As bodies continue to fall in Haiti’s streets and the nation spirals further into chaos, the U.S. has quietly tightened the screws on immigration — all while designating two of the country’s most notorious gangs as terrorist outfits.
But for Haitian immigrants already on American soil, this shift might feel more symbolic than seismic. One immigration analyst put it bluntly: “Three years from now, how many Haitians will actually be deported under this rule? Very few.” The process of pinpointing affiliations and proving them in court is murky at best.
Between October 2024 and June 2025, nearly 5,000 lives have been claimed in Haiti’s brutal gang wars, according to a grim tally from the U.N. Human Rights office. Despite mounting pleas from international agencies, deportation flights from the U.S. haven’t slowed — they’ve soared.
The United Nations has urged governments to halt removals to Haiti, warning of humanitarian disaster. But Washington remains unmoved. Deportation dockets continue filling up, especially as policy pressure mounts from figures like Donald Trump, who has revived inflammatory rhetoric. On the campaign trail in 2024, Trump even peddled an outrageous claim that Haitians in Ohio were “eating people’s pets”—a statement as false as it was telling.
The Biden administration has attempted to thread the needle, declaring gangs like *Viv Ansanm* and *Gran Grif* as terrorist groups — a move meant to choke off their financial arteries by cutting access to American banks and business connections. It mirrors earlier designations applied to Latin American drug cartels.
Still, despite the political theater and policy maneuvers, Haiti’s transitional government offered no public reaction to the gang terror designations. Silence, perhaps, speaks for a nation too overwhelmed to respond.
Meanwhile, Haitians in the U.S. await uncertain fates. A recent court ruling halted one Trump-era attempt to revoke Temporary Protected Status for over half a million individuals. But fear lingers. The gangs may be named terrorists, but the people fleeing them still face planes pointed back toward Port-au-Prince.
