Is an open border reckoning at hand? Migrants brought to the US under shady temporary legal status changes made by the Biden Administration seem to think so. In June of this year Biden granted special immigration benefits to at least 300,000 Haitians (out of 500,000 already allowed into the US) brought into the country in 2022, allowing them to remain until early 2026. The plan included minimal background checks and was originally touted by Biden as a way to "slow illegal border encounters".
Biden offered migrants from Haiti, Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela easy access to work visa programs and special benefits so that the same people wouldn't cross into the US illegally. In other words, Biden was desperate to reduce embarrassing border crossing numbers so he paid vast sums of money to transport and house hundreds of thousands of migrants under a veil of legality.
The administration, however, did not renew legal status protections in 2024 for a large percentage of these immigrants and they will be required to leave the US in the near term. A host of NGOs advise migrants on how to use legal loopholes to stay within the country for extended periods of time, usually dragging out the clock until they can apply for permanent residency. None of this, however, will matter much in the wake of Donald Trump's mass deportation plans.
In response to the impending cleanup of Biden's immigration mess, Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio are reportedly fleeing the area and relocating to sanctuary cities in an attempt to avoid deportation. The president of the Haitian Support Center in Springfield says some families have left the city for locations like Dayton and Columbus because of uncertainty about the changes in government.
“Some of them, they relocate in those areas just to follow or observe the unfolding of the situation with the expectation that they can come back if everything gets back to normal,” said Viles Dorsainvil, Haitian Support Center president.
“We still have some kind of anxiety going on, of fear just because people do not know what will be happening with the upcoming the next administration..."
The media has attempted to portray deportation policies as a threat to all immigrants, even those that have been in the US for many years following the legal citizenship process.
But for every story of a migrant that has actually added something of value to their new community, there are thousands of migrants feeding off government subsidies. Democrats often claim that illegals and migrants under TPS don't receive government benefits. This is false.
The majority of Haitian migrants under the Biden program are eligible for cash assistance, medical assistance, employment preparation, job placement, English language training, and other services offered through the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR).
They may also be eligible for federal “mainstream” (non-ORR funded) benefits, such as cash assistance through Supplemental Security Income (SSI) or Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), health insurance through Medicaid, and food assistance through Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP).
This is on top of cash aid provided to Haitians by pro-immigration NGOs.
Over 20,000 Haitian migrants were shipped to Springfield, Ohio; the city originally had a population of only 60,000. That's a 33% increase in total population made up of a third world demographic, all in the span of a couple years. This was done subversively without any warning or input from native residents. The situation became national news after locals reported increasing disappearances of pets and park wildlife after the arrival of the migrants, which Donald Trump commented on during the second presidential debate.
The ability of migrants living in the US under tenuous circumstances to fight deportation is limited. Democrats and sanctuary city officials suggest they can tie up the DHS and ICE for months or years on each case, exhausting the Trump Administration with legal battles. This is not reality.
Trump can indeed place a moratorium on asylum requests and revoke Temporary Protection Status (TPS) applications. He did this during his first term and he can do it again. Legal battles are harder to fight when the person in question is booted out of the country where the courts reside. There is nothing that can stop deportations, including ambiguous sanctuary city protections. One way or another, most migrants in the US illegally and those under Biden's TPS policy will be sent back to where they came from.