Florndjie Camey, 31, had gone from a bleak future in Haiti to hope for a new life; she had landed a cashier’s job in her new city of Miami after coming to the country legally with a sponsor. Then, President Donald Trump declared that she and more than 1 million other people did not have legal permission to stay in the country.
Trump, seeking to go down in history as the president who carried out the largest mass deportation in U.S. history, deemed that the Biden administration program that allowed Camey and hundreds of thousands of others to legally enter the U.S was actually illegal.
Trump has pledged to clear the country of people who are illegally here, but the new criteria is expected to significantly expand the pool of undocumented immigrants.
“If you’re looking for the definition of ‘self-fulling prophesy,’ look no further than Trump’s stream of policies that intentionally take legal status away from people so they go from being documented, to undocumented and then are fair game for being deported,” said Angela Kelley, an adviser at the American Immigration Law Center and a former senior adviser on immigration for the Department of Homeland Security under the Biden administration.
“The Trump administration is creating a larger class of undocumented people by literally de-legalizing them and taking away their work authorization early,” Karen Tumlin, founder and director of Justice Action Center, said in a statement.
By “delegalizing” Camey and others, Trump has drastically hiked the number of people who could be deported through a sped-up process, while helping his administration meet its goal of ridding the country of 1 million immigrants a year.
“What happened to his promise of targeting criminals? He’s had to create larger numbers of targets and even then, the folks aren’t criminals, because they’re here legally,” Kelley said.
On May 30, the Supreme Court allowed the administration to strip more than 500,000 people from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela (CHNV) of the permission they were given to live and work in the U.S. temporarily through the CHNV parole program.
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem has issued a notice saying that the administration has terminated the parole and authorization to work for those in the CHNV program directed them to “self-deport” immediately.
Immigration groups have contested the administration’s assertion that the Biden program is unlawful. Guerline Jozef, executive director and founder of Haitian Bridge Alliance, said in a statement that hundreds of thousands in that program had trusted the U.S. government and had undergone extended vetting to secure lawful status. “Now they are having the rug violently pulled out from under them,” Jozef said.
The Trump administration has stated that the humanitarian parole granted through the CHNV program didn’t sufficiently improve border security and made interior enforcement more difficult. It argues that parole was meant to be more narrowly used. When the Supreme Court allowed Trump to terminate the CHNV program, the administration said in a statement that the participants were “poorly vetted” and were given opportunities to compete for American jobs. The Trump administration said the programs were promoted despite fraud within them.
The Department of Homeland Security referred NBC News to the same statement in response to a request for additional comment. NBC News also has contacted the White House seeking comment.
Steve Camarota, director of research for the Center for Immigration Studies, which advocates for immigration restrictions, supports the administration’s actions. Perpetuating previous parole policies “is creating the situation that caused the border crisis” under Biden, Camarota said. “If you don’t move to end them, then you are not very serious about dealing with this reality.”
Critics of Trump’s policies point out that while the administration has focused on more deportations, it hasn’t expanded the number of visas or other mechanisms to legally bring workers into the country or to legalize immigrants who’ve spent years trying to adjust their immigration status. The business and the agricultural communities have called for more visas and ways to help legalize immigrants in order to expand the pool of workers needed in a number of industries and to keep a viable labor force amid a decline in U.S. birth rates.
“We’ve just seen no effort to improve legal pathways and, if anything, things have gotten worse,” said Stuart Anderson, executive director for the National Foundation for American Policy, a public policy group focused on trade, immigration and related issues.
Anderson noted Trump has made vague comments about legal pathways, such as his suggestion that some agricultural and hotel workers could leave the country and return if their employers’ vouched for them. The administration had paused raids involving those workers, but DHS reversed that decision this week.
Meanwhile, the administration has instituted travel bans on a number of countries. For people from Haiti, there is essentially a complete ban on travel to the U.S., with bans on temporary visas and immigrant visas, he said.
