International
Haitian’s march in thousands over Trump’s decision to send them home
Scores of Haitian immigrants who were offered Temporary Protected Status, or TPS, after an earthquake killed 300,000 people and ravaged their homes in January 2010 are protesting the decision by President Donald Trump to send them back home.
After previously granting a six-month extension, Trump’s administration announced on Monday that it would end TPS for Haiti in July 2019, meaning that any Haitian who cannot obtain another kind of U.S. visa will be subject to deportation back to the Caribbean nation.
“We’re just left in a void,” said Sebastian Joseph, 26, a Haitian immigrant living in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn where Haitians and other Caribbeans are concentrated.
Read also: Trump slaps new travel restrictions on Chad, Venezuela, North Korea
He said virtually all Haitians want to stay in the United States, where they have carved out a niche in construction and healthcare services such as caring for the elderly and sick.
“America has been the home of the free for 200 years or more. Everybody wants to come to America,” Joseph said. “A lot of people will go back to nothing.”
At least one Haitian TPS recipient in Brooklyn accepted that eventually she must return.
“If they say I have 18 months and that’s it, I say thank God, and then I will go,” said Margaret Etienne, who gave birth to a 3-year-old son here who is now a U.S. citizen.
“It’s my country. I love my country,” she said after buying takeout from a Haitian restaurant with her son on a stretch of Church Avenue that is also called Bob Marley Boulevard, after the late Jamaican musician.
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