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The views expressed below are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy or Harvard Kennedy School. These perspectives have been presented to encourage debate on important public policy challenges.

 Haiti and Haitians have always been a laboratory of anti-Black racism in U.S. policy. 

The Trump Administration’s current mandate of mass deportations is rooted in the U.S.’s long history of anti-Black racism and nativism. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents are disproportionally focusing on cities with large communities of color such as New York City, Chicago, and Los Angeles.1 Many of these communities have been decimated by decades of over policing, mass incarceration, anti-Black violence, and poverty. This extra layer of xenophobic hysteria will only further debilitate these communities, for both immigrants and non-immigrants alike. The Trump Administration’s attacks on immigrants of color, especially against Haitians, is a continuation of the longer history anti-Black nativism in the U.S. that is bipartisan. This matters because how the U.S. has treated Haitian immigrants reflects the longer history of anti-Black racism in the U.S. In truth, Haiti and Haitians have always been a laboratory of anti-Black racism in U.S. policy. 

Why are the Haitians a special target at this moment? Let’s start by looking at the recent history. In 2004, Haitian President Jean Bertrand Aristide was removed from power by a coup for the second time. The first time Aristide was removed in 1991, it led to the 1994 United States invasion and devastating occupation of Haiti. This time, the removal of Aristide from power set off a chain reaction of events in Haiti that would lead to years of violence across the island nation that are still ongoing. More recently, the violence in Haiti has escalated into what is essentially a civil war between the Haitian state and rival gangs. Beyond the violence in Haiti, in 2023 half of Haiti’s 11.5 million people were food insecure.2 The Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN (FAO) and the Word Food Program (WFP) elevated Haiti to “the highest concern level” for food insecurity in 2023.3 Additionally, approximately, 5.2 million people in Haiti needed humanitarian assistance.4  The violence, economic, and food insecurity displaced people internally and forced many to flee the country.  

Between 2000 and 2010, the Haitian population in the U.S. grew by 40 percent, and between 2010 and 2022 it grew an additional 24 percent, in part due to the aftermath of the devastating earthquake of 2010.5 Haitians now make up the fourth largest Caribbean immigrant group in the U.S. behind Cubans, Dominicans, and Jamaicans.6 Yet, Haitians continue to be attacked by nativists in the U.S.7 For example, in 2018, then U.S. president Donald Trump questioned why the U.S. should allow more immigrants from “shithole countries” such as Haiti, other African nations, and El Salvador, instead of allowing more immigrants from place like Norway.8 And in March 2020, Trump, citing the COVID-19 pandemic, used Title 42, an emergency public health order, to suspend the right of Haitians to seek asylum in the U.S. for 38 months. In 2021, then U.S. president Joseph Biden proved that the anti-Haitian nativism was bipartisan when the U.S. Border Patrol apprehended or expelled nearly thirty thousand migrants at the southern border near Del Rio, TX. Most of these migrants were Haitians, and images of the Border Patrol agents chasing down Haitians on horseback while wielding whips was reminiscent of images of slave patrols hunting the enslaved.9 Between 2021 and 2022, nearly 100,000 Haitians were expelled and denied asylum in the U.S., with approximately twenty-three percent expelled under Title 42.10 

Images of the Border Patrol agents chasing down Haitians on horseback while wielding whips was reminiscent of images of slave patrols hunting the enslaved.

But anti-Haitian sentiment has long and deep roots in the United States.  Since the Haitian Revolution, the largest successful slave uprising in the western hemisphere, began in 1791 and the founding of Haiti as the free Black Republic in 1804, the U.S. has been hostile towards the country. As historian Rayford Logan noted, to slave holders, “the very word ‘Haiti’ evoked images of black slaves devastating property and torturing and murdering their former master.” Out of fear of having a free Black country of formerly enslaved people so close to their borders, southern enslavers enacted laws that restricted Black mobility by prohibiting free Black sailors from disembarking from their ships while docked in southern ports.  The enslavers feared that the free Black sailors would mingle with the enslaved and plant the seeds of rebellion in their minds. 

In 1915, when the U.S. illegally occupied Haiti for the first time, the Marines and U.S. politicians elevated lighter-skinned Haitians into positions of power because they preferred working with light skinned Haitians over darker skinned Haitians. This imported Jim Crow-ism disrupted Haiti’s politics and enflamed racial tensions between light skin and dark skin Haitians which would help lead to the rise of the brutal dictatorship of François “Papa Doc” Duvalier in 1957. Under Papa Doc, and later his son Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier, the Haitian people would suffer under extreme violence and poverty that was sustained by U.S. neocolonialism. 

