Trump revokes protected status for over half a million Haitian immigrants

Jacob Crosse

President Donald Trump listens as Interior Secretary Doug Burgum speaks to the media in the Oval Office at the White House, Tuesday, June 10, 2025, in Washington, as Director of the Office of Management and Budget Russell Vought and Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem look on. [AP Photo/Evan Vucci]

Three days after the US Embassy in Haiti warned US citizens, “Do not travel to Haiti” and “Depart Haiti as soon as possible,” Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Kristi Noem announced the termination of Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for people from that country.

TPS was created by Congress in 1990 under the Immigration and Nationality Act. It provides temporary immigration status to people fleeing war, natural disasters or other calamities that prevent their safe return. On January 21, following the devastating 7.0 magnitutde earthquake on January 12, 2010, which killed over 100,000 people and displaced over 1.5 million more, the DHS designated Haiti for TPS status.

In the over 15 years since the earthquake, Democrats have done virtually nothing to protect Haitians under TPS, such as advancing legislation that would provide citizenship to long-term TPS and green card holders. Instead, TPS status has been extended multiple times throughout the Obama, Trump and Biden administrations as conditions worsened in Haiti, especially following the assassination of President Jovenel Moïse in 2021.

The termination is effective Tuesday, September 2, 2025, leaving over half a million Haitians, some who have been in the US for over 15 years, barely 10 weeks to find another legal pathway to remain in the US or face detention and deportation to a country the US State Department warned not to travel to in March 2025. In making this announcement, the State Department said:

Local police and other first responders often lack the resources to respond to emergencies or serious crime. Shortages of gasoline, electricity, medicine, and medical supplies are common throughout the country. Public and private medical clinics and hospitals often lack trained staff and basic resources. In addition, they require prepayment for services in cash.

The travel advisory went on to note that US governmental personnel “are subjected to a nightly curfew and are prohibited from walking in Port-au-Prince.” They are also prohibited from “using any kind of public transportation,” “visiting banks and using ATMs,” “driving at night,” “traveling anywhere after dark” or “traveling without prior approval and special security measures in place.”

There is no question that the termination of TPS protection will lead to hundreds, if not thousands, of deaths. Two centuries of foreign colonial and imperialist intervention following the only successful slave revolt in history have left the country in a state of collapse.

In a country of 11 million people, over five million are considered “food insecure” by the United Nations, with many parts of the country facing famine conditions. Meanwhile, heavily armed gangs control large swaths of the capital city, Port-au-Prince.

Ignoring all of this, in a staggeringly false statement attributed to “a DHS spokesperson,” the agency falsely claimed: “The environmental situation in Haiti has improved enough that it is safe for Haitian citizens to return home.”

The statement noted that Secretary Noem “determined that conditions in Haiti no longer meet the TPS statutory requirements,” and that “overall, country conditions have improved to the point where Haitians can return home in safety.”

The statement concluded: “She further determined that permitting Haitian nationals to remain temporarily in the United States is contrary to the national interests of the United States.”

During the presidential campaign last year, as part of Donald Trump’s drive to whip up a pogrom-like atmosphere against immigrants, which went unanswered by Vice President Kamala Harris and the Democrats, Trump spread a fascist conspiracy theory that Haitian immigrants were stealing and eating the pets of residents in the town of Springfield, Ohio. The racist and baseless lie originated with the Nazi group called Blood Tribe and was repeated by virtually the entire Republican Party, including Trump’s vice presidential candidate JD Vance.

The revocation of TPS for Haitian immigrants follows the termination of the Cuba, Honduras, Nicaragua and Venezuela (CHNV) parole program in April. On May 30, the US Supreme Court lifted an injunction issued by a federal district court the prior month, paving the way for the immigration Gestapo to begin revoking parole and work authorizations prior to deportation.

The termination of TPS for Haitian immigrants is a monumental crime. Not only are over half a million people now facing deportation to a country mired in crisis, but since March, Erik Prince, formerly of Blackwater Worldwide, has been operating a drone assassination squad in coordination with the US-backed interim government.

Blackwater founder Erik Prince speaks at the Conservative Political Action Conference, CPAC, at the Gaylord National Resort & Convention Center, Saturday, Feb. 22, 2025, in Oxon Hill, Maryland. [AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana]

Prince’s Blackwater mercenaries are responsible for some of the more heinous war crimes conducted by US imperialism during its illegal invasions and occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, including the Nisour Square Massacre on September 16, 2007. On that day, Blackwater contractors armed with heavy machine guns and fragmentation grenades murdered at least 17 Iraqis and injured 20 more.

Four of the mercenaries were later convicted for their crimes, including murder and manslaughter, but in 2020 President Trump pardoned the killers as part of his efforts to cultivate a fascistic base of support among US Special Forces and private military contractors.

