The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has announced that it is formally terminating Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for Haitian nationals, ordering hundreds of thousands of people legally living and working in the U.S. to prepare to leave early next year.
TPS for Haiti will end Feb. 3, 2026. DHS instructs beneficiaries to depart if they cannot secure another lawful basis to remain stateside.
“After consulting with interagency partners, Secretary (Kristi) Noem concluded that Haiti no longer meets the statutory requirements for TPS,” the announcement said. “This decision was based on a review conducted by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, input from relevant U.S. government agencies, and an analysis indicating that allowing Haitian nationals to remain temporarily in the United States is inconsistent with U.S. national interests.”
As of March 31, there were 330,735 Haitian nationals who received TPS approval to live in the U.S. — the second-most of any country, following Venezuela, according to a Congressional Research Service report. Nearly a third of America’s 1.3 million TPS holders live in Florida.
DHS is directing Haitians to report self-departures using the CBP Home mobile app, a program marked as a “secure and convenient” self-deportation process that includes a free plane ticket, a $1,000 “exit bonus” and the promise of possible future eligibility for legal status.
The announcement is the latest escalation in President Donald Trump’s aggressive rollback of humanitarian protections and work authorization programs. Since retaking office in January 2025, the administration has moved to terminate TPS or humanitarian parole for nationals of Haiti, Venezuela, Nicaragua, Syria, Somalia, Burma, Cameroon, Afghanistan and others, while encouraging people losing status to self-deport using CBP Home.
The announcement, issued Wednesday, comes as Haiti faces dire humanitarian and security crises.
Immigrant rights advocates and legal experts say DHS is ignoring catastrophic conditions in Haiti. The Miami Herald reports that 5.7 million Haitians—more than half the population—face acute hunger. Some 1.4 million are internally displaced, and as many as one in four of the island nation’s 12 million people live in gang-controlled neighborhoods.
Criminal organizations now control roughly 90% of Port-au-Prince and all major roads in and out of the capital, while kidnappings, rapes and killings number in the thousands this year. Hurricane Melissa recently deepened shortages, killing dozens and severing already-fragile supply routes.
The termination also follows a surge in xenophobic rhetoric targeting Haitians during last year’s presidential campaign, when Trump, Vice President JD Vance falsely claimed Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, were eating cats and dogs — a debunked conspiracy theory amplified at the time by numerous other Republicans and condemned by many elected leaders in the Haitian American community.
The false claims sparked multiple bomb threats that shut down government offices, hospitals and schools, prompting widespread outrage and a retraction by the woman who had initially spread the rumor on local social media.
According to an analysis of public and U.S. Census data by the libertarian Cato Institute think tank, immigrants from Haiti have an incarceration rate 48% lower than U.S.-born Americans.
Haiti first received TPS after the catastrophic 2010 earthquake, which killed hundreds of thousands and left more than 1 million homeless. The country has since faced repeated natural disasters, another major earthquake in 2021, and cascading political upheaval culminating in the 2021 assassination of President Jovenel Moïse.
Gangs filled the power vacuum, seizing police stations, ports and fuel terminals while pushing families into makeshift shelters in churches, schools and stadiums. In July, the United Nations said Haiti’s gangs had “near-total control” of the capital city of Port-au-Prince.
Legal battles have slowed but not stopped the administration’s push to end TPS for Haiti, which began one month into Trump’s second term.
In July, U.S. District Judge Brian Cogan in New York blocked a DHS attempt to move up the TPS end date by five months, ruling the government violated notice requirements. Then in September, U.S. District Judge Edward Chen in San Francisco halted terminations for more than 1 million Haitian and Venezuelan TPS holders, calling the actions by DHS arbitrary and capricious.
The U.S. Supreme Court, however, has granted multiple emergency requests allowing DHS to continue parts of its TPS rollback plan.
English 
