UNITED STATES – On July 27, the Old State cancelled the Temporary Protected Status, or TPS, of more than 350,000 Haitian immigrants, revoking their legal status and work authorization. A day later, the Department of Homeland Security ruled that asylum officers could bypass applicants and send their applications straight to deportation proceedings. As a result, the Haitians, displaced and forced to migrate from their homeland ravaged by U.S. and French Imperialism, are currently being targeted by ICE agents in New York City, Boston, San Diego, Orlando, Miami, and Springfield, Ohio. Immigrant workers’ shifts were liquidated; international students were dis-enrolled from school as a result of their TPS cancellations, and were thereby sent to privately owned concentration camps for varied amounts of time before deportation. Hundreds of thousands of immigrants from oppressed countries such as Cameroon, Honduras, Nicaragua, Venezuela, and Syria also had their TPS terminated.
Utilizing “race” and national enmity as a weapon, the U.S. State has ramped up its demonization against Haitians in the last few years; J.D. Vance and Donald Trump accused them of being “illegal aliens,” sent into the U.S. by fellow imperialist Kamala Harris, who spread infectious diseases, make roads unsafe, commit violent crimes, and eat animals. This marked the culmination of the reactionary current of neo-Nazi and Klan organizations against Haitian proletarians in Springfield through the August 10, 2024 Blood Tribe march, with swastikas and semi-automatic rifles in hand. Haiti, on the other hand, was deemed by U.S. imperialists as “too dangerous for Americans,” giving the oppressed nation a designation of “Level 4: Do Not Travel.”
Haitian immigrant workers in the U.S. generate surplus value for the ruling class in logistics and healthcare. In fact, Haitian TPS workers generate an annual $209 million for the state of Indiana alone. However, both the Democratic and Republican wings of the Old State ironically expressed concern over potential damage to employers and local economies, another clear sign of reactionary self-sabotage within imperialism. DHS general counsel James Percival gave a “generous” offer of only “$2,600 and a free flight home” on his X page. In spite of the State’s “offers,” many Haitians do not possess enough income to purchase a ticket to the capital of Port-au-Prince, given the Federal Aviation Administration bars U.S. airlines from flying to Haiti due to the chronic instability created by imperialism.
This month alone, ICE has consistently targeted and surveilled the Haitian masses in Springfield, kidnapping 29 people by August 21. From shopping malls to housing complexes and gas stations, from warehouse workers to pastors, excuse has been permissible for the State to detain Haitians and imprison them. They have been sent to Butler County Jail in nearby Hamilton and six other ICE camps in Ohio. This comes after the increased criminalization of Haitian residents, having been forced to report to local ICE offices and wear ankle monitors. The choice for Haitian residents is to either live while being monitored by the State or be deported.
The bourgeois-democratic right to seek asylum, which was incorporated into international law after the Second Imperialist World War, was similarly incorporated into U.S. law through the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952, it has since then been gradually dismantled. This process accelerated in large part during the Biden-Harris regime, through the expansion of deportation flights and greater militarization of Customs and Border Protection. TPS, codified into U.S. law in 1990 through the Immigration Act of 1990, guarantees protection from deportation if one’s country is deemed “unsafe” due to “extraordinary and temporary conditions”. In reality, these “conditions” are the imperialist plunder, impoverishment, and unequal development of the oppressed nations in collaboration with the comprador and bureaucrat bourgeoisie.
Since the 1825 re-colonization of the Black republic, Haiti has been subject to colonial interventions, mass slaughter, military occupation, and U.S.-backed dictatorship, both by the exploiting classes of Haiti and of the neighboring Dominican Republic. U.S. armed gangs in the country collaborate closely with the oppressing classes to terrorize the Haitian people at home, leaving the nation in political disarray since the 2021 assassination of Jovenel Moïse. After the 2010 and 2021 earthquakes, thousands were forced to flee. Yet, the Old State exacerbated their immiseration by using Canadian and Kenyan reactionaries to carry out foreign intervention and block Haitians from crossing the southern border.
August marks the first mass uprisings of enslaved Afrikans in the colony of Saint-Domingue that sparked the Haitian Revolution of 1791-1804, founding the first Black republic on Earth. Every colonial and imperialist power on the continent understood immediately the ramifications of allowing this precedent, and they spent the following two centuries making the masses of Haiti pay for it. France extracted a crushing indemnity in 1825, backed by warships, forcing the newly free nation to compensate its former slaveholders for the “loss” of their human property, a debt Haiti did not finish paying off until 1947, strangling its development. The United States occupied Haiti militarily from 1915 to 1934, rewrote its constitution at gunpoint to permit foreign land ownership, and installed the forced labor regime that built the roads its occupying Marines needed.
Haiti moved to elect its own government ostensibly free of U.S.-backed dictatorship, in 1991 and again in 2004, Washington backed the coups that overthrew it both times. U.S. Imperialism does not neglect Haiti. It requires Haiti’s continued immiseration as living propaganda against the very idea its revolution represents, and every TPS cancellation, every deportation flight, is the same old indemnity collected in a new currency.
It is the duty of class-conscious workers and their allies to build durable instruments to break the system which enslaves the world. A component part of this struggle is at the atomic level, in neighborhood defense against ICE and the imperialist State. Being armed with the history of the Haitian revolution the masses must take up and develop nationwide efforts among the sea of Haitian and other national-minority workers, wherever they live. The historical and contemporary significance of Haiti’s struggle to reclaim its right to national self-determination must be propagated and the State’s dehumanization of the Haitian people denounced among the proletarian and oppressed masses to build genuine internationalism that fosters solidarity with Haiti and all those exploited and oppressed by imperialism globally.
