This week, PBS Frontline aired a must-watch documentary about the crisis set off by the Trump administration's decision to revoke Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for Haiti. The film opens with footage of people arriving in Cap-Haitien from U.S. deportation flights. The deportees cover their faces with clothes to obscure their identities from gangs, who will kidnap and extort them if they find out they have any ties to the U.S.
Some of them describe spending years or decades in the United States, earning advanced degrees and contributing to the U.S. economy. One woman says she was a pharmacist with a doctorate. Now, they have been expelled to a country that has been reduced largely to rubble by ongoing gang violence, and where a multinational UN security force is now waging active armed combat to try to wrest some territory from marauding criminal networks.
Of course, the film has to do its due diligence and present "both sides" of the issue. Top Trump administration officials refused to speak with them or provide any rationale for their policy, however, so they have to resort to archival footage of Stephen Miller declaring that Haiti is safe "for Haitians," and that while the country may have "pockets of crime," it is no different from Chicago or Los Angeles in this regard.
Eventually, the filmmakers managed to get one former DHS official from Trump's first term on the record. He admits blithely that Haiti may not be a "desirable" place to live, and claims that the country has "always been dangerous" (ever read Graham Greene's The Comedians, anyone?), but adds that the goal of U.S. foreign policy shouldn't be so much to inquire into what's good for Haitian refugees, as what's good for the United States.
The filmmakers also speak to some local toughs in Springfield, OH, who have been leading a local pressure campaign in support of Trump's revocation of TPS. Frontline's reporter asks them if they think Haiti is really a safe place to forcibly expel any human being to right now. They reply: maybe not, but go somewhere else then. You don't have to go home, but you can't stay here, they say. One of them apparently calls himself a "street pastor."
I am reminded of Robert Tressell's line, in his novel The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, after the protagonist Frank Owen overhears a number of his coworkers blaming their economic troubles on "Frenchies" and "Hitalian horgan-grinders":
Some of you seem to think [...] that it was a great mistake on God’s part to make so many foreigners. You ought to hold a mass meeting about it: pass a resolution something like this: ‘This meeting of [...] Christians hereby indignantly protests against the action of the Supreme Being in having created so many foreigners, and calls upon him to forthwith rain down fire, brimstone and mighty rocks upon the heads of all those Philistines, so that they may be utterly exterminated from the face of the earth[.]
One would like to publicize Owen's bit of sarcasm here far and wide, if this administration were not likely to take it literally and act on it. Pete Hegseth's version of Christianity, after all, would seemingly straightforwardly endorse the proposal Tressell here satirizes.
Trump himself is meanwhile trying to revoke the citizenship of a member of Congress and recently posted unhinged racist rants on social media in which he urges "the people of Minnesota" to "fight" the "Somali immigrants" in their midst. As the documentary shows, thanks to Trump's mass deportation policies, Haitian communities all over the country who have lost their status now endure a daily agony in which they are not sure whether today will be the day the vans and troops arrive to haul them to detention.
One is reminded of the lament in Auden's immortal poem "Refugee Blues":
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