cap-haitien

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem announced last month that temporary protected status for about 5,000 Haitians would end Sept. 2, five months earlier than planned. The Trump administration has cited flawed and contradictory assessments of conditions in Haiti — which, make no mistake, remains unsafe.

Although a U.S. district court halted the action — at least temporarily — and reinstated the original termination date of Feb. 3, the administration is likely to challenge the ruling. The outcome of such a challenge could hinge on whether the courts receive and believe an accurate representation of current events in Haiti.

The administration asserts that “overall, country conditions have improved to the point where Haitians can return home in safety.” Nothing could be further from the truth. But few outsiders are entering and leaving the country lately, so the truth can be hard to ascertain.

In late April and early May, as a researcher for Human Rights Watch, I traveled to the northern city of Cap-Haïtien. For the first time in the several years I have been working in Haiti, violence kept me from reaching the capital, Port-au-Prince, where the airport remains under a Federal Aviation Administration ban since November when gangs shot Spirit, JetBlue and American Airlines passenger jets in flight.

In Cap-Haïtien, I spoke with dozens of people who fled the capital and other towns in recent months. Many shared accounts of killings, injuries from stray bullets and gang rapes by criminal group members.

“We were walking toward school when we saw the bandits shooting at houses, at people, at everything that moved,” a 27-year-old woman, a student from Port-au-Prince, told me. “We started to run back, but that’s when [my sister] Guerline fell face down. She was shot in the back of the head, then I saw [my cousin] Alice shot in the chest.” The student crawled under a car, where she hid for hours. She fled the capital in early January.

This rampant violence is precisely the sort of conditions Congress had in mind when it passed the temporary protected status law in 1990. It recognized a gap in protection for situations in which a person might not be able to establish that they have been targeted for persecution on the basis of their beliefs or identity — the standard for permanent asylum claims — but rather when a person’s life is at real risk because of high levels of generalized violence that make it too dangerous for anyone to be returned to the place.

When an administration grants this designation, it does so for a defined period, which can be extended based on conditions in the recipients’ home country. For instance, protected status for people from Somalia was first designated in 1991 and has been extended repeatedly, most recently through March 17, 2026.

Almost 1.3 million people are internally displaced in Haiti. They flee increasing violence by criminal groups that killed more than 5,600 people in 2024 — 23% more than in 2023. Some analysts say the country has the highest homicide rate in the world. Criminal groups control nearly 90% of the capital and have expanded into other places.

Perversely, the Department of Homeland Security publicly concedes this reality, citing in a Federal Register notification “widespread gang violence” as a reason for terminating temporary protected status. The government argues that a “breakdown in governance” makes Haiti unable to control migration, and so a continued designation to protect people from there would not be in the “national interests” of the United States.

Even judging on that criterion alone, revoking the legal status of Haitians in the U.S. is a bad idea. Sending half a million people into Haiti would be highly destabilizing and counter to U.S. interests — not to mention that their lives would be at risk.

The Trump administration has taken no meaningful action to improve Haiti’s situation. The Kenya-led multinational security support mission, authorized by the U.N. Security Council and initially backed by the United States, has been on the ground for a year. Yet because of severe shortages of personnel, resources and funding, it has failed to provide the support the Haitian police desperately need. In late February, U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres recommended steps to strengthen the mission, but the Security Council has yet to act.

The humanitarian situation in Haiti continues to deteriorate. An estimated 6 million people need humanitarian assistance. Nearly 5.7 million face acute hunger.

On June 26, just one day before Homeland Security’s attempt to end Haitians’ protected status prematurely, Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau described the ongoing crisis in Haiti as “disheartening.” He said that “public order has all but collapsed” as “Haiti descends into chaos.” Two days earlier, the U.S. Embassy in Haiti issued a security alert urging U.S. citizens in the country to “depart as soon as possible.” These are not indications that “country conditions have improved to the point where Haitians can return home in safety,” as Homeland Security claimed on June 27.

The decision to prematurely end temporary protected status is utterly disconnected from reality. The Trump administration itself has warned that Haiti remains dangerous — and if anything has become more so in recent months. The U.S. government should continue to protect Haitians now living in the United States from being thrown into the brutal violence unfolding in their home country.

Nathalye Cotrino is a senior Americas researcher at Human Rights Watch.

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — A video showing dozens of people marching toward the office of Haiti’s prime minister elicited gasps from some viewers as it circulated recently on social media. The protesters, who are HIV-positive, did not conceal their faces — a rare occurrence in a country where the virus is still heavily stigmatized.

“Call the minister of health! We are dying!” the group chanted.

The protesters risked being shunned by society to warn that Haiti is running out of HIV medication just months after the Trump administration slashed more than 90% of the United States Agency for International Development’s foreign aid contracts and $60 billion in overall aid across the globe.

