Haitians in Springfield are required to report to ICE and wear ankle monitors | Hacker News Reader

Haitians in Springfield are required to report to ICE and wear ankle monitors

ohiocapitaljournal.com

26 pointshn_acker18 comments

Next they'll be made to wear a yellow badge with the letter H on it...

Millions of American criminals are required to wear an ankle monitor as a condition of bail or parole. These people had 15 or more years to handle their court cases or become legal citizens. There is nothing racist about it.

Putting the whole "criminals" tangent aside, you might want to read up on what's actually happening...

They came legally in an effort to bolster Springfield's economy. From Wikipedia:

> As new businesses opened and a labor shortage emerged,[21][23] Haitian immigrants began arriving in Springfield around 2017 to work in local produce-packaging and machining factories.[24] By 2020, Springfield's economy had somewhat rebounded; new employers had added some 8,000 jobs, adding to the labor shortage.[25][26][27][28] Employers encouraged Haitians to continue coming to the city to fill jobs in warehouses, manufacturing, and the service sector. Haitians in the United States, Haiti, and South America heard from family and friends about Springfield, its low cost of living, and its need for workers. Immigration increased substantially after the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, coinciding with deepening political and economic instability in Haiti after the assassination of the president in 2021.[21][24] By 2024, some 12,000 to 15,000 immigrants, many Haitian, had legally moved to the Springfield area.[29][30][21][31] In June 2024,[32] ongoing crises and severe violence in the Caribbean nation of Haiti led the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to grant temporary protected status to Haitian immigrants,[33] allowing the existing migrant population in the U.S. to live and work *without the risk of deportation*

Haiti has a Level 4 "DO NOT TRAVEL" advisory from the State Dept. It is extremely unsafe to go there and has been for many years.

[^0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Springfield_pet-eating_hoax

It’s not a tangent. It’s the simple truth. American criminals often wear ankle bracelets as a condition of their release from prison, and that’s not racist. But suddenly because we require it of illegal immigrants, it is racist? Nonsense.

If they were told that TPS protected them from deportation then they were lied to. All TPS does is pause enforcement. Once it ends their immigration cases are not paused any more. Their cases simply proceed from wherever they left off. Most illegal immigrants apply for asylum when they get caught but don’t actually qualify for it, so they’ll be deported. This isn’t racist, it’s just the reality of how our immigration laws work.

İ cannot believe you are ratiolising this. Refugees are not the same as criminals. İ agree it is not racist, but this is a violation of human rights. Slowly but surely rights of people in the US are being chipped away, like boiling frogs.

They are both groups with a high likelihood of skipping town instead of showing up for sentencing.

And most of them were never refugees. They were economic migrants who were already in the country illegally when Haiti had an earthquake.

> They are both groups with a high likelihood of skipping town instead of showing up for sentencing.

Could you clarify how broadly you define both "groups" and provide a source demonstrating that either has a high likelihood of skipping sentencing, or even just regarding Haitians in Springfield? As far as I know, most Haitians in Springfield have attended immigration-related or -adjacent hearings and sentencing whenever required of them.

> And most of them were never refugees. They were economic migrants who were already in the country illegally when Haiti had an earthquake.

This is false on all counts. Most Haitians in the US (not just in Springfield) fled political crises or violence [1]. Most Haitians in Springfield entered the US legally under programs such as Humanitarian Parole and have been staying in the US legally for every second since then [2], whether or not their continued stay relied on TPS, until the federal government revoked TPS without following the federal government's own procedures.

[1] https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/social-sciences-and-...

[2] https://springfieldohio.gov/immigration-faqs/

Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, and I'll throw them into cages and put ankle bracelets on them

If you’d like to go tell Bill Clinton that the bill he championed and signed into law in 1991 is racist then be my guest. That was the last time our immigration laws were amended. The immigration model we use in the US is that immigrants must ask permission to immigrate first, only arrive after receiving that permission, and not overstay their visa. Anyone who does otherwise is an illegal immigrant. If you don’t like that then ask your congress–critter to propose a bill amending the law.

> If you’d like to go tell Bill Clinton that the bill he championed and signed into law in 1991 is racist then be my guest. That was the last time our immigration laws were amended.

This is an irrelevant strawman. Whether or not the last legislative modification to our immigration system was racist has nothing to do with whether the system as a whole continues to be enforced with racist motivations veiled by pretext or enforced in a racist manner.

> The immigration model we use in the US is that immigrants must ask permission to immigrate first, only arrive after receiving that permission, and not overstay their visa. Anyone who does otherwise is an illegal immigrant. If you don’t like that then ask your congress–critter to propose a bill amending the law.

Your immigration model is a model of a model. You are leaving crucial details out. Haitians in Springfield did ask for permission [1], did enter legally, and have been staying legally until the federal government revoked TPS without following its own procedures.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49334145

When the first comparison that you make to this Haitian refugee situation is "criminals wear ankle bracelets too!", then, yeah, people are going to throw the racism card. Maybe that's not what you meant, but it does feel like an unconscious bias.

They weren't lied to. The US Government AND Springfield, OH explicitly and proudly accepted these Haitians into the US during a very difficult time in their country. The Biden Administration specifically encouraged this. [^0]

There are lots of refugees in the US from everywhere in the world. That the ankle bracelet ATD (alternative to detention) is SPECIFICALLY targeted at the same group of refugees that were accused of eating dogs during the last re-election is what makes this problematic...

[^0] https://www.cnn.com/2024/09/19/us/springfield-ohio-haitians-...

[^1]: https://apnews.com/dfcdc6302e154753a526c04706df45d6

[flagged]

I'm so sorry. These people doing this are just such a malignancy. A show of how incredibly corrupt and bad government can be, a show of abuse & violation of the sacred trust of the public. Alas: that itself plays in to the modern insurrectionist Republican agenda, which seems to revolve around anti-governance and insurrection itself.

The sacred trust of the American public was violated when previous administrations turned Temporary Protected Status into de facto permanent residency without the consent of said public.

This member of the public thinks the entire immigration system is a racist joke, and welcomes any and every means of circumventing it.

what is happening is NOT government.

When you hear this:

"I grew up in IT !"

English translation:

"I grew up in Haiti"

Isn't this the town that Trump talked about people and dogs ?

Why this is not front page news on all media proves yet again the rich and powerful owns all mainstream media and want this country to become like East Germany before it fell.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com