On Monday, more than 300,000 Haitian immigrants were stripped of their legal status and work authorization through the cancellation of their Temporary Protected Status (TPS). This savage move exposes workers and their families to arrest, imprisonment and deportation to a country devastated by decades of US imperialist intervention.

One day later, the Department of Homeland Security imposed a sweeping new rule allowing asylum officers to send hundreds of thousands of applications directly into deportation proceedings without first interviewing the applicant. The measure could affect as many as 444,724 pending cases, in addition to an estimated 132,000 future applicants every year.

Heavily armed and masked Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents were reportedly being mobilized in cities with large Haitian populations, including New York City, Boston, San Diego, Orlando, Miami and Springfield, Ohio. Locals have reported that normally busy streets teeming with life are empty as residents stay home to avoid the immigration Gestapo.

The operation has the character of a modern-day pogrom. Unaccountable federal agents are being sent into working class communities to hunt down workers, parents, students, nurses and teachers who have committed no crime. Those seized face imprisonment for weeks, months or even years in the expanding network of mostly privately operated concentration camps across the United States, before being deported to one of the most dangerous countries in the world.

“We’re hearing from people across the country,” Guerline Jozef, executive director of the Haitian Bridge Alliance, told the Miami Herald. “People are afraid. They are confused. They are traumatized because there are no clear guidelines.”

Jozef said Haitian communities reported an increased ICE presence over the weekend. Workers have already had their shifts eliminated, while students preparing to return to school this fall are being dis-enrolled after losing their immigration status.

In Indiana alone, approximately 7,000 Haitian workers lost their work authorization Monday. Many work in warehouses, delivery services and healthcare. Some 3,000 are employed as stockers and packers, another 1,000 as delivery drivers, and roughly 20 percent of Haitian TPS recipients work in healthcare. Haitian TPS workers in Indiana contribute an estimated $209 million annually to the state economy and pay $55 million in federal, state and local taxes.

In Springfield, Ohio, the targeting of Haitian workers is the culmination of a years-long campaign initiated by neo-Nazis and elevated by Trump, Vice President JD Vance and the Republican Party.

On August 10, 2024, members of the neo-Nazi Blood Tribe marched through downtown Springfield carrying swastika flags and semi-automatic rifles. Police permitted the Nazis to march unmolested. Weeks later, Trump and Vance recycled their racist lies, falsely accusing Haitian immigrants of stealing and eating household pets.

Trump subsequently pledged to revoke the legal status of Springfield’s Haitian population and carry out mass deportations. That threat is now being implemented by the federal government.

The administration is ordering Haitians to return to conditions that its own State Department declares are too dangerous for Americans. A State Department advisory updated July 10 designates Haiti “Level 4: Do Not Travel” because of “crime, kidnapping, terrorism, unrest, and limited health care.” It acknowledges that Haiti has remained under a national state of emergency since March 2024 and that the US government has an “extremely limited ability” to provide emergency services.

Nor can Haitians simply purchase a ticket to Port-au-Prince to escape the ICE dragnet. “US commercial flights are not currently operating to or from Port-au-Prince,” the State Department states. The Federal Aviation Administration prohibits US carriers from flying there because of “ongoing instability.”

Conditions in Haiti are not the product of some inexplicable natural catastrophe. For more than two centuries, the country has been subjected to colonial plunder, military occupation, US-backed dictatorships and repeated imperialist interventions.

Hundreds of thousands fled after the catastrophic 2010 earthquake. Further waves followed the 2021 earthquake and the assassination that year of US-backed President Jovenel Moïse. Washington responded to Haiti’s social collapse by deporting refugees, blocking asylum seekers at the southern border and supporting further foreign military intervention.

Even some Republican and Democratic officials have warned that the expulsion of Haitian workers will damage employers and local economies. Ohio’s Republican Governor Mike DeWine called the termination a “mistake.” Haitians in Springfield “have created and filled jobs,” he told CBS. “So to lose them and to have them not be able to work anymore and possibly taken out of this country is frankly a blow to Springfield and to the state of Ohio.”

San Diego’s Democratic Mayor Todd Gloria likewise wrote, “Ending TPS is a mistake that hurts families, employers, and our economy.”

Their objections are framed above all as concern for employers deprived of exploitable labor. Neither DeWine nor Gloria has called for the abolition of ICE or the closure of its concentration camps.

The attack on Haitians coincided with another far-reaching assault on immigrants. On Tuesday, the Department of Homeland Security implemented a rule allowing US Citizenship and Immigration Services to refer certain asylum applications directly to Justice Department immigration courts without first interviewing the applicants.

The rule eliminates references in federal regulations to an applicant’s “right” to an interview. It also removes the requirement that referral notices include an asylum officer’s assessment of the applicant’s credibility. Because a single application can cover an entire family, the number of people threatened is potentially much larger than the number of cases.

The purpose is to transform the asylum process into an accelerated conveyor belt toward deportation. Applicants can be thrown directly into removal proceedings before the politically-controlled immigration courts without an asylum officer ever hearing their testimony.

The road to Trump’s attacks on immigrants and the right to asylum was paved by the Democrats and the Biden administration. In June 2024, Biden issued a Trump-style executive order closing the southern border to most asylum seekers once an arbitrary daily threshold had been reached. He revived deportation flights to Haiti despite the country’s catastrophic conditions and dispatched mounted Border Patrol agents against Haitian refugees in Del Rio, Texas. His administration expanded the detention, deportation and border police state apparatus now being wielded by Trump.

The right to seek asylum was incorporated into international law after the Second World War and the Holocaust, when governments had barred Jews and other refugees fleeing Nazi persecution. Its destruction is inseparable from the fascistic character of Trump’s mass deportation campaign and the repudiation of the democratic principles proclaimed by the US ruling class after the defeat of Nazi Germany.

The defense of Haitian immigrants and all workers cannot be entrusted to the courts or capitalist politicians. Workers must organize independently to prevent ICE raids and deportations, demand the immediate restoration of legal status to every affected immigrant, close the detention camps, abolish ICE and guarantee the right of all workers to live and work wherever they choose.