“They’ve done nothing to make it easier to get visas and made it harder in many areas, including student visas,” Anderson said.
In Haiti, Camey was working to help youth in need and had returned to school to finish her university studies in psychology. But she saw no future for her and her young daughter and no chance to build a life.
She was living in rural Fort Liberté, in the northern part of the country, where violence was not as bad as in Port-au-Prince but where gangs were beginning to extend their reach, she told NBC News in her native Creole.
“I felt like I was just existing. There was no future — you can’t build anything, not even save enough to buy a car. Some people had it even worse — no food or shelter … There is truly no future,” she said.
Camey was sponsored to come to the U.S. by her aunt, making it possible for her to work in the U.S. and also support her daughter and family in Haiti.
“It felt like a second chance at life. I’m someone who likes to work and has strong willpower. It was a new experience and a new beginning,” Camey said.
Expanding the undocumented pool
Because the CHNV parole program is temporary — good for up to two years — legally vetted immigrants like Camey and others would have to find other possible ways, such as Temporary Protected Status (TPS) or asylum, to remain in the country.
But those other routes might also be difficult. In addition to terminating parole for the hundreds of thousands in the CHNV program, Trump has been trying to revoke the TPS of 350,000 Venezuelan immigrants.
He’s targeted nearly 300,000 more people from Afghanistan, Cameroon and Haiti who also were granted TPS, which grants protection from deportation and eligibility for work authorization for about six to 18 months and is extendable.
More than 900,000 people given permission to come into the country through the Biden administration’s CBP One app also have been told to leave the country. Many who entered using the app have asylum claims or are TPS recipients. Some who used the app have been arrested and detained and some have been shipped to El Salvador’s notoriously brutal mega prison CECOT.
The administration has gone further and wants to yank American citizenship from some people who don’t have at least one U.S. citizen or legal resident parent. According to the Migration Policy Institute, a Washington think tank, ending birthright citizenship for children with unauthorized parents or other noncitizens, such as those temporarily here, “would significantly swell the size of the unauthorized population — now and for generations to come.”
Specifically, the Trump plan for ending birthright citizenship would increase the unauthorized population by 2.7 million by 2045 and by 5.4 million by 2075, according to a Migration Policy Institute-Penn State analysis. Every year for 50 years, about 255,000 children born in the U.S. would start life without U.S. citizenship, according to MPI-Penn State’s analysis.
Temporary, not permanent
Noting that Trump’s actions are being challenged in court, Camarota said the Trump administration learned from the president’s first term in the White House that “you may prevail in court, but you better start now” in trying to remove people who the administration believes should not have been granted entry.
He added that the parole and TPS programs that are meant to be temporary don’t often end up being temporary “and that’s what we’re trying to undo.”
“It’s not absurd that the longer people are here, they do have more of a claim on our conscience, but that is what we are trying to avoid,” Camarota said. In the end, he added, the goal is to encourage people to leave.
Faced with the prospect of having to return to Haiti, five Haitians who used the Biden parole program to come to the U.S. and were sponsored by Rivly Breus of Miami have relocated to Canada. Others may go to Chile and a few will go to Mexico or the Virgin Islands, Breus said.
When the CHNV program opened, Breus and nine other people created a “sponsor circle” to individually sponsor families. They used their own earnings to initially clothe, house, feed and support them as they found jobs and settled in. They also pooled money to create an emergency fund. In all, the individuals in the circle sponsored 30 people, Breus said.
The end of the CHNV program “saddens me,” she said.
“It’s not that these people want to leave their homeland,” Breus said. “It’s a question of survival. These people have been trying to survive their entire lives. A lot of them don’t want to give up because giving up means death for them or just being in a position where there is nothing to live for.”
Camey, who has filed for Temporary Protected Status, has no other option now but to go to a different country, Breus said.
“I would never stay (here) undocumented,” Camey said. “All I know is I won’t go back to Haiti.”
