WASHINGTON — As the Trump administration weighs extending humanitarian protections for thousands of Haitian immigrants, officials are digging for unusual information: How many have been convicted of crimes.
Internal emails obtained by The Associated Press show a top immigration official wanted not only crime data on Haitians who are protected from deportation under the Temporary Protected Status program, but also how many were receiving public benefits. Such immigrants aren’t eligible for welfare benefits.
Roughly 50,000 Haitians have been allowed to live in the U.S. under the program in the aftermath of a 2010 earthquake, and the questions about misdeeds among them comes at a critical moment. Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly must decide soon whether to continue protecting the group from deportation.
Normally the decision depends on whether conditions in the immigrants’ home country have improved. But emails suggest Kelly is looking at other criteria as well.
Department spokesman David Lapan said Tuesday that criminal history and other information requested by policy chief Kathy Nuebel Kovarik won’t be used to make a final decision about Temporary Protected Status. Lapan said the questions were asked so that Kelly could have a fuller understanding of who is in the program.
But Lapan’s explanation doesn’t reflect the apparent importance placed on the questions by Kovarik in repeated emails to her staff.
“I do want to alert you … the secretary is going to be sending a request to us to be more responsive,” Kovarik wrote on April 27. After agency staff said they couldn’t gather the information about wrongdoing, she said: “I know some of it is not captured, but we’ll have to figure out a way to squeeze more data out of our systems.”
The request for criminal data for an entire ethnic community is unorthodox. Federal law doesn’t specify it should be a consideration for Temporary Protected Status, and the government has never said it would use a community’s behavior in deciding if a nation’s citizens should get to stay.
