That is a reasonable conclusion. But not everyone in the Trump administration recognizes it. The acting head of Citizenship and Immigration Services, James McCament, wrote to Mr. Kelly this month recommending that temporary protected status be ended next January.
“Although Hurricane Matthew recently caused a deterioration of conditions in Haiti’s southwest peninsula,” he wrote, “over all, circumstances in the country have continued on an upward trajectory since the 2010 earthquake.”
Give that man a prize for bureaucratic understatement: “Deterioration of conditions” is a brutally antiseptic way to describe a Category 4 hurricane that left so much death, sickness and hunger in its wake. In fairness, Mr. McCament’s memo does acknowledge many of the other afflictions that would argue for temporary protected status, including homelessness, gender-based violence, food insecurity, deep deficiencies in sanitation and health care, and a weak government.
And yet it reached the wrong conclusion. Only in December, in President Barack Obama’s administration, the State Department examined the same circumstances and recommended that the Haitians be allowed to remain.
