Two immigration policy changes landed almost simultaneously this week, and taken together they represent one of the more significant shifts in how this country handles asylum seekers in years. I think both deserve a clear-eyed explanation before anyone reaches for a partisan talking point, because what’s actually in these policies matters more than which side is cheering or condemning them.
First: the administration terminated Temporary Protected Status for Haitian nationals, stripping legal status and work authorization from more than 300,000 people, with reporting suggesting the number affected by related TPS decisions runs closer to 500,000 when you count everyone who’d built a life here under the designation. TPS exists for a specific reason — it lets people from countries experiencing war, natural disaster, or state collapse stay and work legally in the U.S. without a path to permanent status, on the theory that sending them back into active crisis is both inhumane and impractical. Haiti, by any independent accounting, has not stabilized. Gang control of large parts of Port-au-Prince, a nonfunctional police force, and a humanitarian crisis that predates this policy change by years are not in serious dispute. Ending TPS doesn’t require Haiti to have gotten safer. It just requires the administration to decide the designation is no longer a priority.
Second, and less covered: the Department of Homeland Security issued a new rule allowing asylum officers to route applications directly into deportation proceedings without an interview first. That’s a bigger deal than the wording suggests. The interview stage is where an asylum seeker gets to actually make their case — to explain the specific threat they’re fleeing — before a human being with authority to grant relief. Skipping straight to deportation court affects an estimated 444,724 pending cases, plus roughly 132,000 new applicants a year going forward, according to reporting on the rule. Whatever you think about the underlying immigration debate, removing the interview step is a due-process change, not just an enforcement one. It changes the odds for everyone in the system, not just people whose claims are weak.
I’m not going to pretend UNJ doesn’t have a point of view on enforcement and border security — we do, and it’s an unapologetically pro-order one. A country is allowed to control who enters and remains within its borders, and chaotic, decades-long backlogs in the immigration court system have failed everyone, including the people waiting in good faith for their cases to be heard. But “the system needs order” and “skip the interview and speed people toward deportation” are two different propositions, and conflating them is how bad policy gets sold as reform. Due process isn’t a loophole. It’s the thing that distinguishes an orderly, lawful process from an arbitrary one.
There’s also a community dimension here that’s getting lost in the national coverage. Reporting indicates ICE has been mobilizing additional resources in cities with large Haitian populations — New York, Boston, Miami, Orlando, San Diego, and Springfield, Ohio, the small city that became a flashpoint in the 2024 election over Haitian migration. Milwaukee’s Haitian population is small relative to those cities, but our Black immigrant and refugee communities more broadly — Congolese, Somali, Liberian, Rohingya — are watching this policy shift closely, because a rule that expedites deportations without interviews for one nationality is a template that can be extended to others. That’s not speculation. It’s how administrative rule-making typically scales.
My ask of readers here is a narrow one: separate your view on immigration enforcement generally from your view on this specific due-process rollback. You can believe in a secure, orderly border and still believe an asylum seeker deserves an interview before the government decides their claim doesn’t merit one. Those two positions aren’t in tension. The people who’ll tell you they are usually have a policy to sell you, not a principle to defend.