Jenice Armstrong: The incalculable impacts of Trump's attack on TPS

The Philadelphia Inquirer Editorial Board, The Philadelphia Inquirer on Jul 30, 2026

Published in Op Eds

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It’s terrible what’s going on with Haitians and Syrians who have been living under a special designation known as Temporary Protected Status (TPS).

They’ve literally been in panic mode since last month’s U.S. Supreme Court 6-3 ruling cleared the way for the Trump administration to strip away their ability to legally work and be protected from deportation. Roughly 350,000 Haitians and 6,000 Syrians are scrambling to figure out what their next moves will be.

Will they relocate to Canada? South America? Somewhere else? Or even go underground? Pause for a moment and imagine having to find a whole other country that will take you in.

Many fled Haiti’s 2010 earthquake and have lived in the United States for more than 15 years. We’re not talking about illegal aliens. These people are here legally. They are our neighbors. They own homes. Some have children who are U.S. citizens. They pay taxes. They hold jobs. Many work in hospitals, nursing homes, and retail establishments. Some are entrepreneurs. What are they supposed to do? Where do they go? Do they take their American-born children with them?

MAGA dismisses them, saying, “Go back to Haiti.” But it’s not that simple. The tiny Caribbean nation is on the U.S. Department of State’s Do Not Travel list. It’s not safe there. Not for Americans. Not for native-born Haitians, either.

Same thing for Syria.

The Trump administration has dramatically restricted the number of refugees allowed in this year to just 7,500, but makes exceptions for white South Africans.

As an African American, it galls me to have to sit back and watch this kind of racial preference play out. Granted, disparate treatment like this is nothing new. America has always been racially divided — but what’s happening now reaches a new depth of inequality.

It starts at the top.

President Donald Trump’s disdain for Haitians is deep and well documented, having falsely accused those living in Springfield, Ohio, of eating their neighbors’ pets and “destroying their way of life.” He has a long history of racial animus directed at Black people, famously referring to Haiti as being a “shithole country” and claiming many of its immigrants “probably have AIDS.”

Former Fox News host Megyn Kelly may be feuding with Trump, but it certainly sounded as if she were speaking for his administration last month when she said this about Haitians: “We don’t want you. We don’t care if you’re offended.”

Bigot Barbie wasn’t done, adding: “Get out. Go home,” before using an expletive to tell immigrants to go back to Haiti. Kelly delivered her vile commentary shortly after the Supreme Court’s conservative majority ruled that government officials could end Temporary Protected Status for those who had come to America to escape violence and natural disasters.

Congress created the TPS program in 1990 to protect noncitizens regardless of their immigration status.

Now that the protections Haitians and Syrians have been living under have effectively ended, Trump can extend his campaign pledge and include those until now legally residing here in his mass deportation efforts.

This is scary.

And potentially life-threatening.

Yet, it’s not on a lot of people’s radar.

I reached out to the Rev. Jennifer Joseph, the lead pastor at Zion Community Church in Yeadon, where many Haitians worship. She told me people need to know that “folks on TPS are not illegal, and they are not criminals.”

Joseph added, “Those who are not well versed about immigration law just assume that these people shouldn’t have come (and that) they should have known better.”

Yes, I’ve heard that, too.

Many don’t know what TPS is, and that the program doesn’t offer its own path to citizenship.

It’s great that the U.S. allows immigrants to reside here when their homelands are in turmoil. But once people arrive and become long-term, law-abiding residents, they need more pathways to permanent legal status.

They also need to be protected from the political whims of people like Trump or Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin.

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