This piece is part of a series on hemispheric approaches to anti-Haitianism.
On April 20, 1990, tens of thousands of Haitians and allies shut down the Brooklyn Bridge to protest a ban on Haitian immigrants donating blood in the United States. The Food and Drug Administration rule had taken effect months earlier, following guidance from the Centers for Disease Control that arbitrarily identified Haitians as among the primary transmitters of HIV. Marching from Brooklyn’s Grand Army Plaza to Wall Street with chants of “Down with the FDA“ and other slogans, the demonstrators were the most visible front in a groundswell of actions across the Haitian diaspora in the United States. The pressure worked. By December 1990, the FDA reversed the ban.
Amid the early days of the AIDS epidemic and the height of Haiti’s refugee crisis, U.S. policy stigmatized and scapegoated Haitian immigrants as a threat to the United States. Such tactics haven’t gone away more than three decades later. On September 14, during the presidential debate with Kamala Harris, Donald Trump accused Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, of eating people’s pets. Trump’s running mate, JD Vance, had already spread the rumor, even though he admitted he could not verify it. Vance said it was a good narrative to bring media attention to the Biden administration’s immigration policies. A sagging Republican ticket was looking for ways to re-energize their base.
In response, Haitian Americans and progressive organizations have decried this racist and xenophobic vitriol. But Trump and Vance’s accusation is more than just a slur: their comments are priming the extreme right in the United States to attack minority groups. We know from history that once an ethnic, religious, or racial group has been singled out, that group can more easily be eliminated through violence.
The only way Haitians will end this systematic attack on their communities is to organize and build alliances across ethnic, cultural, and racial groups with the aim of changing U.S. policy toward Haitians and all immigrants who are forced to leave their homes as a result of U.S. foreign policy. History, like the 1990 march on the Brooklyn Bridge, offers a precedent. As immigrants and progressives in the United States, we should not dismiss the attack on Haitian immigrants as mere campaign rhetoric that will go away after November 5. The possibility of a second Trump presidency makes it all the more urgent to organize and mobilize against fascist tendencies because immigrants from Haiti, Central America, and elsewhere, and every Black and Brown person in the United States, will be under attack.
A History of Mobilizing Against Anti-Haitian Policies
Beginning in the 1960s, Haitians were forced to flee the U.S.-backed regimes of “Papa Doc” Duvalier and his son, “Baby Doc,” together in power for 29 years. As one of the most repressive regimes in the Caribbean, the Duvaliers impoverished the rural population and ultimately laid the groundwork for the chaos in Haiti today: rampant gang violence and the internal displacement of over 700,000 Haitians.
Throughout the 1970s, tens of thousands of Haitian refugees fled by boat to South Florida, where they were detained and, in most cases, swiftly deported. In the 1980s, when a second cohort of refugees was fleeing the Duvalier dictatorship, the Reagan government implemented a new policy of intercepting boats carrying Haitian refugees at sea. Those who made it to the mainland were denied immigration parole and incarcerated in detention centers and federal prisons, such as in Brooklyn. In 1991, in the wake of the coup against Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the United States inaugurated Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, as a site to detain tens of thousands of Haitian refugees.
Meanwhile, in the early 1980s, the CDC incorrectly identified Haitians as high-risk for acquiring HIV. This CDC-sponsored stigmatization marked a massive setback for Haitian immigrants, who were already confronting discrimination and racism in the United States. As the media linked Haitian immigrants to AIDS, still a newly discovered and poorly understood deadly disease, it created havoc in the community. Poor Haitians who worked as maids, nannies, and in the service sector lost their jobs because employers were afraid to encounter them.
Throughout this period, the Haitian community never remained silent in the face of attacks on their human and civil rights. In response to the CDC designation, Haitian professional organizations in the health sector and beyond held regular protests to pressure scientists to rectify their claims. At the same time, many progressive organizations mobilized against anti-Haitian detention and deportation policies. Haitian groups joined forces with African American organizations such as the NAACP, Operation PUSH, which was led by Jesse Jackson; Labor Unions such as SEIU Local 1199 representing the healthcare sector in New York City, DC 37, Unite, and ILGWU; the American Civil Liberties Union, and several religious denominations to lobby the federal government for the release of detained Haitian immigrants.
The National Coalition for Haitian Refugees organized several marches to Washington, DC, to lobby Congress and the Carter and Reagan administrations to grant the “boat people” political asylum. After these efforts successfully forced the Reagan administration to conditionally release nearly 2,000 Haitian asylum seekers in 1982, Haitian grassroots organizations continued to mobilize to demand access to resources for the community, such as bilingual education, housing, welfare, and medical aid. One of the most significant victories these groups obtained from the federal government was the granting of temporary work permits to Haitian immigrants awaiting a final decision on their status.
By the early 1990s, increasing numbers of Haitian immigrants had become naturalized citizens, and many children of immigrants had come of age. As a result of these two factors, the community continued to empower itself, and new forms of coalition began to emerge. These coalitions were more politically active, and the children of the first- and second-wave immigrants were in leadership positions.
Within these movements, a critical mass of educated second-generation Haitian Americans had a better understanding of the U.S. political system. Some began organizing the community to vote in local school board elections and sponsored their leaders to run for other elected offices. These individuals played a major role in bringing several progressive organizations to march with the community across the Brooklyn Bridge on April 20, 1990 to challenge the FDA’s ban on Haitian blood donations—one of the largest demonstrations ever held by Haitians in New York. According to some estimates, some 100,000 people marched that day, shutting down the Brooklyn Bridge to vehicular traffic during rush hour to bring the city’s attention to this issue. When the FDA rescinded its ban in response to the march a few months later, the community no longer felt stigmatized and outcast.
Nothing Can Stop Us
Although one of the goals of the Brooklyn Bridge demonstration was to seek the support of the New York business community to have the FDA lift the ban on Haitians donating blood, the march created a more lasting impact. Haitian immigrants realized that they had the potential to organize the community to influence local and national politics. Since this massive mobilization for their dignity and respect, Haitian immigrants in New York City have successfully organized against police brutality, for better schools, and for the right to elect their own representatives to state offices.
This community organizing was not restricted to issues affecting Haitian immigrants in the United States. In 1991, there were protests in New York—with tens of thousands once again taking the Brooklyn Bridge—and Washington, DC, against the military coup that overthrew President Aristide. These protests eventually led the Clinton administration to bring Aristide back to Haiti in 1994. Today, despite the turmoil Haiti is facing, organizations all over the United States have come together to protest U.S. support for another occupying force in Haiti, as well as U.S. support for a government whose members collude with gangs.
As we march toward the U.S. presidential election, I know that Haitian Americans and progressives may feel tired and discouraged after all these attacks. Despite these testing moments, there is a ray of hope for Haitian Americans who have been organizing to change the U.S. narrative on Haiti and their communities in the United States. As we have seen in recent days in Miami’s Little Haiti, Haitian Americans are coming out in large numbers to vote in the presidential election, showing that the attacks on their brothers and sisters in Springfield will not discourage them from mobilizing to protect their civil rights. And as is evident from the mobilizations in the context of AIDS, the release of the refugees from prison and detention in the 1980s, and the departure of corrupt regimes in Haiti, once we pull our forces together, nothing can stop us. Whether Harris or Trump is elected, a new march on the Brooklyn Bridge is more than needed.
François Pierre-Louis is a professor of Political Science at Queens College City University of New York. His research interests are immigration, citizen participation, and Haitian politics. He has been organizing with the Faith in Action network since 1996.
