Friday, February 06, 2026
Thursday, February 05, 2026
Revealed: Private jet owned by Trump friend used by ICE to deport Palestinians to West Bank | ICE (US Immigration and Customs Enforcement) | The Guardian
Revealed: Private jet owned by Trump friend used by ICE to deport Palestinians to West Bank
"Exclusive: Luxury aircraft owned by property tycoon close to US president’s family has twice flown Palestinian men from Arizona to Tel Aviv
On the morning of 21 January, Israeli authorities left eight Palestinian men at a West Bank checkpoint. Disoriented and cold, they were dressed in prison-issued tracksuits and carried their few belongings in plastic bags.
Hours earlier, they had been sitting with their wrists and ankles shackled on the plush leather seats of a private jet owned by the Florida property tycoon Gil Dezer, a longtime business partner of Donald Trump.
Dezer is also a Trump donor, friend of Donald Trump Jr and member of the Miami branch of Friends of the Israel Defense Forces.
His sleek Gulfstream jet – which he has called “my little rocket ship” – was used to transport the men from an airport near a notorious removal centre in Arizona to Tel Aviv. The jet made three refuelling stops en route: in New Jersey, Ireland and Bulgaria.
A Guardian investigation has established the flight was part of a secretive and politically sensitive US government operation to deport Palestinians arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to the Israeli-occupied West Bank.
One of those deported on the January flight was Maher Awad, a 24-year-old originally from the West Bank, who had lived in the US for nearly a decade. Speaking to the Guardian in the town of Rammun, Maher shared photos of his girlfriend and newborn son in Michigan.
Awad is one of several men onboard two recent flights who have been identified by the Guardian and the Israeli-Palestinian publication +972 Magazine. “I grew up in America,” he said. “America was heaven for me.”
On Monday this week, Dezer’s 16-passenger luxury jet was used a second time to transport another group of Palestinian deportees. They landed at Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion airport and also appear to have been taken to the West Bank.
Former US officials and immigration lawyers said the flights – and Israel’s assistance in returning Palestinians to the occupied territory – marked a shift in policy driven by the Trump administration’s aggressive mass deportation campaign.
A photograph published by the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, which first reported the January flight, shows the men were met at Ben Gurion airport by a huddle of Israeli security personnel. From there, according to Awad, armed guards took them to a checkpoint near the West Bank village of Ni’lin.
“They dropped us off like animals on the side of the road,” Awad said. “We went to a local house, we knocked on the door, we were like: ‘Please help us out.’”
Mohammad Kanaan, a university professor whose house is near to the checkpoint, recalled the moment Awad appeared in the village. Kanaan, who was wearing a red keffiyeh scarf to protect from the cold wind, took a selfie with the men.
“I was shocked to see them walking towards my house and the village. The Israeli army usually doesn’t release prisoners at this checkpoint,” he said. “They stayed at my place for only two hours. During that time, we fed them. They called their families who either came to pick them up or arranged transportation for them.”
He added: “They did not have any contact with their families for a long time. Their families considered them missing.”
‘I was at his wedding. He was at my wedding’
The tail of the private jet used by ICE to deport the Palestinian carries the logo of Dezer Development, a real estate company established by the Israeli-American developer Michael Dezer and today run by Gil Dezer, his son.
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The Dezers first partnered with Trump in the early 2000s and have since built six Trump-branded residential towers in Miami. Together, father and son have made more than $1.3m in donations to support his presidential campaigns, filings show.
Gil Dezer is an influential figure in Miami’s luxury property scene. At his extravagant 50th birthday party last year, attended by celebrities including the rapper Future, performers dressed as Trump mingled with guests. Previously, Gil Dezer also attended Donald Trump Jr’s 30th birthday party.
In a recent interview Dezer spoke of his “love” for Trump. “I’ve known him now for twentysomething years. I was at his wedding. He was at my wedding. We’re good friends. Very proud that he’s in the office. Very proud of the job he’s doing.”
