US Deports First Group of Haitians Since Trump Administration Won Legal Battle to End TPS Program

The United States has deported over 160 people to Haiti for the first time since the Trump administration won a legal battle to end Temporary Protected Status for some 350,000 Haitians.

The plane carrying the deportees landed in the northern Haitian city of Cap-Haitien because the main international airport in Port-au-Prince is considered too dangerous due to ongoing gang violence.

The U.S. government currently has a ban on U.S. commercial flights to Haiti’s capital through early September.

According to Jean Négot Bonheur Delva, director general of Haiti’s National Office of Migration, the deportees included TPS holders and Haitians who had served prison sentences.

‘It is not the Haitian state that asks for them to be sent back,’ Delva said.

‘Our mission is to welcome migrants of forced return. … We welcome them with the aim of accompanying them to their home.’

Delva noted that some of the deportees were not born in Haiti, although they are of Haitian descent.

He said that several deportees planned to travel to Haiti’s southern region, a journey that is considered dangerous due to gang control of the main routes leading to that area.

Others are going to Haiti’s western region.

Delva also shared the story of one deportee who was born in the Dominican Republic and had never been to Haiti before.

‘There is one migrant who knows nothing about Haiti because he said he was coming from the Dominican Republic; that’s where he was born,’ Delva said.

‘He said he was coming from the Dominican Republic; that’s where he was born,’ Delva said.

Delva said the government would attempt to reunify him with any potential relatives in Haiti or the Dominican Republic, where his mother and father live.

Immigration officials in Haiti on Thursday offered deportees a maximum of $65 and something to drink and eat.

‘Those who cannot reach their homes today, we will host them in secure spaces and the next day the process will continue until all migrants return home as they should,’ Delva said.

Delva did not say how many of the 161 deportees were TPS holders who had been living and working legally in the U.S. since 2010.

In late June, the U.S. Supreme Court allowed the TPS program to end, affecting some 1 million people from more than a dozen countries.

The cases went back to the lower courts, but by late July, the government had not extended work permits for Haitians.

On August 5, a federal judge in Washington, D.C., lifted an order preventing deportations of Haitians on Temporary Protected Status, which was effectively a formality after the Supreme Court ruling in June.

Activists have warned that Haiti is currently too dangerous and doesn’t have enough resources to help those being deported to a country of nearly 12 million people, of which more than half need humanitarian assistance due to surging gang violence and deepening poverty, hunger, and violence.

Gang violence already has displaced a record 1.5 million people across Haiti, where more than 3,100 people were reported killed from January to June and another 1,189 injured, according to U.N. statistics.

One deportee briefly spoke to The Associated Press as he arrived in Cap-Haitien. He identified himself as Jean Diane Louis and said he left Haiti when he was 5 years old.

He said his family lives in New York City and that he was sentenced to 19 years in prison for an unspecified crime he asserted he did not commit.

‘Then ICE came and took me without questioning me,’ Louis said.

‘They just sent me here.’

As gang violence persists, Haitian migrants in the U.S. continue to be arrested and deported.

On Thursday, U.S. authorities arrested a popular Haitian pastor at a gas station in Springfield, Ohio, according to Springfield G92, a faith-based group supporting Haitian immigrants.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrested a second Haitian man who was with him.

The pastor, Gilbert Joubert Adrien, was being held by immigration authorities in Ohio, said Marjory Wentworth, a spokesperson for Springfield G92.

She said ICE has been a heavy presence in recent days in Springfield, a city of about 60,000 people that gained attention when U.S. President Donald Trump said falsely during his 2024 campaign that Haitian residents there ate dogs.

Haiti’s Group Supporting Refugees and Returnees has decried the deportations.

‘Haiti is not ready to receive this number of migrants who were in the TPS program,’ it said in a statement Thursday.

The group noted that more than 140,000 Haitians have been deported from neighboring countries, including the Dominican Republic, in the first half of the year alone.

‘We note that there are no government measures in place to adequately assist these migrants,’ the group said.

‘Many of those deported ‘have seen their dreams go up in smoke; the bonds they had already made in their communities are broken.’

‘Many are experiencing family separation.’

The U.S. had conducted about one deportation flight to Haiti since December 2023, according to Human Rights First’s ICE Flight Monitor, which tracks flight data.

Since December 2025, flights have originated in Alexandria, Louisiana, a hub for ICE deportation flights, with a stop in Miami on the way to Cap-Haitien International Airport.

Coto reported from San Juan, Puerto Rico.