Beginning during Papa Doc’s rule and continuing for the past fifty years, Haitian asylum seekers have come to the U.S. to escape violence and extreme poverty in Haiti. Between 1970 through the mid 1990s, thousands upon thousands of Haitians fled to the U.S. These Haitian “Boat People” -- a term used to describe Haitian migrants who arrived from Haiti via boat containing derogatory racial and class connotations--faced extreme racist immigration policies that forced many to either return or stay in the U.S. as undocumented. For example, during the 1980s, as the plague of mass incarceration started wiping out Black American communities, the Reagan Administration enacted an interdiction policy that effectively expanded the U.S.’s borders and allowed the Coast Guard to intercept and return any Haitian Boat People to Haiti because Haitian migrants were considered economic refugees, not political refugees, such as the Cubans seeking to escape Castro’s Cuba during the same period. This essentially turned Haiti into a large prison. Furthermore, during the 1980s and 1990s, many undocumented Haitian migrants who made it to the U.S. were rounded up and incarcerated in prisons such as the Krome Detention Center in Miami and in Guantanamo Bay. In this way, Haitian immigrants were either incarcerated in the U.S. or they were prevented from leaving Haiti altogether. 

For Haitians immigrating to the U.S. today, there is now an added condition of extreme precarity as they make for easy scapegoats for nativist politicians looking to distract voters from their political flaws. For example, on September 10, 2024, Trump again attacked Haitian immigrants, this time fabricating a claim that Haitian immigrants living in Springfield, OH were “eating the dogs. They’re eating the cats. They’re eating the pets of the people that live there.”11 Trump made these comments to solidify his nativist anti-(Black/Brown) immigrant platform and to distract from other issues that his political base may not appreciate. In doing this, he drew upon old myths of Haiti as uncivilized that were promulgated by U.S. Marines during the U.S. occupation of Haiti in 1915; the stigma of Haitians as HIV carriers, first promoted during the Boat People crisis of the mid-1980s; the fear and ignorance of the Haitian practice of vodou; and the nativist belief that the U.S. is an exclusively white nation.  

The Haitian immigrants in Springfield, numbering approximately 15,000, had arrived in Ohio as part of a federal program that allowed them to remain in the country temporarily. This was a program implemented by the Biden administration in June 2024 that allowed 300,000 Haitians already in the U.S. to stay because conditions in Haiti were too unsafe for their return.12 These Haitians were now under Temporary Protected Status (TPS). The TPS program was created by congress in 1990 to prevent deportations to countries suffering natural disasters or civil strife. It allowed the Department of Homeland Security to grant TPS to people from different nationalities who applied and can prove they needed protection. It also allowed for the distribution of work permits, meaning that these immigrants would work and contribute to their communities.  

Regardless of the humanitarian efforts that allowed Haitians to live and work in Springfield, Trump’s remarks were echoed by his running mate and vice-presidential candidate, J.D. Vance. Vance argued that the reports of Haitians eating cats and dogs were “verifiable,” even though they were not.13 On the social media site X, Vance claimed that “people have had their pets abducted and eaten by people who shouldn’t be in this country.”14 Not only were Haitians eating domesticated animals, but they had no right to be here. They did not belong because they were Black, Haitian, and non-English speakers. Vance further expressed this imagined difference and Haitian pathology of abnormal eating to a matter of cultural differences stating, “Everybody who has dealt with a large influx of migration knows that sometimes there are cultural practices that seem very far out there to a lot of Americans.”15 Here, Vance is arguing that Haitians are culturally different from Americans. Their ways of living, believing, and knowing are fundamentally different than that of an American. They were abnormal and uncivilized. They, as different people culturally and racially, did not belong here. It made no matter the U.S.’s role in creating the conditions in Haiti that forced many of these people to flee. As Black immigrants, they had no right to be in the country. 