Dezer’s aircraft, which he has described as “my favourite toy”, was chartered by ICE through Journey Aviation, a Florida-based company (which declined to comment on the flights to Israel). Public records show Journey is frequently contracted by US agencies to charter private jets.
According to Human Rights First (HRF), which tracks deportation flights, Dezer’s jet made four “removal flights” – to Kenya, Liberia, Guinea and Eswatini – starting last October, before its two recent trips to Israel.
In an email, Dezer told the Guardian he was “never privy to the names” of those who travelled onboard his jet when it was privately chartered by Journey, or the purpose of the flight. “The only thing I’m notified about is the dates of use,” he said.
He did not respond to further questions about the use of his jet by the Trump administration to deport Palestinians through Israel.
US officials did not answer questions about the cost of the two recent flights to Israel but, according to ICE, chartered flight costs have ranged between nearly $7,000 and more than $26,000 per flight hour in the past. Aviation industry sources estimated the flights to and from Israel would have cost ICE between $400,000 and $500,000.
Savi Arvey, HRF’s director of research and analysis for refugee and immigrant rights, said Dezer’s jet was “part of an opaque system of private aircraft facilitating” a mass deportation campaign that “has blatantly disregarded due process, separated families, and is operated without any accountability”.
Flown across the world in shackles
Aircraft tracking data shows that both the 21 January and 1 February flights to Israel made refuelling stops at Shannon airport in Ireland and at Sofia airport in Bulgaria. Those stops may raise questions for the authorities in those countries about the legal status of the passengers transited through their territory.
The eight Palestinians had their ankles shackled on the 21 January flight, according to Awad and another man onboard, Sameer Isam Aziz Zeidan, a 47-year-old grocery worker. Awad said he was forced to wear a body restraint, with his wrists handcuffed to his stomach. Both men said the restraints made it difficult to eat, requiring them to bend their heads forward to put food in their mouths.
In an interview, Zeidan’s uncle said he had left the West Bank for the US in the early 2000s and, until he was deported, lived in Louisiana with his wife and five children. He said Zeidan, who served time in prison about a decade ago and failed to renew his green card, was detained by ICE more than a year ago. “Now he cannot go back to the [United] States. His whole family is there,” he said.
Like Zeidan, Awad has family in the US, including a four-month-old son whom he’s never met as he was born while Awad was in ICE detention.
Awad said he was 15 when he left the West Bank and travelled alone to the US on a tourist visa, joining siblings and extended family. He went to high school in Michigan and later worked at the family’s various businesses – including a popular shawarma shop in Kalamazoo – as well as selling cars.
He said he obtained a US social security number, paid taxes, and got a driving licence. He met and moved in with an American woman he planned to marry. “Everything I know, everything I experienced was in the United States,” he said.
They had only recently learned they were expecting a child when Awad called the police in February 2025 to report a break-in at their home. When the officers showed up, they apparently arrested Awad in relation to a domestic violence charge from the previous year.
Awad was detained for two days. When he was released from the local jail, ICE agents were waiting for him outside. The charge was later dropped, but he spent the next year being shuffled between immigration detention centres across the country, including in Michigan, Texas and Louisiana.
Readjusting to life in the West Bank, where military and settler violence has soared in recent years, Awad has been spending his days making video calls to his partner, Sandra McMyler, and their baby. He said when Israeli soldiers stopped him at a checkpoint recently, all he had to show was his Michigan driver’s licence.
His life, he said, was in the US. “I don’t want to be here. I’m looking forward to going back as soon as possible.”
In Michigan, McMyler told the Guardian she was struggling without Awad and missed his cooking and the way he made every day feel like it was her birthday. “He wants to be able to help me take care of his baby. He wants to hold him, kiss him, talk to him, everything,” she said. “I want my family back together.”
A spokesperson for the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) did not answer questions about the deportation flights to Israel, but said: “If a judge finds an illegal alien has no right to be in this country, we are going to remove them. Period.”
The US Department of State declined to comment beyond saying it “coordinates closely with DHS on efforts to repatriate illegal aliens”. Both Israel’s foreign ministry and prison service declined to comment on their involvement in the operation.
