Haiti’s northern coast is where the country faces the vast Atlantic with all its baggage. There’s Labadie, the private resort open only to American cruise ships and foreign holiday makers. Just next door is Ile de la Tortue, an infamous way station for human traffickers. And then there’s Cap-Haitien, a city steeped in the country’s revolutionary history – and more recently, the first-choice destination for the Trump administration to deport Haitian migrants.
Since Haiti’s devastating earthquake in 2010, Cap-Haitien has been a major hub for internally displaced people fleeing disaster and violence in other parts of the country. And after the Trump administration’s legal victory this month to remove temporary deportation protections from hundreds of thousands of people in the United States, the city may soon see many more arrivals.
Thursday marked the first deportation flight to Haiti from the US since the revocation of Temporary Protected Status (TPS), which had protected about 350,000 Haitians in the US from deportation and given them legal work permits. Now Haitian communities across the US are coming to terms with the new reality that they’re vulnerable to the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown.
