Trump is targeting Haitian immigrants. They've been here before.

The Trump administration is urging the Supreme Court to terminate Temporary Protected Status for Haitian immigrants, claiming Haiti’s instability creates a national‑security threat, while advocates warn the move would deprive roughly 350,000 Haitians of legal residence and revive a long history of anti‑Haitian rhetoric and enforcement.

Killers, leeches, entitlement junkies. Scientists, engineers, nurses.

Behind the legal clash over deportation protections for Haitians unfolding in the Supreme Court is a long-running war of words to define the contributions – or the security risks – of one of the nation's oldest immigrant groups.

On April 29, the Trump administration will argue its rationale for ending Temporary Protected Status for Haitians in a case that could affect some 1.3 million TPS holders from more than a dozen countries. For the Haitian diaspora, the fight is the latest chapter in a long saga of the U.S. government targeting them for immigration enforcement, often in racist terms, dating back to the 18th century.

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There were fewer than 1 million Haitian immigrants in the United States in 2022, according to the Migration Policy Institute, a think tank. Yet they have been a frequent target of immigration enforcement by both Republican and Democratic administrations for a half century.

President Donald Trump's focus on Haitian immigrants stands out for the dramatic ways he has tried to define Haitian people in the United States in an effort to justify their removal, immigrant advocates say.

Trump has repeatedly singled out Haiti and Haitians from the campaign trail and the White House, calling African nations and Haiti "shithole countries" and repeating the debunked claims that Haitian immigrants "probably have AIDS" and were eating household pets in Ohio.

"As I've said all along, if you import the Third World, you become the Third World," Trump said in the April 9 post on Truth Social, in which he shared a video of a Haitian immigrant allegedly killing a convenience store clerk. The Department of Homeland Security touted his arrest by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Haitian advocates say their diaspora didn't bring the problems of their island nation to the United States any more than the Irish brought their famine, the Italians their poverty or the Jews their persecutors throughout immigration waves in the 19th and early 20th centuries.