‘Thousands of people are now going to die violent deaths,’ says attorney for Ohio Haitian community

Ohio native Geoff Pipoly texted me one word, “broken,” to describe how he felt after losing his first case before the U.S. Supreme Court last week.

In a 6-3 ruling, the court’s right-wing majority essentially sanctioned the immediate deportation of the 350,000 Haitian immigrants Pipoly represented in Miot v. Trump.

The 43-year-old lawyer, who grew up in a suburb of Toledo, has litigated on behalf of foreign nationals from Haiti since the first Trump administration.

These were people “with a ton of courage and a ton of resilience” who fled for their lives from a violent, imploding country and found humanitarian protection in America.

Some Haitian families have been in the country for a decade or more.

Under Temporary Protected Status, they were legally allowed to live and work and contribute economically to many American communities, including Springfield, Ohio, while Haiti spiraled out of control and return was unthinkable.

Haitians in the United States have received multiple extensions on their temporary protected status to stay alive.

Conditions in the small Caribbean nation, convulsing in a state of de facto anarchy, are even worse today.

The U.S. State Department issued its highest Do Not Travel advisory for Haiti due to rampant gang violence, kidnapping, civil unrest, limited healthcare.

But the Supreme Court just green-lit the Trump regime’s merciless immigration policy to end TPS for Haitian families and deport them home to widespread famine, cholera outbreaks, closed medical facilities and schools, and roving armed gangs who use child soldiers, sexual violence, and bloody massacres to terrorize the population.

Pipoly said the inevitable outcome of the court’s decision is brutal.

“Thousands of people are now going to die violent deaths,” he predicted.

The dejected attorney from Sylvania, Ohio — who had spent years fighting to retain the temporary protection status of powerless people whose lives depended on it—was crushed.

The court gave the Trump regime free reign to ignore statutory mandates (created by Congress) to impose racially motivated deportations of people the president doesn’t like.

Lawless inhumanity given an indefensible pass. 

“It didn’t have to happen,” Pipoly lamented. “It was preventable. It is a choice that we as a society made. That reality is going to weigh on me for a long time.”

His core arguments were waived off by six Republican-appointed justices.

Pipoly asserted that Trump’s Department of Homeland Security skipped the required process to adequately assess country conditions before TPS designations could be given, extended, or taken away.

“Congress was very clear about the circumstances under which a TPS designation could be terminated, and it is after a fact-based assessment that the foreign country is safe to return. There was no such finding made here,” he said.

Moreover, Pipoly added, the court was alerted that new documents revealed even more proof that “these political appointees were coming at the very last minute and doing exactly what the president wanted them to do — which was find a reason for ending TPS.” 

Even if expert analysis of current Haiti, drawn from facts on the ground and other sources reports compiled by government agencies, recommended otherwise.

“Haiti was designated [for TPS] based on violence, based on housing insecurity, based on food insecurity, based on poverty, etc,” said Pipoly.

Those crises have exploded.

The real reason for termination of humanitarian protections for Haitians was not the one set forth in the official government notice, he argued.

“The real reason is because the president doesn’t like Haitians and it is unlawful to terminate on that basis.”

DHS’s rush to cancel TPS for singled out Haitians was driven, in part, by Trump’s racial animus of Black immigrants, in Pipoly’s view, and that violated the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment.

The lead counsel in the Haitian TPS lawsuit noted how the president’s anti-immigrant rhetoric “gets much stronger and more aggressive and more derogatory the darker one’s skin gets.”

According to Trump’s own statements, the attorney recounted, “Somalis are ‘garbage’ and low IQ. Haitians are ‘eating the dogs and cats’ and ‘all have AIDS’ but white people from Denmark and Norway are ‘nice.’”

In a blistering dissent to the majority opinion that Trump’s cited remarks were not “overtly racial,” Justice Elena Kagan put those remarks on the record and said, “they fairly shout, in their racial undertones and overtones alike, that race entered into the President’s resolve to remove Haitians from this country.”

Pipoly contended the DHS termination of TPS for Haiti was preordained and pretextual.

“The preordained nature is the statutory violation,” he said.

“That’s kind of the what. That’s the failure to follow obligatory procedure. That’s what happened. The racial animus or bare dislike for Haitians is the why it happened. Just the what was in and of itself enough to set aside the TPS termination and start over,” explained Pipoly.

“The why it happened was a constitutional violation.”

A group of lawful immigrants, at the mercy of the U.S. government, was targeted for who they are, said the attorney.

Trump’s ugly disparagement of Haitians, in particular, “reflect a TPS policy outcome that was unconstitutionally discriminatory.”  

Recently the DHS chief told panicked Haitians in Springfield, Miami, Boston, Atlanta, Philadelphia, and elsewhere he would buy them a ticket out of the country and throw in some spending cash for good measure.

The cruel indifference to the fate hundreds of thousands who sought legal refuge in America left their lawyer broken.

“These folks didn’t do anything wrong. They don’t deserve this.” 

This story is republished from the Ohio Capital Journal under a Creative Commons license. View the original article.