Aksyon ouvriye pou bat kampay rasis kont Aysyen yo – kounye a !
TPS Canceled – Courts and Congress a Dead End

For Workers Action Now to
Defeat Racist Drive Against Haitians!

The following article was distributed as a leaflet at an August 1 “All Out for Haitian TPS” rally in Brooklyn called by Haitian Women for Haitian Refugees and a number of community and left groups.

JULY 31 – The Trump administration’s mass deportations drive has come to a head with the cancellation of Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for more than a third of a million people. The Supreme Court’s June 25 ruling in the case Mullin v. Doe gives the green light to the MAGA (Make America Great Again) racists in office to eliminate TPS for Haitians, something that has been in their sights since the start of Donald Trump’s second term in office. This decision affects over 350,000 Haitians and 6,000 Syrians whose work authorization and legal status are due to expire in the coming days. The Court’s ruling went into effect on July 27. Deportation flights to Cap-Haïtien have already resumed – now is the decisive moment to act.

Given Trump’s vicious racist lies last year about Haitians in Springfield, Ohio supposedly eating family pets, it’s no surprise that Haitian immigrants are the next focus of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids. Federal agents are gearing up to quickly hit Springfield, where Haitian immigration saved the former manufacturing hub from economic ruin. And with Trump’s “border czar” Tom Homan vowing to send in “more ICE agents than you’ve ever seen in New York City” – with the second-largest population of Haitian immigrants (after Miami, Florida) and by far the largest number of people of Haitian origins in the U.S. – we may soon see the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) agents snatching people off the streets of Brooklyn.

The strategy of many “mainstream” Haitian community groups, elected officials and immigrants’ rights advocates has been to look to Congress and the Courts to preserve TPS, and to the Democratic Party for political support. But that has always been illusory, and now it has come to the end of the road. Many may seek refuge in Canada or elsewhere. But many more may not. The June 25 Supreme Court decision clears the way for ICE to target Haitian neighborhoods en masse. And judging by the treatment of Haitians at the U.S.-Mexico border in 2021 under Democrat Joe Biden, when Haitians were lashed by Border Patrol agents on horseback, and the recent murder spree by the ICE Gestapo in Texas, Maine and Florida, it may soon get bloody.

Against the power of the murderous paramilitary immigration police, it is necessary to bring to bear a superior power: that of the organized workers movement. New York City is a labor stronghold – a quarter of all workers in NYC are union members. Haitian workers are a key part of the workforce, particularly among health care workers, school bus drivers and other sectors. In the face of a new “surge,” with masked federal agents prowling the streets trying to terrorize immigrants and the entire population, the Labor Committee to Defend Immigrants is calling to mobilize workers action to stop the deportations, and for unions, together with students and communities, to lead mass mobilization to run the modern-day slave catchers out of town.

Imperialism’s Racist Targeting of Haitians

Ever since the Haitian Revolution of 1791-1804 – the first successful slave revolt in history, which kicked out the French colonialists and established the first independent black nation in the West – the imperialists have never forgotten or forgiven this humiliation. News of the Haitian Revolution spread across the Americas inspiring slave revolts, including Denmark Vesey’s Rebellion in 1822 and Nat Turner’s Rebellion in 1831. The racist U.S. ruling class sought to destroy the Haitian economy and destabilize the black republic. In 1915, the U.S. occupied Haiti to collect debt owed to National City Bank of New York (now Citibank), which took over the “indemnity” (ransom) Haiti was forced to pay to France to compensate the former slaveowners.

The Marines’ occupation, begun by segregationist Democrat Woodrow Wilson, didn’t end until 1934. Ever since, the U.S. has effectively run Haiti as a neocolony. In the 1990s, Democrat president Bill Clinton destroyed the Haitian rice industry by subsidizing imports of rice from Arkansas (where he had been governor). After the 2010 earthquake, which killed over 300,000 people and left many more homeless, Democratic president Barack Obama sent U.S. troops to put down unrest by the poor and working people of Haiti. Ex-president Clinton became the effective colonial governeur, and secretary of state Hillary Clinton set up sweatshop garment factories where workers were (and still are) paid starvation wages of $5 a day.

