Haitian Immigration Is a Biden Success Story. I’ve Seen It Firsthand.
Three or four nights a week, from 10 pm to 6 am, Mireille bends over a conveyor belt, quickly plucking out bad beans or kernels of corn bound for the cannery. The seasonal work started in July, and it ends this month. After this, she’ll need to find a new job. But her biggest concern isn’t the job market—it’s what happens on November 5. She’s heard Donald Trump’s promises of mass deportation, even of immigrants who are here legally like Mireille—and she’s heard the insults he’s hurled against Haitians in particular.
“I’m worried,” Mireille told me through a translator. She was nervous even to speak about immigration, and she asked that I use her first name only. “I just came to the country. I haven’t worked enough, and I have nothing saved. Going back home would be a disaster.” Haiti is now facing an acute hunger emergency and a lack of clean water. Tens of thousands of Haitians have been displaced by political violence. Gunmen rampage through towns and massacre children.
Mireille came here to Delaware in search of a better life, but the promise of stability now seems hazier than ever. Through those long overnight shifts, the same thought keeps playing in her mind: “I didn’t leave anything back home in coming here, and then to go back there with nothing in my hands?”
Mireille arrived in the United States in April 2023, three months after the Biden administration implemented a two-year “humanitarian parole” for Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans ‘fleeing political violence and natural disasters to find work in the U.S.—up to 30,000 people per month. The program formally known as the Processes for Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans (CHNV) is “divine intervention” for Haitians with no other options, said Emanie Dorival, a nurse practitioner who works with the Haitian community in Delaware. “There is no way all these Haitians and the other countries who are part of that program would have been allowed to come.” People who worked as lawyers, doctors, nurses, and accountants in Haiti now find themselves on the production line, she said. “They’re doing whatever to survive. It’s about survival.”
At Mireille’s church in a small town a few miles from the capital of Dover, about three-quarters of congregants are recent arrivals. Haitians were the largest group of immigrants within the program, with about 214,000 moving to the U.S. and filling jobs in industries that have struggled to retain workforces, especially after Covid killed and disabled so many workers. The program also revitalized dying towns, helping immigrants alongside citizens. Ensuring asylum wasn’t just the right thing to do in terms of morality or international law; it also helped rescue the economy, said Ediberto Román, law professor and director of citizenship and immigration initiatives at Florida International University. The CHNV program has been one of the Biden administration’s quieter but more striking success stories.
Perhaps it’s no surprise, then, that the Haitian community has come under sustained fire from the Trump campaign. When Trump recirculated a lie during the presidential debate about Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, eating pets, when he later pledged to remove their protected status and deport them, and when he said immigrants had “bad genes” that predispose them to violence, it was in keeping with his longtime obsession with eugenics and an enduring opposition to Haitians in particular. But this contempt has taken new shape as a dangerous policy proposal.
Trump’s running mate, JD Vance, has said he considers the Biden-Harris administration’s immigration policy to be illegitimate, and he insists on calling documented immigrants like the Haitians in Springfield, Ohio, “illegal.” That’s why Trump and his surrogates frequently say that mass deportation would ensnare 25 or even 30 million people in the United States. With only an estimated 12 million or so undocumented residents, many more people who are here legally would also be swept up in such a purge. But it’s not just immigrants with or without documentation; American citizens are also at risk of deportation. Former policy adviser Stephen Miller—architect of the family separation policy, among other horrors—has outlined a “turbocharged” policy to denaturalize citizens in order to deport them. “The consequences of that will be the targeting of immigrants but also anyone perceived to look like an immigrant,” Román said.
The promise of mass deportations (“NOW!”) has been central to the Trump campaign. “His only policy-related position is to blame everything on immigrants,” said Román. His hateful rhetoric has consequences for every American, beyond the realm of the moral into the practical and logistical. If Trump is elected again, “we’re going to have incredible shortages and economic downturn” with the potential for “rampant inflation,” Román said. He pointed to the examples of Alabama and Georgia, where strict immigration enforcement cost each state billions of dollars. “Look at your kitchen, open the fridge—just about everything you buy” would see higher prices, Román said. Child care, health care, agriculture, hospitality, construction workers—all are industries built upon the labor of immigrants.
