A History of Exclusion: Haitian TPS Termination and Legal Access

Several hundred thousand Haitians, who used to have Temporary Protected Status (TPS), are now vulnerable to deportation. In June of this year, the US Supreme Court decided that the Trump administration had to the authority to move forward with terminating TPS for Haitians.ⁱ In late July, the termination took effect and in early August, a District Court judge issued a decision that dissolved an injunction that had been blocking further government action.ⁱⁱ

Since this time, U.S. immigration enforcement has been moving forward with plans to apprehend former TPS holders, who are still residing in the U.S., which also includes disseminating information to the Haitian community about how to self-deport.ⁱⁱⁱ ICE arrests of Haitians have already been rising drastically, rising from an average of about 150 per month in 2025, close to 200 per month in the first six months of 2026, to exceed 400 per month in July. During the first week of August (the most recent data available) more than 200 Haitians had already been arrested, which means ICE was on pace to arrest close to 900 Haitian people during the month.^iv  

The termination of TPS for Haitians could result in the removal of almost half of the foreign-born Haitian population, considering that the pre-termination Haitian TPS population has been estimated to be approximately 350,000 people of the 850,000 Haitian-born people residing in the U.S., according to 2024 estimates.^v 

The challenges that most Haitians face accessing legal counsel make them even more vulnerable to removal than other nationalities. Almost 18% of Haitians whose cases were initiated in immigration court in the past year and a half had legal representation at some point during their case, the lowest rate among the top 10 nationalities in the removal caseload.^vi

All of these facts point toward a crisis of legal access for Haitian immigrants, which could spiral to unprecedented proportions in the coming months. The termination of Haitian TPS also takes place approximately one year after the termination of TPS for Venezuelans, which affected over 700,000 people, along with terminations for several other nationalities that affected over 100,000 people.^vii The combined effect of all of these terminations has been to reduce the entire TPS caseload to one fifth of this former size.^viiiMeanwhile, TPS terminations for El Salvadorans are scheduled to occur in early September,2026.

TPS has been a critical lifeline for people fleeing political persecution, natural disasters and other kinds of mass-scale displacement events. The rationale for TPS issuance is similar to that for asylum and refugee relief, with the notable exception that TPS is a temporary status that is renewed at the discretion of the U.S. government, and does not provide a pathway to permanent resident status.^ixNevertheless, for the past several decades, TPS has been the primary type of relief that the U.S. government has issued to people fleeing displacement events.^x

Haitians have suffered from a long string of displacement events, including a devastating earthquake that disrupted much of the nation’s physical infrastructure in 2010, and chronic political instability (including government persecution, coups against the government, and instabilities caused by external interventions, which date to the 1970s, and most  recently, by an escalation of organized criminal activity by gangs and other illicit networks.^xi

Haitian asylum seekers have also been subjected to some of the most exclusionary treatment, of any national-origin group, in the history of U.S. immigration and refugee policy. Haitians were the first national-origin group to be targeted by the U.S. government’s interdiction operations, which apprehended asylum seekers in international waters, on the premise that Constitutional protections and international protocols on refugee rights that had been executed within U.S. law, did not apply to the government’s treatment of asylum seekers until they reached U.S. territory. Haitians were also the first nationality to be detained on a mass-scale at the U.S. naval base in Guantanamo Bay Cuba and were the first group to be subjected to mandatory detention on U.S. soil.^xii

These are among the reasons why TPS has been such a critically important of relief for forcibly displaced Haitians. It’s also important to note that many of the policies and enforcement practices that have been rolled out for Haitians—which begin as unprecedented developments—have become mainstays of the U.S. immigration system. This is why the legal and immigrant rights community should be concerned about the severe legal access challenges that the TPS terminations pose for Haitians, while also keeping in mind that support for the rights of Haitians is integral to any effort to create a stronger floor of due process and asylum rights for all immigrants.