GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump has promised that he will revoke the legal status of the Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio, who have been the center of controversy for the last month or so.
Speaking with NewsNation on Wednesday, Trump said he would effectively change immigration law so that the legal status of the Haitian migrants would change to make them illegal. He would then be able to deport the migrants back to Haiti if he were to win the White House in November’s election.
As Trump said during the interview:
“Springfield is such a beautiful place, have you seen what’s happened to it? It’s been overrun. You can’t do that to people. They have to be removed.
“Absolutely, I’d revoke [Temporary Protected Status]. And I’d bring them back to their country.”
Trump as well as his running mate, Ohio Senator JD Vance, have pushed claims that the migrants who arrived in Springfield over the last few years with legal TPS status have stolen residents’ pets and are eating them.
With all the national attention, the Haitians have received death threats, and state and local buildings and schools have been targeted with threats as well.
All of this is despite the fact that Republican Governor Mike DeWine has pushed back over these false claims.
Following Trump’s interview, immigration advocates railed against the former president’s plan. The American Immigration Council’s senior fellow, Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, wrote on the social media platform X:
“By January, there may be as many as 250,000 Haitians or more who have TPS, about 60,000 of whom have had TPS since the 2010 earthquake. … TPS is for countries undergoing circumstances that make it inhumane and dangerous to deport people there. If Haiti doesn’t count, what does?”
It wasn’t certain whether Trump would revoke the TPS status of only the Haitian migrants who are in Springfield, or whether he’d attempt to do so for all Haitian migrants in the country.
The migrants came into national focus when Trump brought up the claims about them eating pets at the September 10 presidential debate with Democratic nominee Kamala Harris.
Just a few days after the debate, Trump said he’d enact “the largest deportation in the history of our country.”
He said that plan would start in Aurora, Colorado, and Springfield, Ohio.
In addition to migrants overtaking Springfield, Trump has claimed that migrants from Venezuela — many of whom he says are members of gangs — have “taken over” Aurora.
The police chief and many city officials there have rejected those claims, though.
Many legal experts don’t believe that Trump would have the power to deport the Haitian migrants even if he were to win the White House. Stephen Yale-Loehr, who works at Cornell Law School as an immigration law professor, commented:
“In general, deportation is for people who lack immigration status. People here on parole or temporary protected status have a status, so they shouldn’t be put into deportation proceedings unless a separate ground of deportability (e.g., a criminal conviction) applies to them.”
