Killers, leeches, entitlement junkies. Scientists, engineers, nurses.

Behind the legal clash over deportation protections for Haitians unfolding in the Supreme Court is a long-running war of words to define the contributions – or the security risks – of one of the nation’s oldest immigrant groups.

On April 29, the Trump administration will argue its rationale for ending Temporary Protected Status for Haitians in a case that could affect some 1.3 million TPS holders from more than a dozen countries. For the Haitian diaspora, the fight is the latest chapter in a long saga of the U.S. government targeting them for immigration enforcement, often in racist terms, dating back to the 18th century.

There were fewer than 1 million Haitian immigrants in the United States in 2022, according to the Migration Policy Institute, a think tank. Yet they have been a frequent target of immigration enforcement by both Republican and Democratic administrations for a half century.

President Donald Trump‘s focus on Haitian immigrants stands out for the dramatic ways he has tried to define Haitian people in the United States in an effort to justify their removal, immigrant advocates say.

Trump has repeatedly singled out Haiti and Haitians from the campaign trail and the White House, calling African nations and Haiti “shithole countries” and repeating the debunked claims that Haitian immigrants “probably have AIDS” and were eating household pets in Ohio.

“As I’ve said all along, if you import the Third World, you become the Third World,” Trump said in the April 9 post on Truth Social, in which he shared a video of a Haitian immigrant allegedly killing a convenience store clerk. The Department of Homeland Security touted his arrest by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Haitian advocates say their diaspora didn’t bring the problems of their island nation to the United States any more than the Irish brought their famine, the Italians their poverty or the Jews their persecutors throughout immigration waves in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

“We are honest. We are hardworking individuals. We believe in education,” said Renold Julien, director of a Haitian community center in Rockland County, New York, called Konbit Neg Lakay. “That is why our kids become an important part of society. Our kids become doctors, lawyers, judges, teachers, nurses.”

Ending TPS would strip roughly 350,000 Haitian immigrants of their right to live and work legally in the United States.

White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson told USA TODAY that TPS “was never intended to be a pathway to permanent status or legal residency, no matter how badly left-wing organizations want it to be.”

History of strained relations, immigration

Five Haitian immigrants covered by TPS – including an aspiring neuroscientist, a software engineer and a registered nurse – argue in a lawsuit the Trump administration ended their protected status to further a policy agenda that favors White immigrants over people of color and didn’t consider, as law requires, that Haiti is still gripped by instability, rampant violence and hunger, according to reviews of conditions by Human Rights Watch and the U.S. State Department.

The Trump administration says those conditions in Haiti represent a national security risk to the United States, according to the July Federal Register notice terminating TPS. Then-Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem cited the arrest by ICE of a Haitian gang member as evidence of “the broader risk posed by rising Haitian migration.”

Separately, in a December social media post, Noem recommended a full travel ban “on every damn country that’s been flooding our nation with killers, leeches and entitlement junkies.” The ban, which took effect in January, targeted more than a dozen Black-majority nations, including Haiti.

But Haitians’ memory of the words and actions targeting them goes back much further ‒ two centuries, they say.

“If we are looking into Haitian relations and immigrants specifically, you can go back 200 years,” said Guerline Jozef, executive director of the Haitian Bridge Alliance, a nonprofit that advocates for Haitian immigrants.

She and others recall how her people, fleeing a U.S.-backed authoritarian government in the 1980s, were interdicted at sea, sent home or detained in immigration jails in Florida or at the Guantanamo Bay military base in Cuba. The modern immigration detention system was, in essence, created by President Ronald Reagan to detain Haitians, she said.

Or go back further, she said, to the very beginning of both nations: how the United States government in the 1800s refused for decades to recognize their country, founded by formerly enslaved people who overthrew their French enslavers. Some Haitians, including free Black men and women, sought refuge in the newly minted United States, from New Orleans to Philadelphia in what has been described as America’s first refugee crisis.

In modern times, the Obama administration was the first to begin the practice of “metering” at the U.S.-Mexico border, to block the entry of Haitian asylum-seekers. The Biden administration left Haitian asylum-seekers in squalid encampmentsat the Texas border.

Trump’s efforts to define Haitians in negative terms stand out, Jozef said. She and the Haitian Bridge Alliance formally asked an Ohio prosecutor to bring criminal charges against Trump and then-running mate J.D. Vance for their derogatory comments about Haitian immigrants in Springfield. The prosecutor declined.

“They created a narrative that dehumanized Haitian people in a vile way that wasn’t true,” she said.

‘Haitians want a better life’

The argument the administration is using to end TPS “is about who we are,” said Tessa Petit, director of the Florida Immigrant Coalition and a Haitian political asylee.

“Yes we come from a poor nation,” she said. “Yes we are a nation of Black people. One thing we all have in common, Haitians want a better life.”

Evan Auguste, assistant professor of psychology at the City University of New York, runs a support group for Haitian people wrestling with “the yo-yo of policy decisions,” and the looming deportation threat. It’s a place where the diaspora can share memories of their homeland, too.

“People describe missing the food, the land, the air, the ocean, missing one another,” he said. “People, if they could, would go and build a beautiful Haiti. These policies significantly impact people’s ability to do that.”

In mid-April, a former U.S. immigration judge fired by the Trump administration, Jeremiah Johnson, visited Mexico’s southern border, where thousands of Haitian migrants had gathered in hopes of reaching Mexico City, or Canada.

Some 2,000 Haitians gathered at 6 p.m. at a park in Tapachula, a colonial city near the Mexico-Guatemala border. They set off in a downpour walking toward Mexico City, he said, roughly 700 miles away. A video he shared with USA TODAY shows them walking in plastic ponchos, their belongings wrapped in trash bags against the rain. He walked with them to the city’s edge.

“They are practical people,” he said. “They heard there were more opportunities in Mexico City.”

The U.S. State Department warns American citizens in no uncertain terms: “Do not travel to Haiti for any reason.” As of April 16, the department maintained a level four travel advisory, flagging “the risk of crime, terrorism, kidnapping, unrest and limited health care.”

U.S. commercial flights to Haiti’s capital Port-au-Prince are currently suspended, according to the State Department. Deportation flights, one per month, continue.

Lauren Villagran covers immigration for USA TODAY and can be reached at lvillagran@usatoday.com or on Signal at laurenvillagran.57.