Since at least March 1 of this year, a secret assassination task force created by Haitian interim prime minister Alix Didier Fils-Aimé, working with Prince’s mercenaries, has been conducting lethal drone operations against alleged “gang members.”

In May, the Wall Street Journal reported that the task force is using “drones strapped with explosives,” and that at least 300 people had been killed.

The Journal reported in April that Prince and private security contractors affiliated with him met with leaders in the Haitian government to “discuss work on security.” Four days after the Journal’s report, the New York Times confirmed that Prince is “working with Haiti’s government to conduct lethal operations against gangs.”

Citing “senior Haitian and American government officials,” the Times reported that Prince has signed a contract “to take on the criminal groups” and that “Prince’s team has been operating the drones since March.”

Prince, the brother of Trump’s former education secretary Betsy DeVos, has been “scouting Haitian American military veterans to hire to send to Port-au-Prince and is expected to send up to 150 mercenaries to Haiti over the summer.” Citing “two experts,” the newspaper reported that Prince “recently shipped a large cache of weapons to the country.”

The Times reported that, in addition to Prince, “at least one other American security company is working in Haiti, though details of its role are secret.”

Senate advances Trump plan to gut social programs to benefit the super-rich

Patrick Martin

Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-South Dakota, center, joined at left by Sen. John Barrasso, R-Wyoming, the GOP whip, speaks to reporters after Republican senators met with Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and worked on President Donald Trump's tax and immigration megabill so they can have on his desk by July 4, at the Capitol in Washington, Tuesday, June 24, 2025. [AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite]

The US Senate voted by a 51-49 margin Saturday night to open debate on the major legislative package of the Trump administrative, which will provide $4 trillion in tax cuts for the wealthy, cut $1 trillion or more from Medicaid and food stamps and pump hundreds of billions of additional dollars into the immigration police and the US military.

The Senate bill directly manifests the further shift to the right in the Republican Party and the entire framework of capitalist politics in the United States, as Trump seeks to establish a presidential dictatorship, now rubber-stamped by the Supreme Court, in order to carry out a social counterrevolution against the working class. 

Contrary to expectations set by the media and the Democratic Party, the ultra-right House version of the reconciliation bill, which passed by only one vote, has become even more draconian in its Senate version. The cuts in Medicaid have increased from $800 billion to $930 billion over 10 years. And the Senate version adopts a new method of calculating the impact on the deficit which conceals the cost of Trump’s tax cuts for the rich.

Two Republicans, Rand Paul of Kentucky and Thom Tillis of North Carolina, voted against opening debate, for opposite reasons. Paul wanted even bigger spending cuts, while Tillis objected to the impact of Medicaid cuts on rural hospitals in his state. Within 24 hours of casting this vote, facing a threat by Trump to back a primary challenger, Tillis announced he would not run for reelection next year.

A perfunctory debate ensued, with Democrats arguing against the bill that they are certain will pass the Senate. The bulk of the “debate” consisted of the clerk of the Senate reading out loud the entire text of the 900-page bill, an exercise in political theater forced by Democratic Minority Leader Chuck Schumer.

By Sunday evening, the Senate moved on to an equally arcane and lengthy process cynically titled the “Votearama,” in which every senator is entitled to offer amendments which must receive an up-or-down vote, usually by roll call. The purpose of this exercise is to allow senators to posture as supporting popular proposals (which are invariably defeated) or create opportunities for future attack ads.

The Senate version that emerges from this process—having already undergone substantial modification by the Republican leadership—must go back to the House of Representatives for final passage. This is hardly assured, given the one-vote margin of passage of the first version.  

Some Republican House members say they will now oppose passage because of the increased cuts to Medicaid. Sixteen House Republicans, most of whom voted for the reconciliation bill, sent a letter to Senate Majority Leader John Thune saying they would switch their votes if the Medicaid cuts were increased.

One such Republican, Don Bacon of Nebraska, has already announced that he will not run for reelection in his Omaha-based district next year. Democratic presidential candidates carried the district in 2020 and 2024, and Bacon has barely held on to his seat each time.

The declarations by Tillis and Bacon are expected to be followed by other departures by so-called “moderate” Republicans, who would be considered extremely right-wing in most other countries but are out of step with the fascistic direction of the Trump administration and the Republican Party.

The most right-wing faction of House Republicans, the House Freedom Caucus, has threatened to oppose the Senate bill because it raises the deficit by even more than the House bill.

Significantly, at least four Republican senators have demanded and won support from the leadership for a proposal by Rick Scott of Florida to penalize states that expanded Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act.

Retiring Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the former Republican leader, expressed the brutality of the drive to cut vital healthcare spending. According to Punchbowl News, he told a closed-door Republican caucus meeting, “I know a lot of us are hearing from people back home about Medicaid. But they’ll get over it.”