The +972 Magazine journalists Ghousoon Bisharat, Ben Reiff and Alaa Salama contributed to this article."
Opinion | What’s Really Driving These Bogus Claims of Voter Fraud - The New York Times
What’s Really Driving These Bogus Claims of Voter Fraud
By Stephen Richer
"Mr. Richer is a Republican former elected recorder of Maricopa County, Ariz., where he was responsible for voter registration, early voting and mail-in voting.
This week, President Trump called on his party to nationalize American elections, an unconstitutional move that he said would be justified because of the danger of noncitizens casting ballots. “These people were brought to our country to vote, and they vote illegally,” he said.
No president has so baldly proposed to intervene in state elections, but the charge that noncitizens are illegally casting ballots is sadly commonplace. Elon Musk claims on X, without evidence, that significant numbers of illegal immigrants vote. Rudy Giuliani erroneously alleged that my home state, Arizona, had allowed “probably about 250,000” votes from noncitizens in 2020, despite the fact that Arizona has long required proof of citizenship to vote in state elections.
Election officials usually respond to these allegations by pointing out that there are almost no prosecutions of fraudulent noncitizen voters. Reuters has noted that even the pro-Trump Heritage Foundation’s database of election crimes listed only 24 instances of noncitizens voting in U.S. elections from 2003 to 2023.
While these rebuttals are correct, they are incomplete: Just because something isn’t prosecuted doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen. Happily, there is new compelling evidence debunking the false claims. Recently, a number of states have undertaken investigations into noncitizen voting, cross-checking voter rolls with citizenship status, and found it virtually nonexistent.
When confronted with allegations on noncitizens voting in Utah, Lt. Gov. Deidre Henderson, the state’s top election official, initiated a monthslong review of Utah’s approximately 2.1 million registered voters. She and her team found one “confirmed noncitizen.” Just one. And that one noncitizen, while registered, had never voted.
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Idaho, a state of one million voters, ran similar tests in 2024, and they found 36 “very likely” registered noncitizens. That may seem like a lot until you view it in light of claims that statewide elections are altered by such anomalies. Some, but not all, of those 36 people have previously voted, the secretary of state, Phil McGrane, said, but “out of the million-plus registered voters we started with, we’re down to 10 thousandths of a percent” of the overall count — not even close to affecting the outcome.
Louisiana’s investigation in 2025 netted some 390 noncitizen registrants, 79 of whom had voted in at least one election over the last several decades (out of 2.9 million registrants). Just a few weeks ago, Montana found 23 possible noncitizen registrants (out of approximately 785,000 people registered). And Georgia, in some ways the model for these investigations, found in its 2024 audit 20 registered noncitizens (out of 8.2 million registrations). In my four years in office in Maricopa County overseeing voter registration, I came across a total of two possible instances of noncitizens voting out of some 2.5 million registered voters.
Some politicians are trying to exploit even these small numbers. In Michigan, the Macomb County clerk, Anthony Forlini, who is running for the top election office in the state, the secretary of state, recently announced to great fanfare that he’d found 15 noncitizens on his county’s voter rolls of over 724,000 registered voters. The incumbent secretary of state, Jocelyn Benson, then tasked her team with investigating the 15 files. It found that three of the people were U.S. citizens, four were previously removed from voter rolls, four were under further investigation and four do seem to be noncitizens.
These investigations affirm what is simply common sense. People largely aren’t willing to risk their status in the United States — the land of economic opportunity — for the ability to cast one more vote out of hundreds of thousands or millions in a state and hundreds of millions in the country.
The investigations also suggest that many politicians and public interest groups, all of which have access to these reports, may not actually care that much about election security. The constant talk of noncitizen voting is more likely about scoring political points and bolstering fund-raising.
Playing politics with the idea of fraudulent voters and stolen elections comes at a real cost to American confidence in our elections. It’s an affront to our democracy and to all those who work to deliver free and fair elections. It’s also an ominous sign for where things may be heading this year.
