By Dr. Jude Élie
July 10, 2026
On June 25, the Supreme Court of the United States cleared the way for the Trump administration to end Temporary Protected Status for some three hundred and fifty thousand Haitians. Let me say at the outset what many of my compatriots do not wish to hear: a government has the right to decide whom it admits and whom it asks to leave, and a president who keeps a promise to the citizens who elected him is doing precisely what he was elected to do. I do not dispute that right. I want, instead, to understand what was decided and what it reveals.
The Naked Decision
Begin with the most honest line in the entire ruling: the Court’s confession that it had no authority to judge. It did not find that Haiti is safe. It examined neither the gangs that hold our capital, nor the hunger, nor the silenced schools. It held only that the decision to send us back belongs to the executive and not to the judges. A century ago, the German jurist Carl Schmitt who would later lend his brilliance to the Nazi state compressed this into a single sentence: sovereign is he who decides on the exception. Sovereign is the one who stands, at the decisive moment, above the ordinary rule of law. The TPS decision is sovereignty in exactly that sense: not the calm application of a norm, but an act of political will that no court would review. The robe of legal procedure was lifted, and beneath it stood a naked decision.
Schmitt was right about sovereignty, but he was wrong about its morality. The sovereign draws the line but whether that line is a wall or a horizon depends entirely on who stands on which side of it. My quarrel is not that America drew a line. My quarrel is that my nation has never been allowed to draw its own, and that when we tried, the world sharpened the pencil for us. A decision, for Schmitt, is always the drawing of a friend-enemy distinction. Strip the TPS ruling of its administrative language and this is what remains: a judgment that we are not of them. So I permit myself one question. What, exactly, did Haiti do to earn such contempt?
The Witness in the Hemisphere
We are America’s near neighbors, in its own hemisphere, and we have been witnesses to its entire story. We watched its experiment in liberty from across the water, and then we made our own the only nation in history born of a successful revolt of the enslaved. For that audacity we were made to pay. The slaveholding powers refused to recognize us; the United States itself withheld recognition until 1862, when its own house was burning over the very question we had already answered. France extracted from us an indemnity for the crime of having freed ourselves a debt that bled the nation for more than a century. In the twentieth century, when we would not bend to designs that were not ours, the Marines came and stayed nineteen years; they returned in the 1990s; and in 2004 a foreign hand arranged our politics once more. Through all of it, we remained standing. Whatever else may be said of Haiti, we have never been a people who surrendered the right to decide for ourselves.
This is why the present moment wounds in a particular way because there have always been two Americas. One is creedal: the America of Paine’s “asylum for mankind,” of Washington’s promise that the oppressed of every nation and religion would be received and made full sharers in its rights. That America says: you belong if you take up our principles, not if you resemble us. The other America is the one Schmitt would have recognized at a glance the America that understands democracy as the rule of a people, and a people as those who are alike. He said it without flinching: every real democracy rests on homogeneity, and, where necessary, on the exclusion of the heterogeneous.
The Mirror and the Folly
But I have come to understand something I did not wish to see. I do not grieve because America betrayed its pure ideal. No nation is pure. I grieve because I now see which side of its own civil war over the soul won today. The creed was never a deed; it was a weapon, wielded by one faction against another, and we mistook it for a shelter. We answered that first America in good faith. The Biden administration opened a lawful door, and we walked through it exactly as the creed instructed we worked, we paid our taxes, we cared for the sick, we built in every corner of that society. We did not ask to become like Americans; we asked only to be judged by whether we had taken up the principles. And we had. Then the door we had been invited through was closed behind us, and we were told to go.
I hold no bitterness toward the man who closed the door. He told his voters he would, and he did; that, too, is sovereignty. My quarrel is not with his keeping of a promise. It is with the discovery for any Haitian who still doubted it of which America was the real one. And here, let me say something harder still. He taught us something we refused to learn from our own suffering: a nation that cannot enforce its own borders will always have its borders enforced by others. He taught us that mercy is seasonal. We mistook seasonal mercy for permanent justice. That was our folly, not his cruelty. Cruelty we expected. Folly we must repent of.
The Traitors in Our Own House
And the lesson turns toward us, and it is the hardest thing I have to say. If the sovereign is the one who decides, then the only dignified answer to being decided about is to become a people who can decide. For too long Haiti has been the object of other nations’ exceptions invaded, indebted, administered, invited and expelled at others’ convenience because we have never fully constituted ourselves as a political subject with a will of its own. A president who defends his people is not our enemy. He is our instructor.
But let us name the traitors in our own house. The elites who park their money in Miami while their cousins eat mud cakes. The gang leaders who take foreign guns to hold foreign aid hostage. The politicians who sign accords in hotel lobbies while the countryside burns. We have been decided about because we have paid others to decide for us. That bargain ends today not with a slogan, but with a ledger. We will audit every remittance, every Non Governmental Organization (NGO) contract, every military agreement signed without parliamentary consent. We will demand accounting where there has been only theft.
So I say to my compatriots: Haiti is ours. We may fight one another over how to build it, but never again over whether to destroy it. And to those who finance the gangs that hold our people hostage understand that you stand on the same soil whose fate is now being decided by strangers; the ruin you sell will reach your own door. The hour has come to choose leaders who defend Haitian interests as fiercely as other nations defend theirs, and to refuse, at last, what is perpetually imposed on us. We will not live like this any longer.
Turning Homeward
Let us accept the rebuke without shame. We crossed the neighbor’s fence because the gate was opened to us; now it is closing, and we will walk back through it with our heads high not as the expelled, but as a people turning homeward to finish the work our ancestors began. But we will not walk back empty-handed. We will carry our dollars, our skills, and our memory. And we will invest them only in a Haiti that answers to Haitian laws not to Washington’s diktats, not to Paris’s ledgers, not to the UN’s rotations. The sovereign is he who decides. From this day, that sovereign will not be a foreigner in our capital. It will be us flawed, fractious, but finally ours.
The welcome was never the foundation of our dignity. Our dignity was. It is time we built a Haiti that no sovereign but our own may ever again presume to decide.
Dr. Jude Élie
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