Media coverage has focused almost entirely on divisions among Republicans over secondary issues, while downplaying the colossal impact that the cuts will have on large sections of the working class. More than 10 million recipients could lose their Medicaid coverage, largely through the imposition of work requirements for most low-income adults, unless they have children under 14 years old at home, and through vastly increased paperwork burdens. 

Recipients will have to file documents establishing their eligibility every six months, rather than annually, and many will fail at this task, not because they are ineligible, but because of the obstacles of poverty, age, illness and lack of education. Other provisions would ban immigrants from receiving Medicaid and limit state taxes on Medicaid providers.

Similar methods will be employed to drive low-income families off the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), the formal name of the food stamp program. The cuts are projected at more than $200 billion over 10 years.

While various factions of the Republican Party jockey for position, the Democratic Party maintains its posture of silent acquiescence to the looting of the Treasury to benefit the super-rich and further impoverish working people. The Democrats have confined themselves to ritualistic speechmaking and have not called a single protest, let alone a mass demonstration in Washington, against the cuts.

They support cuts to social programs and are terrified of the mass turnout at the June 14 “No Kings” protests against Trump’s drive for dictatorship, attended by as many as 11 million people, and by the large vote cast in New York City’s mayoral primary for Zohran Mamdani, who won because he called himself a democratic socialist and advocated limited social reforms.

Earlier this month, the Democrats in the House of Representatives voted with Republicans to kill an impeachment resolution over Trump’s illegal bombing of Iran.

The Democrats, as a party of Wall Street and the military-intelligence apparatus, are bitterly hostile to the mass upsurge against the Trump administration and its assault on democratic rights, which poses a challenge to the financial oligarchy that they too represent.

Jobs massacre spreads across key industries in Germany

Peter Schwarz

While the German government is pouring hundreds of billions of euros into rearmament and war, the jobs massacre in the automotive, supplier, chemical, steel and other key industries continues unabated and is now extending to the services sector.

The trade unions are ensuring that job cuts proceed smoothly, and that any resistance is crushed at the outset. True to the motto “Everyone dies alone,” they isolate affected workforces from one another and downplay the scale of the disaster.

In March 2024, 10,000 employees demonstrated against layoffs in front of the Bosch headquarters in Gerlingen near Stuttgart

According to estimates by credit agency Creditreform, the number of corporate insolvencies in Germany has risen sharply. With 11,900 company bankruptcies, the figure in the first half of 2025 was 9.4 percent higher than in the same period the previous year.

The services sector, including catering and hospitality, was particularly affected, with 7,000 insolvencies. There were 2,220 bankruptcies in retail and 940 in manufacturing. Creditreform estimates the resulting damage at €33.4 billion. Some 141,000 people lost their jobs.

In the department store and fashion sector, several well-known names have recently filed for insolvency, including Galeria, Esprit, Sinn and Gerry Weber. Gerry Weber, which had already closed 122 of its 171 shops in Germany in 2023 and cut 450 jobs, is now shutting the remaining 40 stores. The brand has been taken over by Spanish fashion company Victrix, which will distribute it through other channels.

The crisis in retail is the result of falling purchasing power, rising costs and the lingering effects of the pandemic. These developments are now also showing up in official unemployment figures.

“The labour market is not getting the momentum it would need to turn the corner; that is why we expect unemployment figures to continue rising this summer,” said Andrea Nahles, chair of the Federal Employment Agency (BA), when presenting the May figures.

With 2,919,000 unemployed—a jobless rate of 6.2 percent—the number was 197,000 higher than in May of the previous year. Underemployment, which also includes temporary incapacity for work and people in labour market programmes, was much higher at 3,602,000.

Of the nearly 3 million registered unemployed, fewer than 1 million received unemployment benefits. By contrast, the number of employable recipients of welfare benefits stood at 3.95 million. This includes many people who are in work but whose income is insufficient to live on.

Although the rise in unemployment figures is still relatively moderate, job cuts in key industries—on which many other sectors depend—are advancing at a rapid pace.

Automotive and supplier industries

This applies above all to the automotive and supplier industries, where the workforce has shrunk from 830,000 in 2018 to 730,000, even though turnover has risen significantly. Automotive expert Ferdinand Dudenhöffer estimates that by 2030 the figure will fall to just 500,000.

Volkswagen, where the works council and management agreed in December to cut 35,000 jobs, remains mired in crisis. At the latest works meeting, it was reported that 20,000 employees had so far agreed to leave the company voluntarily by 2030. But this includes all those who will reach retirement age anyway. The majority are going into part-time working prior to retirement. Only a few were willing to give up their jobs in return for severance pay.