For President Trump, the myth of noncitizens voting is part of the broader story he’s concocted to avoid accepting that he lost to Joe Biden in 2020. But it also appears to be about this fall’s election. Mr. Trump may well intend to send the F.B.I. to run elections in Fulton County, Ga., or the Department of Homeland Security to seize ballot tabulators from Los Angeles County.
I don’t think it’s likely he will do so. But I also wouldn’t have predicted that the F.B.I. would take hundreds of boxes of 2020 election materials from Fulton County, as it did last week. And I certainly wouldn’t have predicted that Republicans would attempt to derail the electoral count on Jan. 6, 2021.
Everyone — Democrats and Republicans — should use the new state-level proof that noncitizen voting is virtually nonexistent to push back against the real danger to our democracy: craven politicians using the issue to undermine our free and fair elections.
Source photograph by Desiree Rios/The New York Times.
Stephen Richer is a former elected recorder of Maricopa County, Ariz., where he oversaw voter registration, early voting and mail voting for the fourth largest county in the United States. He is now the chief executive of Republic Affairs and a fellow at the Cato Institute."
White House Offers Shifting Story on Gabbard’s Presence at Georgia Raid - The New York Times
White House Offers Shifting Story on Gabbard’s Presence at Georgia Raid
"President Trump said Thursday that Attorney General Pam Bondi had directed Tulsi Gabbard to be present for an operation at an election center. It was the administration’s fourth explanation for her presence.
Erica L. Green is a White House correspondent. She reported from Washington.
President Trump said on Thursday that Attorney General Pam Bondi wanted Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, to oversee the F.B.I. seizure and search of voter rolls in Georgia — the fourth time this week the administration has shifted its story on Ms. Gabbard’s extraordinary involvement in a law enforcement operation.
Ms. Gabbard’s involvement in the Georgia raid has drawn scrutiny given that her role overseeing the nation’s intelligence agencies does not include on-site involvement in criminal investigative work, and because the results of Georgia’s 2020 election have been the cornerstone of Mr. Trump’s claims that the election was rigged against him.
During remarks at the National Prayer Breakfast on Thursday, Mr. Trump said Ms. Gabbard went to Georgia at the direction of Ms. Bondi.
“She took a lot of heat two days ago because she went in — at Pam’s insistence — she went in and she looked at votes that want to be checked out,” Mr. Trump said of Ms. Gabbard. “Why is she doing it, right Pam, why is she doing it? Because Pam wanted her to do it. And you know why? Because she’s smart.”
Mr. Trump’s explanation for Ms. Gabbard’s involvement in the Georgia raid was different from his remarks on Wednesday, when he was pressed on Ms. Gabbard’s involvement in the raid during an interview with the NBC Nightly News anchor Tom Llamas.
“Why is Tulsi Gabbard there?” Mr. Llamas asked the president.
“I don’t know, but you know, uh, a lot of the cheating comes from — it’s international cheating,” Mr. Trump said. “You have people, they say, from China trying to — let me ask you, do you think China tries to influence our election?”
U.S. officials with knowledge of the Georgia operation told The New York Times this week that Mr. Trump personally ordered Ms. Gabbard to go to Atlanta for the search, and coordinated her actions with Andrew Bailey, one of two deputy F.B.I. directors.
Ms. Gabbard oversaw the F.B.I.’s search of an election center in Fulton County, Ga., during which agents seized truckloads of ballots cast in 2020. During the search, Ms. Gabbard used her cellphone to call Mr. Trump, and he addressed F.B.I. agents who had taken part on speakerphone, asking them questions and praising and thanking them for their work.
On Tuesday, when Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, was asked why Ms. Gabbard was involved in a domestic law enforcement operation, she said the president had tasked Ms. Gabbard with election security as part of her duties.
“Tulsi Gabbard has been tapped by the president of the United States to oversee the sanctity and the security of our American elections,” Ms. Leavitt said, adding that the charge was “a coordinated whole of government effort.”
But on Sunday, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche said in a television interview that he did not know why Ms. Gabbard was present at the raid, though he indicated that it was not unusual given her role as the nation’s top intelligence official.
