Haitian Immigrants ‘Self-Deporting’ Ahead of Trump Inauguration
1st December 2024
According to both CBS News and The Guardian, thousands of Haitian immigrants in the city of Springfield, Ohio, are rushing to Chicago, New York City, and other “sanctuary” locations before Trump is sworn into office and initiates his pledged mass deportation program.
Springfield, a city of less than 60,000, has been crippled ever since the outgoing Biden-Harris administration imported roughly 20,000 Haitian immigrants into the municipality starting in 2021. The city has seen a drastic rise in housing costs and traffic accidents and has been forced to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars annually to accommodate the immigrants, who were granted “temporary protected status” by the Biden-Harris administration.
Many Haitians in Springfield have taken Trump’s promise of mass deportations—to be enacted by his new “border czar,” former Acting Immigration and Customs Enforcement Director and immigration hardliner Tom Homan—seriously. Trump has vowed to terminate the temporary protected status granted to the Haitians, causing many to leave the Ohio city that Trump mentioned during a presidential debate. Popular destinations for the immigrants include Chicago, New York City, Boston, Canada, and even Brazil, where many Haitian migrants had previously been granted temporary asylum before illegally entering the U.S.