If Haiti today is labeled a “failed state” by U.S. politicians, it is the result of unending imperialist domination. Haiti’s unelected “acting prime minister” Fils-Aimé is in office because of backing from a “Core Group” of imperialist countries, kept there to fight the gangs that reportedly control 40% of the capital, Port-au-Prince. Troops from Africa in the (U.S.-financed) Gang Suppression Force act as one more gang. And at least 1,243 people have been killed in drone strikes by a “security contractor” (Vectus Capital) run by notorious mercenary Erik Prince of Blackwater infamy. But while violence in Haiti is such that it is on the State Department’s “Do Not Travel” list, the Trump regime is deporting Haitians immigrants there.

The Trump administration is not uniquely cruel in this regard. After Hurricane Matthew destroyed southern Haiti in 2016, Obama’s DHS head Jeh Johnson announced that the U.S. would “resume removal flights” as soon as possible. In response, the League for the Fourth International (of which the Internationalist Group is the U.S. section) held coordinated united-front protests in the U.S., Mexico and Brazil demanding “Stop Exclusion of Haitians! Stop All Deportations! Occupation Troops Out of Haiti!” But the Trump drive to push out Haitians is driven by blatant racism. The dissent by liberal Supreme Court justices reprinted a whole string of the Trump statements (including his Nazi-like rant about “poisoning the blood” of the U.S.) that the conservative majority ruled were supposedly “not overtly racial.”

In the face of this virulent racist onslaught, it is crucial that the labor movement mobilize to defend our immigrant fellow workers and community members. In 1990, in protest against federal authorities’ racist prohibition against Haitian immigrants giving blood (reflected in Trump’s ravings above), tens of thousands of Haitian protesters marched, closing down the Brooklyn Bridge and parts of lower Manhattan. The power of Haitian immigrant workers as part of the multiracial and largely immigrant working class of this union town was shown again in the 2013 NYC school bus strike. Today, our Haitian brothers and sisters must not be left to stand alone in the face of fascistic ICE thugs whose attack on basic rights threatens the entire working class.

Already there are reports of employers, including hospitals, preemptively firing workers with TPS even before their work authorizations have run out. Medical workers should act to stop the firings. The day before the cancellation of TPS went into effect, Teamsters Local 804 passed a resolution (see below) calling to stop the deportations of Haitians and Syrians and opposing firing or layoffs of workers at UPS and Amazon as a result of changes in immigration status. Against the white supremacist in the White House and the “deport better” Democrats whose cops (as in Zohran Mamdani’s NYPD ) protect ICE, we must look to the multiracial labor movement to wield its enormous potential power now to stop the racist deportation machine in its tracks.

Defend Haitians! Stop the deportations and firings! Full citizenship rights for all immigrants!

Resolution to Stop Deportation of Haitian and Syrian Workers

The following resolution was passed by International Brotherhood of Teamsters Local 804 on July 26.

Whereas, on June 25 the Supreme Court ruled that the Department of Homeland Security may arbitrarily terminate Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for Haitians and Syrians; and

Whereas, the Department of Homeland Security set the deadline to end TPS for Haitians and Syrians for July 24, subsequently extended to July 27, ordering employers to fire them and making them targets in the ongoing campaign of “mass deportations”; and

Whereas, many Haitian workers in particular have lived and worked in the U.S. for decades, and to deport Haitians or Syrians would place them in grave danger; and

Whereas, Haitian workers are a vital part of New York City’s labor movement, and central to the health care system in New York, where their removal would endanger many hospitals and senior care facilities; and

Whereas, attacks on TPS are part of a war on immigrants that grievously undermines the fight to organize the unorganized especially at Amazon where our local is engaged in a unionization campaign, and where, in 2025, Haitian workers whose Humanitarian Parole status had been revoked were laid off en masse; and

Whereas, attacks on immigrant rights are an attack on the rights of the working class as a whole and must be opposed in line with the labor motto that “an injury to one is an injury to all”; 

Therefore, be it resolved, that Teamsters Local 804 calls to stop the deportations of Haitians and Syrians, and opposes any firing or layoff of our immigrant fellow workers by UPS or Amazon due to termination of TPS or other change in immigration status.

To contact the Internationalist Group and the League for the Fourth International, send e-mail to: internationalistgroup@msn.com

Return to THE INTERNATIONALIST GROUP Home Page