“I don’t know why the director was there,” Mr. Blanche said. “She is not part of the grand jury investigation, but she is for sure a key part of our efforts at election integrity and making sure we have free and fair elections. She’s an expert in that space, and it’s a big part of what she and her team look at every day.”
Erica L. Green is a White House correspondent for The Times, covering President Trump and his administration."
Wednesday, February 04, 2026
Miami’s Haitian Community Braces for Deportations
Miami’s Haitian Community Braces for Deportations
“Miami’s Haitian community, particularly in Little Haiti, is facing uncertainty due to the Trump Administration’s plan to end Temporary Protected Status (T.P.S.) for Haitians. This status, granted after the 2010 earthquake, allows Haitians to work legally in the U.S. but does not provide a path to citizenship. With Haiti facing a severe humanitarian crisis, including gang violence, political instability, and widespread food insecurity, the potential deportation of 330,000 Haitians poses a significant risk to their safety and well-being.
The Trump Administration’s plan to end Temporary Protected Status for immigrants from Haiti puts hundreds of thousands at risk of returning to a country in crisis.
Miami’s Little Haiti neighborhood has been shaped by waves of immigrants fleeing natural disasters and gang violence.Photograph by Joe Raedle / Getty
The first documented arrival of Haitian refugees in South Florida dates to 1972, when a wooden sailboat, the Saint Sauveur, ran aground off of Pompano Beach, carrying sixty‑five asylum seekers fleeing the ruthless dictatorship of Jean-Claude Duvalier. Many Haitian families gravitated to Lemon City, one of the oldest settlements in Miami, developed in the late eighteen-hundreds and, at the time, largely populated by lemon-grove workers from the Bahamas. As more Haitians arrived in the area in the nineteen-seventies and eighties, they opened businesses, churches, markets, and cultural centers. Viter Juste, a businessman and activist who’s often called the father of Miami’s Haitian community, coined the name of the neighborhood in the early nineteen-eighties, and it stuck.
Today in Little Haiti, a seven‑foot bronze statue of Toussaint Louverture, one of the leaders of the Haitian Revolution, stands in a small plaza known as the City of Miami Freedom Garden. The plaza sits across from a gas station and bakery, surrounded by rows of modest homes, some purchased decades ago by newly arrived Haitian immigrants, before gentrification began to reshape the neighborhood. Since the statue’s installation, in 2005, three years after I moved to Miami, and a little more than a year after the bicentennial of Haitian independence, the spot has become a neighborhood gathering place. On January 1st, Haitian Independence Day, people stop by to take photos while area churches and neighbors share bowls of soup joumou, “freedom soup,” eaten to commemorate that day. Some afternoons, elders sit on the green benches surrounding the statue to talk or look out at the neighborhood, as they might once have done from their front porches back in Haiti. Occasionally, a group of tourists passes by, led by a tour guide dressed in a traditional blue denim karabela shirt and a straw hat, pausing to look up at the Haitian and American flags perched on tall flagstaffs, before reading the English translation of Louverture’s most famous declaration, at the statue’s base: “By overthrowing me, you have cut down the trunk of the liberty tree of the Blacks in Saint Domingue. It will grow again from its roots for they are numerous and they run deep into the ground.”
On January 12th, at the foot of the statue, a group of elected officials and community members gathered to commemorate the 7.0-magnitude earthquake that struck Haiti in 2010, killing more than two hundred thousand people and displaced 1.5 million. The event has been held annually for the past fifteen years, but this year there was an extra layer of sombreness to the proceedings, which the overcast skies seemed to reflect. On February 3rd, the Trump Administration is set to terminate Temporary Protected Status (T.P.S.) for Haitians in the United States, placing some three hundred and thirty thousand men, women, and children at risk of deportation. T.P.S., granted to certain immigrant populations when the conditions in their home country make safe return impossible, does not provide a path to citizenship, but gives recipients the crucial ability to work legally in the U.S. and, in many states, to obtain a driver’s license. After the 2010 earthquake, Haitian community leaders successfully appealed to the Obama Administration for T.P.S., and it has been extended ever since. Under Donald Trump, though, several countries with T.P.S. status, including Venezuela and Somalia, have recently had their designations terminated, and Haiti’s status is in limbo, as a pivotal lawsuit before the U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., challenges the Trump Administration’s decision to revoke it. During hearings in early January, the presiding judge, Ana C. Reyes, questioned the government’s assertion that it would be safe to return to Haiti, pointing to the fact that the F.A.A. has restricted civilian flights over the capital of Port-au-Prince, and the State Department has warned against travel to Haiti. Reyes’s ruling is expected on February 2nd, one day before the T.P.S. designation for Haitians is set to expire.
