By NAN Staff Writer, NewsAmericas Now
News Americas, TALLAHASSEE, FL, Mon. August 24, 2026: Just days after clinching the Republican nomination for Florida governor, Caribbean roots Byron Donalds, is telling voters he’s personally working to stabilize Haiti, even as he defends the Trump administration’s decision to end Temporary Protected Status for more than 300,000 Haitians.
“I’ve actually had meetings with the transitional government and the ambassador for the transitional government,” Donalds, whose mother is of Jamaican and Panamanian heritage, told CBS’s Margaret Brennan on “Face the Nation” Sunday. “They’re working on security forces right now as we speak to begin to stabilize Haiti, they’ve gotten about a quarter to half of the country under control from the gangs that basically took over Haiti.”
The political tightrope
Brennan pressed him directly: the State Department itself tells Americans not to travel to Haiti under any circumstances, citing crime, kidnapping, terrorism and collapsed healthcare access, the exact conditions TPS exists to protect people from. Donalds didn’t dispute any of that. Instead, he leaned on his personal diplomatic engagement as the answer, while defending TPS’s expiration on principle. “You can’t do on immigration is just say that every program just runs into perpetuity, with no end,” he said, arguing open-ended protections create “the wrong incentives to make sure that people can return to their home country, stabilize that country, and make sure that it returns to normalcy.”
Whether that “stabilization” is actually close to happening is a separate question from whether Donalds is positioning himself carefully for it. Roughly 158,000 Haitian TPS holders lived in Florida as of January, according to Fwd.us, contributing an estimated $2.6 billion annually to the state’s economy, with about 93,000 working across agriculture, security and nursing. Elsewhere in the same interview, Donalds acknowledged replacing an estimated 35,000 Haitian workers would take time, floating adult re-education programs and youth apprenticeships as the eventual solution. Florida has more than 974,000 people of West Indian ancestry. That total includes more than 300,000 Jamaicans and more than 530,000 Haitians
The stakes behind Donalds’ comments became concrete this week as he campaigns for the general election this November. The U.S. deported more than 160 people to Haiti on Thursday, August 20th, the first deportation flight since the administration’s Supreme Court victory to end TPS for roughly 350,000 Haitians. The plane landed not in Port-au-Prince, but in the northern city of Cap-Haïtien, since the U.S. government currently bans commercial flights to the capital’s main airport through early September due to ongoing gang violence. Deportees arrived clad in white, many covering their faces for safety as journalists filmed, with most declining to speak, some out of fear of being targeted by gangs that control an estimated 70% of Port-au-Prince and territory well beyond it. The group included both TPS holders and Haitians who had served prison sentences, according to Jean Négot Bonheur Delva, director general of Haiti’s National Office of Migration. “It is not the Haitian state that asks for them to be sent back,” he said. “Our mission is to welcome migrants of forced return… We welcome them with the aim of accompanying them to their home.”
A pattern worth watching
Whether Donalds’ claim of active engagement with Haiti’s transitional government translates into anything concrete, or functions mainly as political cover heading into a general election where he’ll need votes well beyond his conservative base, including from Floridians with direct ties to Haiti, remains to be seen. It’s a familiar playbook: defend a hardline policy in principle while gesturing toward personal, behind-the-scenes effort to soften its edges, without committing to reversing the policy itself.
Haiti’s own transitional government has faced its own credibility questions on this front. A resurfaced 2025 video of Haiti’s Minister for Haitians Living Abroad, Kathia Verdier, promising robust reintegration support for returning TPS holders has drawn renewed public backlash in recent days, as deportations accelerate and many say those promises haven’t materialized on the ground.
NewsAmericasNow will continue tracking Byron Donalds’ campaign and developments affecting Haitian TPS holders.
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