Friday marks America’s 249th birthday, but from where I’m sitting, America feels less like America every day. With each passing day, the Trump administration targets another immigrant group for removal. This time it’s half a million Haitians who have lost their protected status and face deportation to a nation without a functioning government.
No doubt Friday’s Independence Day celebrations across the nation will include recitations of the Declaration of Independence and other patriotic prose and poetry. But this week my mind goes to another poem:
Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
Of course that is Emma Lazarus’ “The New Colossus,” written to raise money for the construction of the Statue of Liberty. The America that she is writing about is far different than our current reality. President Trump is selling the storied pomp of other nations gold card visas while rejecting the tired, the poor, the huddled masses yearning to breathe free.
The Trump administration claims that Haiti is now safe enough for those Haitians who had temporary protected status (TPS) to return to. But 90% of the capital is controlled by gangs and half of all Haitians face acute hunger. One in 10 Haitians have been displaced by gang violence. Just last month, several members of a congregation were beheaded inside their church by members of a local self-defense brigade. The conditions in Haiti are so bad that the State Department has said Americans should not visit “due to kidnapping, crime, civil unrest, and limited health care.”
How can the Trump administration argue that the conditions are good enough to remove the Haitian refugees’ protected status when its own State Department lists the dangers facing them? The Haitians are just the latest group to lose their protected status under the Trump regime despite the conditions in their home nations not improving, joining Venezuelans (Venezuela is a dictatorship) and Afghans (Afghanistan is ruled as a theocracy under the Taliban).
These TPS holders from places like Haiti, Venezuela, and Afghanistan are the exact people that Lazarus is writing about, people fleeing terrible situations in their home nation, yearning to breathe free. In addition to those TPS holders who face deportation, half a million Haitians, Cubans, Venezuelans, and Nicaraguans also face deportation as the Supreme Court allowed the administration to overturn a Biden-era humanitarian parole program. The current regime would have you believe that immigration hurts America, and that every immigrant is taking something from you. Less than a year ago, Republicans spread vicious lies that Haitians were eating cats and dogs in Ohio. But that rhetoric is the very antithesis of what the Statue of Liberty is meant to represent.
And so, as we celebrate another Independence Day, we have to ask ourselves what kind of nation we want. Do we want a country that is shrouded in nativism? A revival of the Know Nothing Party of the mid-19th century? Or do we want the America that Lazarus was writing about? As a part of this weekend’s festivities, we will be flooded with patriotic images. This weekend when you see images of the Statue of Liberty, perhaps pause and ponder Lazarus’ words and think about if we’re really living up to our promise as a nation.