Homeland Security halts deportations to Haiti after earthquake

The Homeland Security Department announced Wednesday afternoon that it will halt the deportation of illegal Haitian immigrants in the wake of a devastating 7.0 earthquake in that country. But some lawmakers and immigration advocates are lobbying President Obama go further and grant Haitians in the U.S. a safe haven through a controversial emergency program.

The program, called temporary protected status, is designed to shelter tourists, students and illegal immigrants in the U.S. in the event of natural disasters and political upheaval in their home countries, letting Homeland Security issue them 6- to 18-month visas.

Immigration advocates had been pressing for Haiti to be granted that status since a series of hurricanes and tropical storms ripped through the island nation in fall 2008, and they wasted no time in using Tuesday's earthquake to renew their call.

The aftershocks in Port-au-Prince hadn't yet died down Tuesday evening when Florida Republican Reps. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, Mario Diaz-Balart and Lincoln Diaz-Balart released a statement pressing the White House to grant Haiti TPS. On the Democratic side, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand of New York and Reps. Alcee Hastings and Kendrick Meek of Florida have also taken to the airwaves and Internet to support granting TPS.

"If you look at what the law is written for, this is the perfect example," Mario Diaz-Balart told NationalJournal.com. "If there's any people that can't survive this, it's the poor Haitians. Horrible. Horrible."

For now, Homeland Security has halted the deportation of the more than 30,000 Haitians with final orders for removal, 160 of whom are currently in detention. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, according to a press release, "continues to closely monitor the situation."

Granting Haiti TPS would affect tens of thousands of Haitians living illegally in the U.S. A 2000 Immigration and Naturalization Service report estimated that there were 76,000 undocumented Haitians in the country, though that figure has almost certainly risen in the decade since.

But what some immigration experts argue has held up Haiti's TPS designation -- and may continue to be a barrier -- is that the program has become a de facto amnesty program.

More than 300,000 people from seven countries -- Burundi, El Salvador, Honduras, Liberia, Nicaragua, Somalia and Sudan -- are in the U.S. under temporary protected status. Some of the crises that prevented them from returning home have long since passed -- Hurricane Mitch passed through Honduras and Nicaragua in 1998, and El Salvador's massive back-to-back earthquakes took place in 2001. Yet administrations stretching back to President George H.W. Bush have continued to extend TPS in the face of intense lobbying from those communities, foreign governments and immigration rights advocates.

"It's the PPS -- permanent protected status," said Roy Beck, executive director of NumbersUSA, which advocates lower immigration levels, in March 2009. "It's a kind of backdoor refugee system."

Mario Diaz-Balart countered that while there may be countries that have outlived their need for TPS, the failure of previous administrations to take a politically uncomfortable stand on TPS doesn't detract from the current need to help.

"That doesn't negate the facts," said Diaz-Balart, who has roughly 10,000 Haitians in his district, according to the 2000 census. "If you're ever going to apply TPS, this is when you do it."

In the past, the Homeland Security has worried that granting TPS to Haiti might result in a flood of refugees hoping to gain legal status in the U.S. But Susana Barciela, the policy director for the Florida Immigrant Advocacy Center, insists there will be no such flood. The Coast Guard, she said, intercepted fewer would-be illegal immigrants from Haiti in the months after the 2008 hurricanes. The importance of TPS at this point is to allow Haitians in the U.S. to work and send remittances to families recovering from the earthquake.

Even some immigration foes acknowledge that the magnitude and devastation of this earthquake may necessitate TPS, despite the flaws in the program.

"It might well be a legitimate cause for TPS," said Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, who has taken a dim view of the program. "The question is, when things sort of get back to normal in a few months, do we end TPS, and I wouldn't hold my breath. The Haitians in Florida are certainly upset about this tragedy... but this is going to end up benefiting them immensely."