Yet, as CFO David Powels stressed at the meeting, the savings drive is still far off target. “We have to address our structural problems,” he stressed. VW was investing too much and earning too little on its electric vehicles. Moreover, it took too long for a new model to reach profitability. “Our opportunity now lies in correcting this imbalance together and operating profitably again,” he said—an unmistakable threat of further cuts and redundancies.

Works council chair Daniela Cavallo announced that the conversion of the main plant in Wolfsburg to electric vehicle production would take longer than planned. As a result, a four-day week may be introduced from 2027 for a period—meaning a significant loss of income for those affected.

Massive cutbacks are also planned at Mercedes, BMW, Audi and Porsche. Following the closure of its Saarlouis plant, Ford is now also scaling back its main factory in Cologne. Opel (Stellantis) is increasingly withdrawing from Germany.

The situation in the supplier industry is equally devastating. Giants like Bosch, ZF, Schaeffler and Continental are collectively shedding tens of thousands of jobs, while smaller firms employing several hundred people—often the mainstay of entire regions—are filing for insolvency week after week.

According to a survey by the German Automotive Industry Association (VDA), more than three-quarters of automotive suppliers in Germany plan to postpone, relocate or cancel investments already planned in the country. Only 1 percent intend to increase their investment in Germany.

At ZF in particular, the bad news keeps coming. According to recent reports, management is considering selling off the driveline division entirely. This would affect 32,000 employees—around a fifth of the group’s global workforce. A “ramp down” of the business, is also under discussion.

The supplier, headquartered in Friedrichshafen on Lake Constance, is heavily indebted and fears for its credit rating. At its Schweinfurt plant, the works council therefore agreed in December to partial pay cuts for the 5,500 staff. But it has since announced it can no longer maintain this arrangement. Now, at least 650 compulsory redundancies are threatened, said works council chief Oliver Moll.

Bosch has also been cutting jobs and closing sites for some time. Most recently, the company agreed the “socially acceptable” loss of 1,150 jobs in Schwäbisch Gmünd, Baden-Württemberg, leaving 1,700 positions remaining.

Smaller factories are disappearing without attracting any attention in the national media. In Düren, North Rhine-Westphalia, automotive supplier Neapco has filed for insolvency. Five hundred employees of the city’s largest industrial employer are losing their jobs. The official reason is that the US parent company did not renew a contract for contract manufacturing.

In Bad Neustadt, Franconia, auto supplier Preh completed the shedding of 420 jobs in May, including 50 compulsory redundancies. Before that, 300 workers had accepted severance pay and 70 positions were eliminated through natural attrition and early retirement. Other companies in the predominantly rural region, such as Brose in Coburg, are also reporting heavy losses.

Chemical and steel industries

Tens of thousands of jobs are also being cut in the chemical industry. Sector giant BASF, with a global workforce of 110,000, is focusing on preserving its main site in Ludwigshafen. Even there, however, 1,800 of 33,700 jobs are to go in the first wave.

According to BASF CEO Markus Kamieth, “the chemicals industry in Europe faces a phase of consolidation and restructuring. The largest European chemicals site will not be spared.” But Kamieth refuses to name specific figures. Experts estimate that several thousand jobs are at risk.

US chemical giant Dow plans to shut down several plants at its sites in Böhlen, Schkopau and Leuna in Saxony-Anhalt—facilities that date back to the time of the former East Germany. At Böhlen, 700 employees protested in late May in a “political lunch break” called by the IGBCE union.

Many other chemical companies are also cutting jobs.

As for the steel industry, after Thyssenkrupp, ArcelorMittal has now also abandoned plans to produce “green” steel in Germany. Although the government had pledged over a billion euros in subsidies, the planned hydrogen-powered blast furnaces in Bremen and Eisenhüttenstadt will not be built.

In practice, this could mean the end of steel production in Germany, which still employs just over 80,000 people. Around 1,000 workers protested outside ArcelorMittal’s Bremen site.

The business of death

The only sector currently booming in Germany is the business of death. Arms manufacturers are reporting full order books and fantastic profits.

The €100 billion “special fund” for the Bundeswehr (Armed Forces), approved by the government in March 2022, had already sent Rheinmetall’s share price soaring more than tenfold. Germany’s largest arms company saw its share price rise from €155 to €1,736. Turnover doubled, and post-tax profit quadrupled to €1.2 billion.

The new war credits totaling over €1 trillion are expected to further explode profits at Rheinmetall and other weapons firms. Finance Minister Lars Klingbeil plans to spend as much on rearmament in the next 18 months as in the previous five years.

According to the Federal Employment Agency (BA), around 17,000 people in Germany now manufacture weapons, ammunition and armoured vehicles—50 percent more than 10 years ago. However, the BA only counts jobs paying social insurance contributions; the defence industry itself claims figures of up to 100,000.