To ground this racial and cultural differentiation between Haitians and Americans and drawing from debunked racist eugenics, Trump has argued that non-European immigrants have “bad genes,” and compared them to murderers and criminals.16 His racist nativism echoed that of proponents of the Immigration Act of 1924, also known as the Johnson-Reed Act, which set quotas on the number of immigrants allowed into the country from different nations, significantly favoring immigration from western European nations to keep the U.S. “racially pure.” The Johnson-Reed Act racialized immigration by denoting who was acceptable and who was not.17 At the time, the prevailing rhetoric was that white Europeans came from nations; they had a history and lineage that reflected what Americans wanted. Whereas the “colored races,” Chinese, Black, Japanese, and Indian, for example, had no nation of origin; they were nationless and therefore uncivilized.18 The national quota system of the Johnson-Reed Act assured Americans that only white immigrants would be allowed to settle in the U.S. Note that ironically, under Johnson-Reed, Mexicans were denoted as white because of their value as immigrant laborers.19 

Despite making up only seven percent of the non-citizen population, Black immigrants make up over twenty percent of those in deportation proceedings on criminal grounds.

This dehumanizing, nativist, and xenophobic ideology is dangerous not only for Haitians, but non-white immigrants in general. In Springfield, Trump’s false claims spurred a series of bomb threats against schools and government buildings.20 Around the country, this dangerous rhetoric has amplified the fear of violence against immigrants of color and Americans of color.21 This violent rhetoric also impacted the way law enforcement has handled Haitians at the border. At the southern border, there have been documented abuses by Customs and Border Patrol agents against migrants. For example, over the last decade at least 191 people have died following encounters with CBP agents, six of these deaths were caused by CBP agents firing across the border into Mexico.22 In 2019, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) reported that CBP agents verbally abused migrants. One agent reportedly told a migrant, “I’ve fucken had it with you, this is why you guys don’t advance in this country.”23 This kind of xenophobic and racist verbal abuse is typically accompanied by physical violence against migrants by CBP agents.24 Additionally, during the roundup on horseback at Del Rio, many Haitian migrants were terrorized by the Border Patrol and forced to return home without due process.25  

This xenophobic violence is not relegated to migrants and the southern border. Indeed, when Black and Brown immigrants are disparaged, that racist rhetoric put Black and Brown Americans in danger as well. During the 2020 George Floyd protests against police violence, CBP agents terrorized and kidnapped protestors on the streets of Portland and positioned snipers around George Floyd’s funeral.26 Why would Customs and Border Patrol officers target domestic activists far from a border zone? Because their tactical units are highly trained to respond aggressively to anyone seen to be non-American and out of place.27 Their militarized readiness to kill “outsiders” was more than welcomed by local police forces managing a crowd of protestors and activists fighting for Black lives. 

Other immigration enforcement agencies, such as Immigration and Customs Enforcement, also works with local police departments to target and apprehend immigrants deep within the U.S.’ own borders. These carceral partnerships between border enforcement and local police forces places an additional layer of punitive punishment that Black immigrant and Black communities broadly must navigate. Black immigrants living in Black communities that are already over policed, surveilled, and underfunded, are doubly criminalized as potentially illegal immigrants and as Black people. Despite making up only seven percent of the non-citizen population, Black immigrants make up over twenty percent of those in deportation proceedings on criminal grounds.28 In fact, ICE agents have staked out courthouses to make arrests looking for those who have minor offenses such as drug possession, turnstile hopping, DUI, or writing bad checks.29 This creates a double layer of carcerality that immigrants have to navigate to avoid being criminalized and deported. For non-English speaking Haitians, navigating this double layered carceral system can be a daunting task. 

The violent crackdown and hysteric xenophobia of the Trump Administration is a reflection of a nativism that imagines the U.S. as a white country only where Black people ad people of color broadly are to be policed, contained, and exploited economically.

Claims about the inherent illegality of Haitian immigrants in the United States has deep roots that extend back to enslavement, where the mobility and rights of enslaved Black people was highly surveilled and restricted, especially following the Haitian Revolution and the establishment of Haiti. It is no coincidence that punitive immigration restrictions and racist rhetoric against Haitians has occurred under administrations that have implemented mass policing and incarceration policies in Black communities. Trump’s latest attacks on Haitian immigrants is an extension of this long bipartisan history. The violent crackdown and hysteric xenophobia of the Trump Administration is a reflection of a nativism that imagines the U.S. as a white country only where Black people ad people of color broadly are to be policed, contained, and exploited economically. In this way, the targeting Haitian immigrants through racist rhetoric and excessively punitive anti-immigration policies places Black communities and communities of color, more broadly, in danger. It also demonstrates how in the nativist imagination of the U.S., Black lives do not matter.