According to the U.N., Haiti is facing one of the worst humanitarian crises in the world. Since the assassination of President Jovenel Moïse, in 2021, armed groups have assumed control of large portions of the capital and surrounding areas, terrorizing civilians and causing 1.4 million people, including seven hundred and forty-one thousand children, to be displaced. Friends and family members of mine have moved from neighborhood to neighborhood to escape the violence. Some have had to abandon their homes, with all of their belongings still inside, only to find out later that those houses were burned to the ground. Displaced families often spend weeks, sometimes months, in makeshift dwellings, including public squares and deserted government buildings, while children lose months or even years of education as schools close or become inaccessible owing to gang activity. Sexual violence against women and girls has been on the rise as a tool of control by gangs. Five million and seven hundred thousand Haitians, close to half the population, are now facing high levels of food insecurity. Since Moïse’s assassination, Haiti has had no elected officials. The country’s interim governing body, the Transitional Presidential Council, has been mired in infighting and corruption allegations, and though its mandate ends on February 7th it has yet to reach consensus on who will lead the country or what form the next government will take.
One of the speakers at the earthquake vigil was Marleine Bastien, a Miami-Dade County commissioner and the founder of the nonprofit Family Action Network Movement, which organized the event. A sixty-six-year-old longtime activist, dressed in black, she clutched the microphone with both hands as she described the dire state of Haiti today. “This is a country at war,” she said. Bastien often reminds audiences that her own story is shaped by immigration. She grew up in a small town in the north of Haiti, in a family that practiced the Bahá’à faith, and as a teen-ager she spent her summers volunteering at a hospital near her home town, caring for malnourished babies. In 1981, her father, who had migrated to South Florida years earlier, encouraged her to seek political asylum in the U.S. after she denounced the dictatorship in a radio interview. When she arrived in Miami, at the age of twenty-two, she enrolled at Miami‑Dade Community College, then earned a master’s degree in social work at Florida International University. For more than a decade, she served as a medical social worker, supporting children with sickle-cell anemia, cancer, H.I.V., and AIDS, and she was one of many members of Miami’s Haitian community who were instrumental in securing T.P.S. after the earthquake. Now, lobbying Congress and speaking out in the media, she warns of the consequences of revoking T.P.S. status for Haitians. To deport them, she said, would be to “send them to a place where some will lose their lives.”
At 4:53 P.M., the same moment the earth in Haiti began to shake for an interminable thirty-five seconds in 2010, people bowed their heads to observe a moment of silence. Afterward, we marched to the nearby Caribbean Marketplace, a bright open hall designed by Charles Harrison Pawley, an architect born in Haiti to American parents, to resemble the famed Victorian-style Iron Market, in Port-au-Prince. During the procession, the sky opened and it started to rain, lightly at first, then in steady sheets. In years past, the vigil has attracted a crowd that fills the whole street. This year, attendance was the lowest I had seen. The rain didn’t help, but neither did Trump’s brutal immigration crackdown, which has left many in the community in a constant state of anxiety. Just a few days earlier, as part of a large-scale ICE operation in Minneapolis, an agent had fatally shot Renee Good, a thirty‑seven‑year‑old American citizen, in her car. As Bastien told me later, “People are, of course, afraid that what’s happening in Minneapolis can easily happen here.”
