After the U.S. Supreme Court announced Monday that it would hear a case about whether to end temporary protected status for hundreds of thousands of Haitian and Syrian nationals, advocates are already raising the alarm about what they see as a deadly danger.
If the 350,000 Haitians on TPS — a special status that protects immigrants from countries facing political or natural disasters from deportation — lose their legal status and are forced to leave the U.S. all at once, it will likely create a massive new family separation crisis, warned Tessa Petit, the executive director of the advocacy group Florida Immigrant Coalition. Because of dangers in their country of origin, she said, many people will likely choose to leave their U.S.-born kids behind rather than allow them to be deported with their parents.
“For any parent who is a recipient of TPS who would have to go back to Haiti, they would have to make the difficult choice of either leaving their children behind — or taking them to their death,” Petit told reporters during a media briefing Tuesday.
An estimated 50,000 U.S. citizen children have at least one Haitian parent with TPS, as well as approximately 80,000 Haitian children who are themselves TPS recipients.