At a hospital near the northern city of Cap-Haitien, Dr. Eugene Maklin said he struggles to share that reality with his more than 550 HIV patients.

“It’s hard to explain to them, to tell them that they’re not going to find medication,” he said. “It’s like a suicide.”

‘We can’t stay silent’

More than 150,000 people in Haiti have HIV or AIDS, according to official estimates, although nonprofits believe the number is much higher.

David Jeune, a 46-year-old hospital community worker, is among them. He became infected 19 years ago after having unprotected sex.

“I was scared to let people know because they would point their finger at you, saying you are infecting others with AIDS,” he said.

His fear was so great that he didn’t tell anyone, not even his mother. But that fear dissipated with the support Jeune said he received from nonprofit groups. His confidence grew to the point where he participated in last week’s protest.

“I hope Trump will change his mind,” he said, noting that his medication will run out in November. “Let the poor people get the medication they need.”

Patrick Jean Noel, a representative of Haiti’s Federation of Assns. of HIV, said that at least five clinics, including one that served 2,500 patients, were forced to close after the USAID funding cuts.

“We can’t stay silent,” he said. “More people need to come out.”

But most people with HIV in Haiti are reluctant to do so, said Dr. Sabine Lustin, executive director of the Haiti-based nonprofit Promoters of Zero AIDS Goal.

The stigma is so strong that many patients are reluctant to pick up their medication in person. Instead, it is sent in packages wrapped as gifts so as to not arouse suspicion, she said.

Lustin’s organization, which helps some 2,000 people across Haiti, receives funding from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Though its funding hasn’t been cut, she said that shortly after President Trump took office in January, the agency banned HIV prevention activities because they targeted a group that is not a priority — which she understood to be referring to gay men.

That means the organization can no longer distribute up to 200,000 free condoms a year or educate people about the disease.

“You risk an increase in infections,” she said. “You have a young population who is sexually active who can’t receive the prevention message and don’t have access to condoms.”

‘That can’t be silenced’

On the sunny morning of May 19, a chorus of voices drowned out the din of traffic in Haiti’s capital, Port-au-Prince, growing louder as protesters with HIV marched defiantly toward the prime minister’s office.

“We are here to tell the government that we exist, and we are people like any other person,” one woman told reporters.

Another marching alongside her said, “Without medication, we are dying. This needs to change.”

Three days after the protest, the leader of Haiti’s transitional presidential council, Louis Gérald Gilles, announced that he had met with activists and would try to secure funding.

Meanwhile, nonprofit organizations across Haiti are fretting.

“I don’t know what we’re going to do,” said Marie Denis-Luque, founder and executive director of CHOAIDS, a nonprofit that cares for Haitian orphans with HIV/AIDS. “We only have medication until July.”

Her voice broke as she described her frantic search for donations for the orphans, who are cared for by HIV-positive women in Cap-Haitien after gang violence forced them to leave Port-au-Prince.

Denis-Luque said she has long advocated for the orphans’ visibility.

“We can’t keep hiding these children. They are part of society,” she said, adding that she smiled when she saw the video of last week’s protest. “I was like, whoa, things have changed tremendously. The stigma is real, but I think what I saw … was very encouraging to me. They can’t be silenced.”

A dangerous combination

Experts say Haiti could see a rise in HIV infections because medications are dwindling at a time that gang violence and poverty are surging.

Dr. Alain Casseus, infectious-disease division chief at Zanmi Lasante, the largest nongovernmental healthcare provider in Haiti, said he expected to see a surge in patients given the funding cuts, but that hasn’t happened because traveling by land in Haiti is dangerous since violent gangs control main roads and randomly open fire on vehicles.

He warned that abruptly stopping medication is dangerous, especially because many Haitians do not have access or cannot afford nutritious food to strengthen their immune system.

“It wouldn’t take long, especially given the situation in Haiti, to enter a very bad phase,” he said of HIV infections. And even if some funding becomes available, a lapse in medication could cause resistance to it, he said.

Casseus said gang violence also could accelerate the rates of infection by rapes or other physical violence as medication runs out.

At the New Hope Hospital run by Maklin in Haiti’s northern region, shelves are running empty. He used to receive more than $165,000 a year to help HIV/AIDS patients. But that funding has dried up.

“Those people are going to die,” he said. “We don’t know how or where we’re going to get more medication.”

The medication controls the infection and allows many to have an average life expectancy. Without it, the virus attacks a person’s immune system and they develop AIDS, the late stage of an HIV infection.

Reaction is swift when Maklin tells his patients that in two months, the hospital won’t have any HIV medication left.

“They say, ‘No, no, no, no!’” he said. “They want to keep living.”

Coto and Sanon write for the Associated Press and reported from San Juan, Puerto Rico, and Port-au-Prince, respectively.