The City of Miramar Commission voted affirmatively for a resolution advocating to President Donald Trump and Homeland Security to keep Temporary Protected Status (TPS) alive for Haitian Nationals in lieu of Haiti’s TPS designation set to expire on July 22, 2017.
The Commission set this resolution in place to acknowledge that TPS is an important practice for the United States to maintain as Haiti has not yet recovered from the 2010 earthquake or Hurricane Matthew, and suffers from economic and political crisis, rampant Zika, Chikungunya, and a devastating cholera epidemic. Such reports are many and proliferating, indicating a worsening humanitarian crisis affecting hundreds of thousands of Haitians. These conditions make it dangerous and inappropriate to forcibly repatriate Haitian nationals at this time and have been proven to be hard for Haiti’s government to cope.
City of Miramar’s Commission resolution supports the 50,000 Haitians possessing TPS status in the U.S. for at least six and a half years. The vast majority of those Haitians held this status well before the January 2010 earthquake; have strong community ties including those families with U.S.-born, American-citizen children.
The U.S. sends $1.3 billion per year in remittances to Haiti from Haitians in the U.S. These funds are crucial to sustaining hundreds of thousands of loved ones back home in Haiti. Haitian nationals with TPS aid that preserve these remittances, currently outweigh the amount of foreign assistance given by the United States to Haiti; deeming them crucial to Haiti’s recovery.
The establishment of City of Miramar’s resolution acknowledges that there continues to be extraordinary and temporary conditions that prevent Haitian nationals from safely returning to Haiti. Therefore the City Commission found it to be in the best interest of the citizens and the residents of the City of Miramar to urge President Donald Trump and the Department of Homeland Security to extend TPS to Haitian nationals.
