BAP Backgrounder: U.S. Racist Immigration Policy Toward Haiti Reinforces Imperialism and Weakens Popular Sovereignty
By: Black Alliance for Peace Haiti/Americas Team
U.S. immigration policy is the domestic arm of its foreign policy. The attack on Haitian migrants is a direct consequence of Washington's ongoing war on Haiti's sovereignty, making their defense a central anti-imperialist struggle.
On November 26th 2025, the Trump administration terminated Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for Haiti using nearly identical language to the TPS cancellations earlier this year for displaced Venezuelans and affecting upward of 353,000 Haitian migrants. In both cases, the Department of Homeland Security claimed that continued protections were “not in the national security or foreign policy interests of the United States,” affirming U.S. policy abuses redefine their “interests” at a whim.
While the U.S. has long politicized displacement from leftist states like Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua, casting migrants as evidence of socialism’s failure and selectively offering protections when it aligns with Washington’s broader regime-change goals, Haitian migration has been structurally and historically precarious. The 2025 TPS revocation is simply the latest chapter in a bipartisan, decades-long anti-Haitian regime, one that criminalizes the forced displacement of African/Black peoples while actively producing the conditions of displacement through coups, occupation, IMF prescriptions, Core Group dictates, and externally imposed “security” interventions that deny the Haitian masses true political sovereignty.
Moreover, Haitian migration has been criminalized longer and more intensely than any other migrant flow in the Western hemisphere. Haitians face the harshest, most racialized exclusions within the U.S. immigration system and across the Americas, in particular in the Dominican Republic where state targeting and violence against Haitians, descendants of Haitian migrants, and AfroDominicans are routine. Haitian migrants are routinely denied political meaning, stripped of historic context, dehumanized, and subjected to abrupt TPS revocation alongside mass deportations under Republican and Democratic administrations alike, regardless of materially worsening conditions on the ground driven by U.S. imperial meddling. The recent news of Haitians, along with citizens of 18 other countries, showing up to take their oath for citizenship, getting plucked out of line and told they couldn’t proceed due to their country of origin, highlights the precarity and anti-Haitian racism that many face.
Thus, the latest TPS decision must be understood as a function of both historic white supremacist domestic policy and ongoing imperial aggression toward Haiti itself, including the collapse of the U.S. designed Kenya-led Multinational Security Support Mission (MSS) and the emergence of the rebranded hyper-militarized occupation, called the “Gang Suppression Force.” This is a continuation of the denial of popular sovereignty in Haiti that forces Haitians to migrate under extremely dangerous and dire conditions must be connected to the global white supremacist, colonial, capitalist order of the U.S./EU/NATO Axis of Domination that seeks to maintain hegemonic power in Our Americas. The crisis of Haiti, much like the broader crisis of “immigration” in the U.S., is in fact a crisis of imperialism steeped in anti-Haitian racism.
A History of Policing Haitian Migration
For over forty years, Haitians have been detained at higher rates, deported at faster speeds, and granted asylum at historically low levels (4–5%). Moreover, the U.S. has a long history of strengthening penalties to limit their asylum access. In 1981, the Reagan administration signed an agreement with the repressive pro-Western ‘Baby Doc’ Duvalier regime to interdict any vessel suspected of transporting migrants from Haiti for immediate return, and between 1981-1990 the Immigration Naturalization Service approved only 11 Haitian requests for asylum with some estimates as low as 6. Rather than “refugees,” the Reagan administration characterized Haitian asylum seekers as largely “economic migrants” and “boat people” who were abandoning “one of the poorest countries in the world.”
Following the 1991 U.S.-backed military coup against the democratically elected President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, thousands of Haitian asylum seekers were interdicted at sea and detained at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba where under the Clinton administration, the camps were expanded and Haitians were held without access to asylum protections, legal counsel and subjected to invasive mandatory HIV screening. This extraterritorial system of racialized detention reinforced the U.S.’s broader imperial strategy of punishing Haitians and pathologizing their displacement in the aftermath of U.S.-backed political destabilization.
