Originally published in the Miami Herald.

Marleine Bastien and Brian Concannon

January 31, 2025

Haitians in South Florida — and their families, friends, employers and supporters — are grappling with this week’s immigration raids, the new administration’s plan to deport as many as a million people, mostly immigrants of color, currently living legally in Florida and other states. Now, the U.S. is preparing Guantanamo Naval Base in Cuba to detain them all.

But back in Haiti, people are more worried about the policies implemented by another administration — that of the third U.S. president and slave owner Thomas Jefferson —that still afflict Haiti today. Ending Haiti’s misery and decreasing immigration pressure at our borders require us to reverse these policies.

At the time of President Jefferson’s 1801 inauguration, Haitians had led a revolution and were on the way to becoming the Americas’ second independent country after defeating Napoleon Bonaparte’s French army.

Instead of welcoming Haiti as continuing the U.S.’s fight for freedom against European empires, Jefferson opposed it, seeing Haitian freedom as a threat. The Haitians were Black and Jefferson feared that a prosperous Haiti would inspire Black people elsewhere — we suspect, including on Jefferson’s own plantation — to seek their own freedom and challenge the racist system on which U.S. prosperity was based at the time.

So, Jefferson sent ships and guns to help the French and refused to recognize Haiti’s independence when it was declared in 1804.

President Abraham Lincoln eventually recognized Haiti in 1862, just before issuing the Emancipation Proclamation. But for more than two centuries, U.S. administrations, Republicans and Democrats alike, have continued to interfere to limit Haiti’s sovereignty and democracy.

We believe this interference keeps Haiti poor, subservient and unstable. It also forces Haitians to flee the country they love to find safety in the U.S. and elsewhere.

In 1893, abolitionist Frederick Douglass noted that “while slavery existed amongst us, Haiti’s example was a sharp thorn in our side.” He added that after abolition, we continued to mistreat Haiti. Douglass connected this mistreatment to Haitians and Jefferson’s fears of their liberty being contagious: “In striking for their freedom, they struck for the freedom of every Black man in the world.”

Douglass had seen U.S. interference up close as the U.S. ambassador to Haiti, where he was pressured to forcibly obtain land for a U.S. military base and wrest unfair advantages for U.S. corporations.

The interference continued — including the U.S. Marine occupation from 1915 to 1934 that included an imposed constitution written by Franklin D. Roosevelt that gave non-Haitians new rights. Then we have President Bill Clinton forcing Haiti to drop rice tariffs, that he later conceded decimated Haitian agriculture, and the 2004 overthrow of Haiti’s President Jean-Bertrand Aristide for resisting U.S. economic policy prescriptions.

Most recently, the administrations of Barack Obama, Donald Trump and Joe Biden have propped up governments run by the Partie Haitienne Tet Kale (PHTK) party as it relentlessly dismantled Haiti’s democracy from 2012 to last year.

The PHTK — with long and deep ties to gangs — generated the current acute crisis and forced Haitians to flee both repression and poverty for over a decade. Many of those fleeing arrived in South Florida.

The State Department finally withdrew support from the PHTK government last March after armed groups took over much of Port-au-Prince. The U.S. then insisted on the PHTK and its allies having three of the seven voting seats on the Transitional Presidential Council. That decision has hobbled Haiti’s transition to democracy, and a U.S.-funded mission led by Kenyan police has failed to push the gangs back.

Haitians and their supporters will have much to do to stand up to the challenges facing their community in the U.S. over the next four years.

But any of us who dream of a prosperous, independent Haiti inspiring Black freedom and equality worldwide or, like new Secretary of State Marco Rubio, want to reduce the migratory pressure from Haiti should insist that the U.S. government stop interfering and allow Haitians the freedom to prosper.

Marleine Bastien is a Miami-Dade county commissioner representing District 2 and founder of the Family Action Network Movement. Brian Concannon is executive director of the Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti, www.ijdh.org