The administration is increasing deportation flights to Haiti from once a month to once a week, according to internal documents obtained by The New York Times, a change that could deport hundreds more people a month from the population of more than 300,000 Haitians whose Temporary Protected Status ended this summer.
The acceleration is already underway. On Thursday, August 27, an ICE Air charter landed at Cap-Haitien with 57 people aboard, 51 men and six women, including several children born in the United States, one of them a one-year-old. It was the second flight in seven days; the previous one carried 161 people. The deportees included former TPS holders, humanitarian parole recipients, and people with pending asylum cases. The Haitian Times reported more than 160 Haitians arriving at Cap-Haitien from the U.S. and the Bahamas in a single day.
The conditions in the destination country are described most clearly by the U.S. government itself. The State Department warns Americans not to travel to Haiti “due to the risk of crime, kidnapping, terrorism, unrest and limited healthcare.” The FAA banned commercial airlines from landing at Port-au-Prince this year, citing “ongoing instability,” after gangs fired on aircraft approaching the airport; deportation flights land at Cap-Haitien, 120 miles away, because the capital's airport is not safe. Daniel Foote, who resigned as Biden's Haiti envoy in 2021 over deportations, said, “There is not even a vestige of a state in control,” and “Not only has it not gotten better, it hasn't stabilized. It just continues to get worse and worse and worse.”
How the safety determination was made matters. Internal emails and documents obtained by the Times indicate DHS decided to terminate Haiti's protections in June 2025 without obtaining input from the State Department, the agency normally responsible for assessing foreign conditions. The Supreme Court ruled in June 2026 that the administration was free to end the status (see DHS Declared Protected Status Over for 350,000 Haitians While Lawyers Said a Court Order Still Blocked It and Roughly 1.5 to 1.8 Million People Who Came to the U.S. Legally Have Had Their Status Revoked Under Trump).
The libertarian magazine Reason ran the arithmetic: revoking TPS made roughly 330,000 people deportable, and the weekly-flight pace works out to about 10,400 removals a year, meaning the policy manufactures a vastly larger undocumented population than it removes. The White House's statement, from spokesperson Lauren Bis: “The federal courts have ordered the Haitian illegals must leave the U.S. and we have generously made free flights available.” The administration is also offering $2,600 and a plane ticket to people who self-deport through its app.
A precision note: children who are U.S. citizens cannot be deported, and the reporting describes them accompanying deported parents. What that means in practice is that American citizen children, including a one-year-old, are being sent to a country their own government's aviation regulator considers too dangerous for commercial flights.