The Miami-Dade commissioner Marleine Bastien, at left, marches toward the Caribbean Marketplace with her fellow-commissioner Kionne L. McGhee, the North Miami councilwoman Mary Estimé-Irvin, and the Miami-Dade mayor, Daniella Levine Cava.Photograph by Carl Juste / Miami Herald / Zuma / Reuters
In the past, members of the Haitian community have felt betrayed by American politicians on both sides of the aisle. A decade ago, during Trump’s first Presidential campaign, he held a town-hall-style meeting with Haitian American allies during which he said, “I will be your champion.” Many of the MAGA-friendly Haitians who hosted Trump were angry about Bill and Hillary Clinton’s long history of fraught involvement in Haiti, including the former President’s role in failed post-earthquake recovery efforts, and the former Secretary of State’s support for the controversial musician turned politician Michel Martelly. In October of 2020, Joe Biden took his turn visiting Little Haiti during his bid to unseat Trump, promising that, if elected, he would make sure that the Haitian community had “an even shot.” As President, Biden extended Temporary Protected Status for Haiti throughout his term, in response to worsening conditions in the country, including an earthquake in the southern peninsula, in August 2021. In early 2023, the Administration introduced a humanitarian-parole program intended to reduce the number of people attempting dangerous migration routes to the United States. The C.H.N.V., or “pwogram Biden,” as it’s known among Haitians, allowed up to thirty thousand people from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela to enter the United States each month and remain for two years, provided that they passed security checks and had a U.S.‑based financial sponsor. The program ended in March, 2025, and under the Trump White House’s current policy all five hundred thousand beneficiaries could be subject to deportation unless they have secured another form of legal protection, such as asylum or T.P.S., both of which have become increasingly beyond reach.
In the Marketplace, we sipped ginger tea and ate Haitian patties and warm bouyon, a hearty stew provided by the vigil organizers, as Tessa Petit, the executive director of the Florida Immigrant Coalition, addressed the crowd. Born and raised in Haiti, Petit lost her mother in the 2010 earthquake. She spoke of the Haitian American community’s ongoing grief, now compounded by fear of deportations, but she also stressed the wider economic consequences of ending T.P.S. “We deserve to be recognized for what we have contributed and continue to contribute to this nation,” she said, adding that a hundred and thirteen thousand Haitian T.P.S. holders are members of Florida’s labor force, contributing an estimated $1.3 billion in state and local taxes. Elsewhere in the country, she said, Haitians “have revived towns that were dying.” She was referring to places such as Springfield, Ohio, where Haitian immigrants have helped reverse decades of population loss and fill essential jobs in manufacturing and food processing, even as Donald Trump and Vice-President J. D. Vance spread the lie that they were “eating the dogs.” Many advocates I spoke with hope that evidence of Haitians’ contributions might appeal to the Trump Administration where pleas for compassion have failed. A recent letter to Trump from the San Diego-based immigration-rights organization Haitian Bridge Alliance and the A.F.L.-C.I.O. argues that Haitian T.P.S. holders contribute 5.9 billion dollars to the U.S. economy and that it is “counter-productive” to decimate a “legal, tax-paying workforce that is already filling critical gaps in the U.S. labor market.”
Many T.P.S. recipients are reluctant to speak publicly for fear of attracting ICE’s attention, but at the vigil a few chose to share their stories. One of them was Corinne, a stylish twenty-five-year-old with a cloud of voluminous curls. She was nine when she arrived in the U.S. with her mother and her one-year-old sister, after the 2010 earthquake. They entered on visas and soon became beneficiaries of T.P.S. After graduating from high school, she enrolled at a local private university, paying out of pocket because, as a T.P.S. holder, she was ineligible for financial aid. During her first year of college, her mother fell ill with a chronic pulmonary illness and could no longer work, so Corinne took a job in a retail store to support her family. She dreamed of pursuing a Ph.D. in psychology, and she earned a 4.0 G.P.A., but she eventually had to withdraw from school. In her retail job, she began as a seasonal worker in the shipping department but was eventually promoted to business manager. She now oversees a hundred and twenty employees, and she remains the sole provider for her mother and her sister, who is now seventeen and applying to college. Corinne fears being sent back to Haiti, a country she has not seen since she was nine. “But I also keep thinking about my sister,” she told me later. “What’s going to happen to her and her future if she has to go back with us?” At the vigil, she said, “We are not a status. We are human beings.”
