The Trump administration is facing pressure on the right to ramp up arrests of about 350,000 Haitians who recently lost their legal status after the Supreme Court cleared the way for termination of a humanitarian program allowing them to live and work in the United States for years.
The Department of Homeland Security has so far focused its enforcement efforts in the Springfield, Ohio, area, where a large group of Haitians with Temporary Protected Status arrived in recent years. At least 50 Haitians have been called into immigration offices and given ankle monitors in recent days, according to advocacy groups.
But logistical challenges to deporting such a large group to an unstable country, and a lack of internal guidance within Immigration and Customs Enforcement, have complicated the effort. Some Republican politicians have also voiced concerns about the impact on certain industries if Haitian workers were deported en masse.
Some ICE officers have expressed confusion to colleagues about whether they can pursue the Haitians and sought guidance on whether they can make arrests quickly, according to a person familiar with the matter who was not authorized to speak publicly.
The absence of visible raids aggressively targeting Haitians across the country since the department effectively ended the protections on July 27 has frustrated some of President Trump’s most fervent supporters. Some of them already see Markwayne Mullin, the homeland security secretary, as soft on immigration enforcement.
“The airplanes and the buses should have been ready,” said Stephen K. Bannon, a MAGA podcaster and former senior aide to Mr. Trump. “One hundred percent of the Haitians should have already left the country. It’s unacceptable they’re not.”
The issue exemplifies the difficult balancing act Mr. Mullin has faced since he was installed to lead the Homeland Security Department. He was tasked with bringing order back to the department after the fatal shootings of two U.S. citizens in Minnesota spurred public backlash against Mr. Trump’s immigration crackdown.
But Mr. Mullin’s moves to scale back some tactics have been met with fury by hard-liners who have expressed skepticism about the administration’s commitment to delivering on its pledge of mass deportations. Feeling the pressure, federal officials have rejected the claims and at times backtracked their changes.
A Homeland Security Department spokesperson said in a statement that the department does not discuss ongoing or future operations and encouraged people who have lost protections to self-deport.
Mr. Mullin told NewsNation this week that the department was “going after” Haitians who have lost status and emphasized that the program was intended to be temporary. “We are giving them an opportunity to either leave on their own and we’ll help you, or we’ll arrest you and send you back,” Mr. Mullin said.
A federal judge took the final step on Wednesday allowing the Trump administration to officially terminate the protections for Haitians, which came after the Supreme Court’s June 25 ruling cleared the way for the administration to end T.P.S. programs.
The Trump administration has sought to wind down the humanitarian program, which was created by Congress and signed into law by President George H.W. Bush in 1990.
The administration has moved to end about a dozen T.P.S. programs, which are meant to help foreign nationals who cannot safely return home because of armed conflict or natural disasters in their countries. The protections became all but permanent for nations with continued crises.
The administration’s intention to terminate the programs has upended the lives of more than one million T.P.S. holders, including workers who have filled critical jobs in industries like health care, construction and transportation.
Homeland security officials have considered T.P.S. for Haiti as effectively over since July 27. But ICE’s enforcement actions have been relatively quiet so far.
Guerline Jozef, the executive director of the Haitian Bridge Alliance, an immigrant rights nonprofit, said she had not heard about enforcement actions ramping up outside of Springfield in other regions with large populations of Haitian T.P.S. holders, such as South Florida and New York. In the Boston region, which also has a large Haitian population, other advocacy groups said they had not heard about people receiving ankle monitors in recent days.
It is easy for immigration agents to find and arrest Haitians who have lost their temporary status, given that the government already has their addresses. Deporting them, however, poses a bigger challenge.
The federal government has banned commercial flights to Port-au-Prince because of the risk of violence; gangs control most of the Haitian capital. Nearly every deportation flight under the Trump administration has instead been routed to Cap-Haitien, a port city with a smaller airport that has less capacity to handle more arrivals, said Savi Arvey, whose research team at Human Rights First, a nonprofit, monitors deportation flights.
The security risks involved with sending more deportation flights to Haiti could complicate the administration’s ability to quickly ramp up removals, Ms. Arvey said. The United States has sent one deportation flight a month to Haiti since December 2023. The last removal flight landed in Cap Haitien on July 16 with more than 100 deportees.
It could also take months or years for many cases to go through the immigration court system, further slowing deportations.
Some Haitians could be deported relatively quickly, including those with final orders of removal who have been able to legally stay in the United States with Temporary Protected Status, said Kerry E. Doyle, a partner at Green & Spiegel who was the top ICE lawyer in the Biden administration. But others still have the right to have their cases heard by an immigration judge, a process that could take years.
Only a handful of T.P.S. programs are still valid, including those for El Salvador, Lebanon, Sudan and Ukraine. The administration has not announced plans to end T.P.S. for El Salvador, which expires in September and provides protection to about 170,000 people. But Mr. Trump and his officials tried to do so in his first term.
Federal judges on Friday cleared the way for the Trump administration to end T.P.S. for Myanmar and South Sudan. Terminations are still paused for Somalia and Ethiopia, but those countries are also expected to lose their designations.
The protections for Haitians were first put in place by the Obama administration in 2010 after a devastating earthquake. The program was repeatedly extended after Haiti struggled to fully recover, and its last elected president was assassinated in 2021.
Advocacy groups said that many Haitians who have lost status are now trying to remain in hiding and seek legal advice to figure out if they qualify for immigration benefits like asylum. Many are choosing not to voluntarily return to Haiti, given the escalating violence by gangs who control much of the capital and have attacked, kidnapped and killed civilians.
In an interview, a Haitian woman in Philadelphia in her 20s said she had been on edge since she lost her temporary status and could no longer legally work.
“I’m scared for my life,” said the woman, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of fears she could be targeted by immigration officers.
She said she had mostly stayed inside to avoid encounters with ICE officers, and she feared returning to Haiti, where she had few family members left.
“There is not a safe way for anyone to be deported to Haiti right now,” said Ms. Jozef of the Haitian Bridge Alliance. “That’s not a choice that people can make.”
