When Washington Won't Let You Visit a Country but Will Send Your Child There

Two planes touched down within hours of each other at Cap-Haïtien International Airport on Thursday, carrying 161 people back to a country the United States government's own diplomats will not let their families visit. One flight came from South Florida, chartered by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, carrying 57 Haitians. The other, a Bahamasair jet, brought 104 more from a detention center in Nassau. It was, as wire reporting confirmed, the second U.S. deportation flight to Haiti in a single week, and among the passengers on the ICE charter were children born in the United States — American citizens, including a child as young as one — sent to a nation the State Department's own security assessment describes as gripped by gang control, mass kidnapping and a standing national state of emergency.

This is not an aberration. It is the leading edge of a policy the Trump administration has been building toward for nine months, and it deserves scrutiny not because deportation itself is illegitimate — Congress has given the executive branch broad removal authority — but because of what happens when that authority collides with a temporary-status program never designed for a country still this unstable, and with children who hold no citizenship to lose in the first place.

A Weekly Airlift Where a Monthly One Used to Be

Haiti's Temporary Protected Status designation, which had shielded several hundred thousand Haitians from removal since a 2010 earthquake and years of subsequent crises, formally ended on July 27. The Department of Homeland Security first moved to terminate it in a notice published in the Federal Register last November, with an effective date of February 3. A federal judge in Washington stayed that order days before it took hold. The stay held for months — until the Supreme Court intervened.

Deportation flights to Haiti, which had run roughly once a month for years, are now arriving on a weekly cadence, according to reporting from the Haitian Times, which tracked Thursday's arrivals along with a prior flight of more than 160 people on August 20. Both recent flights, like a growing share of ICE's Haiti removals, bypassed the capital altogether and landed instead in Cap-Haïtien, the country's second city — not by choice but by necessity.

The Ruling That Cleared the Runway

The legal opening came on June 25, when the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 in Mullin v. Doe, a case consolidated with a companion challenge over Syria's TPS designation. The majority held that a provision of the Immigration and Nationality Act strips federal courts of jurisdiction to review the Homeland Security secretary's non-constitutional decisions to terminate a country's protected status. The ruling did not evaluate whether Haiti is in fact safe enough for return. It answered a narrower, procedural question: who gets to ask that question at all. The Court's answer was, in practice, nobody outside the executive branch. Within weeks, the D.C. district judge who had blocked the termination acknowledged her injunction could no longer stand, and DHS proceeded.

That distinction — between a ruling on jurisdiction and a finding on safety — matters enormously to the roughly 350,000 people who lost status and to the families now living the consequences. NPR's reporting in the weeks before termination took effect estimated that as many as 50,000 U.S.-born children live in these mixed-status Haitian households — American citizens whose parents faced an impossible choice between leaving them behind or taking them into a country they have never known.

A Country Washington Will Not Let Its Own Citizens Visit

The incoherence sits in plain sight across two arms of the same government. The State Department maintains a Level 4 "Do Not Travel" advisory for Haiti — its most severe warning category — citing kidnapping, armed group violence and a national state of emergency that has been in continuous effect since March 2024. The department's own security office has told American citizens that the government's ability to provide emergency assistance inside the country is severely limited. Federal Aviation Administration restrictions bar most U.S. civil aircraft from flying below 10,000 feet near Port-au-Prince because armed groups have repeatedly fired on planes approaching the capital's airport — the specific reason both of this week's ICE and Bahamian flights were rerouted to Cap-Haïtien instead.

In other words: the same federal government that will not clear commercial aircraft to fly low over Port-au-Prince, and that warns tourists and businesspeople against so much as visiting, is now routing an accelerating stream of deportees — including toddlers holding U.S. passports — into the country by charter jet on a weekly basis. Homeland Security has defended the practice on process grounds. A department spokesperson told NPR that "ICE does not separate families" and that parents are asked whether they want to be removed together with their children, framing the outcome as a choice rather than a mandate. That framing does not resolve the deeper contradiction: a choice between exile with your infant to a Level 4 warzone-adjacent country, or separation from that infant, is not the kind of choice American policy should be manufacturing for its own citizens.

"They cannot take those children back to Haiti," Guerline Jozef of the Haitian Bridge Alliance said of families facing removal. "It is impossible for them to be safe there."

What the Courts Won't Referee, Someone Else Must

None of this means TPS should be permanent, or that the executive lacks authority to end a designation once conditions genuinely improve. Temporary protection is, definitionally, temporary, and Congress built the program with that off-ramp intended. The problem is that Mullin closed off the one venue — the federal courts — that could have tested DHS's underlying factual claim that Haiti is safe enough for return, at precisely the moment the government's own diplomatic security apparatus was reaffirming the opposite conclusion. When judicial review is foreclosed on a decision this consequential, the burden of getting the underlying facts right shifts entirely onto the agency making it, with no independent check before removal — only litigation over individual cases after people, including American children, are already on the tarmac.

That leaves two remaining venues for correction, and both run through people rather than dockets. Congress retains the authority to legislate narrower protections for U.S. citizen children of TPS holders, or to restore some form of judicial review over termination decisions, if it chooses to act — something it has not done since Mullin came down two months ago. And within the executive branch itself, nothing prevents Homeland Security from reconciling its removal pace with the State Department's own threat assessment, rather than deporting citizens and noncitizens alike into a capital its aviation regulators consider too dangerous to fly over. Absent either, the flights will keep landing in Cap-Haïtien on schedule, and the government will keep deciding, unreviewed, that the country it warns its own citizens away from is safe enough for other citizens to be sent there instead.