Tom Homan defends deportations to Haiti amid travel warnings

The State Department currently has a Do Not Travel advisory against the Caribbean nation due to chaos and crime.

B

y  Cheyanne M. Daniels

08/30/2026 10:19 AM EDT

Border czar Tom Homan on Sunday defended the Trump administration’s ongoing deportations to Haiti despite the State Department’s own advisory warning Americans against traveling to the Caribbean country.

In an interview with CNN’s “State of the Union,” Homan told host Dana Bash that the administration is simply complying with the end of Temporary Protected Status for Haitian migrants.

“The temporary protective status is supposed to be temporary and as long as I’ve been around for over 40 years, it seems like it’s never temporary,” Homan said. “This is an order of the court. They were ordered removed and ICE is removing them.”

The TPS program, first enacted by Congress in 1990, gave the Department of Homeland Security the power to allow migrants to stay in the U.S. due to unsafe conditions in their homeland as the result of a natural disaster, armed conflict or other “extraordinary and temporary” conditions. In June, the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 in Mullin v. Doe that President Donald Trump could end the legal status of more than 1 million migrants who were permitted to live and work in the U.S. due to crises in their home countries.

While Haiti was first designated part of the TPS program in 2010 following a massive earthquake, the State Department continues to have a Level 4 – Do Not Travel advisory for Haiti, citing the risk of crime, kidnapping, terrorism, unrest and limited health care. Last week alone, the United Nations estimated at least 47 people were killed and 22 others injured in an overnight gang raid on a neighborhood near Port-au-Prince, Haiti’s capital.

When pressed on these warnings, though, Homan said he is unfamiliar with conditions in the country, the poorest in the Western Hemisphere.

“I don’t know the conditions in Haiti. I’ve never been in Haiti,” Homan said. “But we’re just enforcing the law and we’re doing it in a way that the American people voted for.”

In addition to Haiti, the Trump administration has ended TPS designations for Afghanistan, Cameroon, Honduras, Myanmar, Nepal, Nicaragua, South Sudan, Syria, Venezuela and Yemen.