House Haiti Caucus Co-Chairs Jamaican-American Congresswomen Yvette D. Clarke (NY-09) and Ayanna Pressley (MA-07) strongly condemned President Donald Trump’s latest executive order that bans citizens from 12 countries—including Haiti—from traveling to the United States, while imposing partial restrictions on seven additional nations.
“Hundreds of thousands of illegal Haitian aliens flooded into the United States during the Biden Administration,” the travel ban proclamation states. “This influx harms American communities by creating acute risks of increased overstay rates, establishment of criminal networks, and other national security threats.” Haiti is the only Caribbean nation fully banned.
Cuba, meanwhile, is the only Caribbean country among seven countries facing partial travel restrictions, specifically targeting immigrants and nonimmigrants on B-1, B-2, B-1/B-2, F, M, and J visas.
In a joint statement, the Caucus leaders called the ban an “unambiguously xenophobic attack” targeting some of the world’s most vulnerable populations. “These are children, women, and men who are fleeing political turmoil and war, who are trying to survive famine and natural catastrophes. Haitians and so many others are drowning, and Donald Trump just ripped a life preserver from their desperate arms and tied weights around their ankles.”
They further denounced the ban as a deliberate act of cruelty aimed at hundreds of millions of Black and Brown people, surpassing the cruelty of previous Muslim and African travel bans.
“But the continuation of their suffering is the point. This is a targeted abuse of hundreds of millions of Black and Brown people at a scale of cruelty even beyond the historically despicable Muslim and African Bans, and it’s undergirded by nothing but baseless accusations and one man’s insatiable hate. The American people know that. No matter what sick justifications he gives or sadistic lies he spins, we see this vile, unlawful act for what is. Just as we see him for who he is,” the statement said.
Clarke and Pressley called on people of conscience to stand in solidarity with those affected by the ban and pledged to fight the executive order vigorously “in the courts, in our communities, and in the halls of Congress.”