That Haitians were later carved out of the 1997 Nicaraguan Adjustment and Central American Relief Act and forced to wait a year for the more restrictive Haitian Refugee Immigration Fairness Act follows this trend. Even in moments of so-called humanitarian relief, African/Black migrants are excluded, over-scrutinized, and systematically denied the protections freely extended to others. This exclusion cannot be separated from the broader neocolonial context because just years after the 1991 coup and Aristide’s conditional reinstatement under an IMF-imposed austerity regime, Haitian displacement was criminalized rather than politically recognized, reinforcing a racialized logic of punishment for asserting sovereignty. This, as well as the infamous Clinton-orchestrated rice importation scheme that devastated the Haitian rice industry and destroyed national food sovereignty, is an example of how the centuries-long campaign of economic warfare against the Haitian people has fed into the ongoing imperialist crises of forced and coerced migration.
Maritime interdictions, Guantánamo detention camps, fast-track removals, and dehumanizing racially-coded language about “chaos,” “instability” and “boat people” have all served to justify anti-Haitian exclusion. Neither party has deviated from such anti-Black logic and state practices against Haiti and Haitians, which is predicated on a broader system of domination through white supremacist colonialism that is the method through which the U.S. maintains hegemony in the region. As such, bipartisan anti-Haitian racism is key to wider U.S. aims of full-spectrum dominance in the Western Hemisphere and fascistic social control domestically.
U.S. foreign policy creates Haitian displacement then criminalizes Haitians for fleeing
What is happening in Haiti in 2025 is not organic instability. It is the predictable outcome of years-long U.S.-backed coups, externally imposed political arrangements, IMF-engineered dependencies hollowing out of the Haitian state, loose flow of arms, and Washington’s support for un-elected leaders against popular will while enforcing foreign police interventions presented as “security reforms.”
Haitians do not flee Haiti because Haiti is a failed state. They flee because U.S.-led imperialism – with key support by Canada, the EU, NATO allies, and others – ensures Haiti is denied the sovereignty required to build a safe, sustainable environment and future. The paramilitary armed groups (so-called “gangs”) that have for years now wreaked violence against the Haitian people, destroyed neighborhoods that are the foundation of popular movements, and heightened social instability are a direct result and tool of U.S.-led imperialism’s war on Haitian sovereignty, and they are reinforced by neocolonial oligarchs and comprador political elites whose interests oppose popular sovereignty. This brings us directly to the current “security” interventions designed to fail.
The MSS occupation designed and championed by the U.S. collapsed under the weight of its own contradictions. Destabilization was the strategy, so the paramilitary violence raging in the capital is not halted because it functions as justification for further occupation and a weapon against popular sovereignty. The new GSF, while presented as a fresh mandate, is simply the MSS intensified. A senior UN peace operation official Jack Christofides brings the same doctrinal and paternalistic peacekeeping framework that has historically failed in Haiti, Iraq, and elsewhere. This is not “new expertise” but continuity with a model of imperial governance that expands foreign control while eroding Haitian self-determination.
Supporting Haitian self-determination and people(s)-centered human rights means understanding the connections between U.S. “domestic” immigration policies. This means fighting to build an authentic Zone of Peace in the hemisphere, which does not fall prey to anti-Haitian racism and colonial logics with regard to migration.
Temporary Protected Status has always meant the least for Haitians because Haitians have always been held to the most punitive, white supremacist standard in the U.S. immigration system. The 2025 Trump revocation is not a break from the past, but a continuation of a bipartisan architecture that destabilizes Haiti through endless imperial intervention, criminalizes Haitian migration, and denies refuge to those fleeing crises the U.S. itself produces. Until U.S. imperialism is confronted and Haitian popular sovereignty restored, TPS revocations, mass deportations, and militarized foreign interventions will continue to operate together as the bipartisan machinery of white supremacist, anti-Haitian rule.
Instead of falling back on failed imperialist, neocolonial models that only exacerbate the root causes of forced and coerced migration, we must understand resolving challenges of migration as an integral part of fulfilling the call for a Zone of Peace in Our Americas. Struggling for this Zone of Peace requires upholding and supporting Haitian self-determination as central to the liberation of the region, through the bottom-up, mass-based, popular struggle in coordination with grassroots struggles throughout the region. Along these lines, the U.S./NATO Out of Our Americas Network is building out a structure for the masses of our peoples to successfully expel the U.S./EU/NATO Axis of Domination from our hemisphere, and open up the space for alternative systems and institutions that can end the imperialist crises of forced and coerced migration of Haitians and all peoples of Our Americas.
Hands Off Haiti!
Shut Down ICE!
Make Our Americas A Zone of Peace!