Haitian community outraged by “reprehensible” video posted by DHS – NBC 6 South Florida
For the first time since the Trump Administration revoked Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for Haitians, deportation flights back to Haiti have begun.
The first one left last Thursday, August 27th, and the next day, the Department of Homeland Security posted a video showing men in chains boarding the airplane.
The video is set to an upbeat Haitian song, but the imagery is arresting, to say the least. Black men in shackles and chains, being led onto the airplane in the rain.
The video is drawing harsh condemnation from the Haitian community.
“This video is absolutely reprehensible, this video is basically dehumanizing us,” said Paul Namphy of the Family Action Network.
“I was in utter shock that they had even released something like this,” said Whenda Tima, owner of a Haitian-American media network called L’Union.
The Department of Homeland Security posted the video on multiple social media platforms on Friday, aimed at Haitians whose TPS has run out.
“And then you’re creating this sickening messaging around Haitians on TPS, that they are all criminals,” Tima said. “People that are on TPS were here legally.”
“There is no way to not connect the dots with the painful 19th- century history of this country and how Black people were treated then,” Namphy said.
The flight landed in Cap Haitien last Thursday, and video shot by APTN shows no one was in shackles as they disembarked.
“Once you depict a certain ethnic group, racial group as subhuman, as subpar, then you can treat them in any way, and we saw that, of course, in Europe in the 1930’s very tragically,” Namphy said.
Posted on the department’s official account, the video drew more than 1,500 comments on X, including one in support which said, “Words mean things… T is for temporary.” However, the vast majority of comments echoed this thought: “This video is deeply offensive and makes me ashamed of our country.”
We asked the Department of Homeland Security to comment on the video, and they told us, in part, “Temporary Protected Status is exactly that—temporary… “What we would say now is it’s closing time, which means you don’t have to go home, but you can’t stay here. The good news is it’s not too late to get a $2,600 check and a free flight home.”
The activists we spoke to point out that every Haitian who was on TPS already knows they no longer have protected status, so they wonder what the point was of the video, except to encourage self-deportation to a country currently so dangerous that commercial airlines will not fly to the nation’s capital.
Paul Namphy says his group, the Family Action Network, is asking Florida’s senators to support legislation to restore TPS for Haitians for three more years.