Alongside the federal immigration crackdown, Florida has launched its own state-run immigration-enforcement program, Operation Tidal Wave, with some of the most punitive measures in the country. In recent legislative sessions, state lawmakers have introduced bills that would bar undocumented immigrants from opening bank accounts and restrict the money-transfer services that many immigrants use to send remittances back to their home countries. These proposed measures come on top of existing laws that restrict driver’s licenses and expand local law enforcement’s authority to turn people over to ICE. Since late 2025, under new agreements with the Department of Homeland Security, Florida has deputized more than eighteen hundred state troopers to perform federal-immigration functions. The state has also expanded its detention infrastructure, opening a “deportation depot” in Baker County, and the Everglades complex known as Alligator Alcatraz, where advocates report that detainees are held in extreme heat in overcrowded and unsanitary dorms with inadequate medical care and little or no access to legal representation.
The day after the vigil, at the Sant La Haitian Neighborhood Center, in North Miami, I met a couple in their forties who arrived in the U.S. in 2022, with their four children, now five, fourteen, nineteen, and twenty. They had walked to the U.S. border after travelling from Brazil through Colombia and crossing the perilous Darién Gap. Three years ago, their youngest child, a boy, was born in Miami with Down syndrome and gastroschisis, a rare condition in which a baby’s intestines, and sometimes other organs, develop outside the body, requiring specialized medical care. They worry that he would not survive if they were forced to return with him to Haiti, and like many “mixed‑status” families they’ve grappled with the wrenching dilemma of whether their child would be better off remaining in the U.S. without them. But they have decided that they could never leave the boy behind.
Attorneys at the Haitian Lawyers Association, a Miami-based nonprofit, have created a dedicated task force to help those at risk of deportation. They have organized free law clinics and offered pro-bono counsel, while also helping clients prepare for possible deportation by organizing powers of attorney, wills, trusts, and guardianship documents for their children and elderly parents. The attorneys consult with counterparts in Haiti, as well as in Canada, where many Haitians have fled, sometimes by walking long distances in freezing temperatures and crossing the northern border on foot.
Vance recently said that ICE agents could begin going door to door in the coming months, exacerbating fears. The husband I met at Sant La told me, “We jump every time there’s a knock.” Josette Josué, the center’s director of community health, told me, “Some of the people we serve are so afraid, they don’t even answer phone calls. They won’t open the door if you visit. They’re afraid to go to church or the supermarket. They barricade themselves inside.” One fifteen-year-old girl, whose family fled Haiti after being caught in the middle of a battle between two gangs, told her mother, who then told Josué that she would rather die than return. Florida school districts have seen dwindling enrollment since 2024, owing, in part, to immigrants leaving the state or fearing being detained by ICE.
Bastien, the H.L.A. lawyers, and others told me that, even if the federal court in D.C. issues an injunction blocking the termination of T.P.S., and even if the program is extended, the community will experience only a temporary sense of relief. The Trump Administration is likely to appeal the decision, reviving the threat of deportation. The only durable solution is a pathway to permanent residency for those who have spent years working, raising families, and paying taxes in the United States. Guibert St. Fort, the program coördinator at Sant La, told me that the people who walk into the center every day somehow hold out hope. “Their faith has been tested again and again,” St. Fort said. “They feel that, if God wanted me to die, he would have let me die where I came from or somewhere along the way.” The couple I met proudly showed me photos of their children—sitting beside a Christmas tree in matching holiday‑themed pajamas, wearing their school uniforms. Their two eldest daughters would like to go to college; one wants to become a nurse. “We have gone through so much,” the wife said. “Like all parents, we hope our children accomplish all that we’ve sacrificed for. We hope their dreams will come true.” ♦
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