At a rally in Pennsylvania this week, Trump made headlines for swaying to music onstage for 39 minutes. But before he stopped answering questions from the audience, Trump still managed to condemn Haitian immigrants for everything from crime to the high price of groceries—in a cruel twist, blaming the very immigrants doing the backbreaking, underpaid work of maintaining our food security and keeping groceries as cheap as they are.
“Immigrants, consistently and historically, have been economic boons to our country,” Román said. But they lack the protections that would be appropriate to their crucial position, he added: “We have an abusive system of individuals that are absolutely necessary to our economy but have no protections.”
Even if the plan of mass deportation doesn’t materialize at the grand scale Trump envisions, it would spread fear in the immigrant community while encouraging racist attacks and threats, Román said. “It’ll make life so horrific that immigrants will not come.” Creating a “chilling effect” is nothing new—the George W. Bush administration, for instance, conducted immigration raids on the meatpacking industry. But Bush seemed to understand that many of these workers were integral to the economy, Román said. “I don’t think Trump cares or is capable of understanding it, so I think there will be far more abuses. It’s going to be incomprehensible.”
Emanie Dorival emigrated from Haiti to the U.S. when she was a child. Her parents had to make the impossible choice between two of their three children to bring with them; one of Dorival’s sisters, chosen to stay behind, was only able to join the family in the U.S. when her third sister died. “That’s how strict they were, 34 years ago, about allowing people to even come with a green card,” Dorival said. Now, under the Biden program, entire extended families can start anew in the United States, a development she sees as nothing short of a miracle.
“But my fear, when we have a change in government, if Trump were to become president, what is going to happen to them? That’s my big concern right now. Are they going to just push all of these people back to Haiti, with the current situation?” she asked. And given the wide scope of the deportation promises—and Vance’s refusal to recognize documented immigration under the Biden-Harris administration—people like Dorival who have lived in the country for decades, who provide essential services to our communities and who are an integral part of our society, are also at risk of losing everything. “We are all fearful. When I say fearful, fearful,” Dorival said. “It will be a nightmare.”
In many ways, I am the target demographic for Trump’s rhetoric. I’m from Delaware, and I grew up in or near the small towns where Haitian immigrants have now settled. My friends and neighbors worked some of the jobs in agriculture and health care now being filled by Haitians. When I first learned about the booming Haitian communities, I must admit I was surprised. Here? In Delaware? But my hesitation wasn’t born of xenophobia or hostility. Rather, I was floored that the rural town I so frequently dreamed of leaving could become a dream destination, a refuge, for someone else. People like me who leave at the first opportunity are one of the reasons these rural small towns began declining in the first place. I am deeply conscious of how the difficult but vital jobs no one seemed to want—caregivers, poultry processors—are now being filled by dedicated workers from other places. Surely they deserve better protections—on the job and in their daily lives—rather than new threats to their safety and immigration status.
Haitians in Delaware and Ohio and elsewhere are revitalizing dying towns, doing the hardest jobs, paying taxes to improve schools and roads and social services, and trying to find a life of meaning and dignity in an incredibly turbulent time. In addition to the moral repugnance of deporting political asylum-seekers and naturalized citizens to face life-threatening political and economic instability in Haiti, a program of mass deportation—or mass abuses—would be incredibly destabilizing economically and socially.
But inflammatory right-wing rhetoric and rising support for mass deportations—even among Democrats—seems to be taking its toll. Earlier this month, the Biden administration announced it will not be renewing the two-year CHNV humanitarian parole program. Anyone who has already arrived through the program will need to apply for Temporary Protected Status, a separate program begun in 1990 that people from Haiti can currently qualify for—unless Trump revokes it. Should Harris win, she would need to reinstate the program—but she’s also talked on the campaign trail about limiting immigration.
“The factory owners or administrators love to have immigrants to work because, labor-wise, it’s more beneficial for them,” Mireille said. “But if the government chooses to send us home, what can we do?”