Another Republican voice in Congress has broken publicly with the Trump administration’s decision to end Temporary Protected Status for Haitians. Florida Representative Carlos Giménez, a reliable Trump ally who has backed the president’s immigration agenda, drew a firm line Sunday on CBS News’s Face the Nation, calling the deportation of Haitian TPS holders “a huge mistake” and arguing that the program exists precisely for situations like the one now engulfing Haiti.
“In the case of Haiti, without a doubt, Haiti is a failed state, and I think that deporting Haitians that are under TPS right now back to Haiti would be a huge mistake,” Giménez told guest host Ed O’Keefe in an interview taped July 2 and broadcast July 5.
The remarks carry particular weight coming from Giménez.
The Miami-area congressman represents Florida’s 28th Congressional District, which includes significant Haitian and Caribbean communities, and has generally aligned himself with the Make America Great Again wing of the Republican Party. His willingness to break from the administration on this issue underscores how politically and morally exposed the deportation question has become, even within the president’s own coalition.
Giménez framed his position not as opposition to Trump’s immigration agenda broadly but as a defense of the specific purpose for which TPS was created. “That’s the reason why TPS was established to begin with,” he said. He extended that argument to Venezuelans, whose TPS was also terminated, noting that a devastating earthquake had struck the country just days earlier. “If Venezuelans lose their TPS status — which they have, too — we should reinstate that because of the devastation caused by these earthquakes that happened last week.”
He was careful to acknowledge the program’s limits. “TPS should not be abused. TPS is what it says, temporary protected status. And if you’re here for a number of years, you should change your status from TPS to something else.” But he immediately balanced that position with the recognition that the protections exist for a reason. “It is meant to safeguard those who are fleeing countries that are either failed states, and there would be at risk of going back to them, or countries that really can’t handle them right now.”
He returned to the point more forcefully later in the interview: “TPS, again, is temporary, but when there’s good cause for it, it needs to be granted, and I think there’s a good argument for the people of Venezuela and the people of Haiti to have temporary protected status.”
A personal frame
Giménez’s remarks carried a personal dimension that set the tone for his entire appearance. He was barely seven years old when his family fled Cuba at the start of the Castro regime, and he recalled arriving in Florida to find 21 relatives packed into a single house. The experience shaped his view of what the United States owes those forced from their homes by forces beyond their control.
He also called on the administration to consider a broader regularization of longtime immigrants, singling out DACA recipients and farmworkers. “A family that’s divided, that’s fractured, is a weak family, and many weak families make up a weak nation,” he said. “Those that have been here for years, that have been working, are part of the community, that are part of the economy — we need to find a way to normalize them.”
The Supreme Court’s June 25 ruling in Mullin v. Doe, decided 6-3, removed the legal barriers that had kept Haitian TPS terminations on hold. Roughly 350,000 Haitians who have lived and worked legally in the United States now face the loss of their employment authorization documents and potential deportation. Many are simultaneously navigating the asylum system, but the window for those protections is narrow and the backlog immense.
Haiti itself offers no safe harbor.
The country remains locked in a compounding crisis: a 7.2-magnitude earthquake in 2021, persistent gang governance over an estimated 90 percent of Port-au-Prince, the 2021 assassination of President Jovenel Moïse, and a transitional government that the United Nations has described as governing a country on the verge of “total chaos.” The original conditions that produced TPS — including the catastrophic 2010 earthquake that killed more than 200,000 people — have never been resolved. They have worsened.
For the Haitian diaspora in Massachusetts, the Giménez statement arrives as a measure of bipartisan acknowledgment of what community leaders, advocates, and officials from Governor Maura Healey to Attorney General Andrea Campbell have been saying for weeks: sending people back to Haiti is not deportation to a country — it is deportation to a crisis.
Where this leaves Congress
Giménez joins a small but growing group of Republicans willing to say publicly what many acknowledge privately: that mass deportation of Haitian TPS holders is neither humane nor pragmatic. DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin maintained last week on CNN’s State of the Union that TPS holders could have and should have changed their status over the years, saying “the whole time these individuals have been here underneath the temporary protected status, they could have applied for a visa.” But that argument sidesteps the practical and legal barriers many Haitians have faced, and it does not address the conditions awaiting them if returned.
Legislation to address the gap is pending but faces difficult odds. Congresswoman Frederica Wilson has introduced the Haitian Refugee Immigration Fairness Act; Congressman Seth Moulton has filed the TPS Relief Act; Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley’s H.R. 1689, which passed the House in April, awaits Senate action; and Senators Edward Markey and Lisa Blunt Rochester are leading a companion effort in the upper chamber. Any measure requires 60 votes in the Senate to overcome a filibuster — a threshold that remains out of reach without substantially broader Republican support than Giménez alone can provide.
Whether Sunday’s remarks represent the beginning of a broader Republican shift, or a lonely exception, remains to be seen. For now, a Trump ally from Florida has said plainly what the administration has not: sending Haitians back to a failed state would be a huge mistake.
Source: CBS.
https://ctninfo.com/another-republic…s-a-huge-mistake/
This article was originally written in English. The French and Haitian Creole versions are produced using AI translation, and errors are possible — the English version is authoritative. CTN also uses AI to convert text into audio. Readers and listeners should rely on the English text where any discrepancy arises.
