The De­part­ment of Home­land Se­cu­ri­ty said Fri­day that it is ter­mi­nat­ing le­gal pro­tec­tions for hun­dreds of thou­sands of Haitians, set­ting them up for po­ten­tial de­por­ta­tion.

DHS said that con­di­tions in Haiti have im­proved and Haitians no longer meet the con­di­tions for the tem­po­rary le­gal pro­tec­tions.

The ter­mi­na­tion of tem­po­rary pro­tect­ed sta­tus, or TPS, ap­plies to about 500,000 Haitians who are al­ready in the Unit­ed States, some of whom have lived here for more than a decade. It is com­ing three months af­ter the Trump ad­min­is­tra­tion re­voked le­gal pro­tec­tions for thou­sands of Haitians who ar­rived legal­ly in the coun­try un­der a hu­man­i­tar­i­an pa­role pro­gram, and it is part of part of a se­ries of mea­sures im­ple­ment­ed to curb im­mi­gra­tion.

Re­cent­ly, the U.S. Supreme Court over­turned a fed­er­al judge’s or­der pre­vent­ing the ad­min­is­tra­tion from re­vok­ing the pa­role pro­gram.

TPS al­lows peo­ple al­ready in the Unit­ed States to stay and work legal­ly if their home­lands are deemed un­safe. Im­mi­grants from 17 coun­tries, in­clud­ing Haiti, Afghanistan, Su­dan and Lebanon, were re­ceiv­ing those pro­tec­tions be­fore Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump took of­fice for his sec­ond term in Jan­u­ary.

Pres­i­dent Trump is end­ing pro­tec­tions and pro­grams for im­mi­grants as part of his mass de­por­ta­tions promis­es. Dur­ing his po­lit­i­cal cam­paign he said his ad­min­is­tra­tion would scale back the use of TPS, which cov­ered more than 1 mil­lion im­mi­grants. His cam­paign high­light­ed un­found­ed claims that Haitians who live and work legal­ly in Spring­field, Ohio, as TPS hold­ers were eat­ing their neigh­bors’ pets.

Hun­dreds of thou­sands of Venezue­lans and some Afghans have been told al­ready that they’re los­ing their TPS sta­tus.

Some of the Haitians who ben­e­fit from TPS have re­quest­ed asy­lum or oth­er law­ful im­mi­gra­tion sta­tus that could pro­tect them from de­por­ta­tion, al­though it is not clear how many could be left with­out any re­lief.

“This de­ci­sion re­stores in­tegri­ty in our im­mi­gra­tion sys­tem and en­sures that Tem­po­rary Pro­tec­tive Sta­tus is ac­tu­al­ly tem­po­rary,” a DHS spokesper­son said. “The en­vi­ron­men­tal sit­u­a­tion in Haiti has im­proved enough that it is safe for Hait­ian cit­i­zens to re­turn home.”

The De­part­ment of State, nonethe­less, has not changed its trav­el ad­vi­so­ry and still rec­om­mends Amer­i­cans “do not trav­el to Haiti due to kid­nap­ping, crime, civ­il un­rest, and lim­it­ed health care.”

Tem­po­rary pro­tect­ed sta­tus for Haitians ex­pires on Aug. 3, and the ter­mi­na­tion will be ef­fec­tive on Sept. 2, Home­land Se­cu­ri­ty Sec­re­tary Kristi Noem said.

DHS ad­vised TPS hold­ers to re­turn to Haiti us­ing a mo­bile ap­pli­ca­tion called CBP Home.

Gang vi­o­lence has dis­placed 1.3 mil­lion peo­ple across Haiti as the lo­cal gov­ern­ment and in­ter­na­tion­al com­mu­ni­ty strug­gle to con­tain an spi­ral­ing cri­sis, ac­cord­ing to a re­cent re­port from the In­ter­na­tion­al Or­ga­ni­za­tion for Mi­gra­tion. The re­port warned of a 24% in­crease in dis­placed peo­ple since De­cem­ber, with gun­men hav­ing chased 11% of Haiti’s near­ly 12 mil­lion in­hab­i­tants from their home.

“De­port­ing peo­ple back to these con­di­tions is a death sen­tence for many, strip­ping them of their fun­da­men­tal right to safe­ty and dig­ni­ty,” said Tes­sa Pet­tit, a Hait­ian-Amer­i­can who is ex­ec­u­tive di­rec­tor of the Flori­da Im­mi­grant Coali­tion.

Frantz De­sir, 36, has been in the U.S. since 2022 on asy­lum, but he says he is con­cerned by the Trump ad­min­is­tra­tion’s de­ci­sion to ter­mi­nate TPS.

“You see your friends who used to go to work every day, and sud­den­ly—with­out be­ing sick or fired—they just can’t go any­more. It hits you. Even if it hasn’t hap­pened to you yet, you start to wor­ry, ‘What if it’s me next?’”

De­sir says his asy­lum court date was set for this year, but the judge resched­uled it for 2028.

De­sir lives in Spring­field, Ohio, with his wife and two chil­dren, and he works in a car parts man­u­fac­tur­ing plant.

AP re­porter Obed Lamy con­tributed from In­di­anapo­lis

By GISELA SA­LOMON

MI­A­MI (AP)