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Author: Paul Doran
US tells Haiti: "No HOPE, no HELP
Credit: Haiti Times
Haiti is undoubtedly the most immiserated country in the Americas. Beset throughout its history with the pernicious legacy of slavery and colonial exploitation, corrupt politics, an underdeveloped plantation economy, vast wealth and income disparities between the black majority and the mulatto elite, and a vulnerability to natural disasters, Haiti is now a failed state by any reasonable definition of the phrase.
The Haitian state – what is left of it – has lost control of security, justice, and the basic provision of social services to its population. In 2024, organized criminal gangs stormed Haiti's two largest prisons and broke out thousands of violent inmates, many of whom became willing assassins for the multiple business-backed gangs which now rule large parts of Port-au-Prince and the other urban centres. Also in 2024, it became clear that with an economy that is effectively defunct, around 5.4 million are at acute risk of food insecurity, nearly half of the country's population.
The United States has – for better or worse – intervened in Haiti when the domestic situation became untenable. In 1991, when a military coup overthrew reformist President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, triggering repression and famine, a US-led a military intervention restored democracy. The United States also threw its weight behind the United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti [MINUSTAH] as a way to stabilize Haiti without bearing the full military and political costs alone. The US – under Presidents Clinton, Bush senior, Bush junior, and Obama – framed MINUSTAH as necessary for hemispheric security and keeping Haiti stable enough to avoid mass refugee flows, the use of its territory by drug cartels, and political contagion.
The latest international efforts to stabilize the country have faltered, if not failed outright. A Kenyan-led "Multinational Security Support" [MSS] was dispatched but lacks the mandate, the resources, and the coordination to assert control by taking on the gangs. Earlier this year, the UN Security Council approved the creation of a "gang-suppression force" of 5,000 personnel with arrest powers which could operate independently of Haitian authority, a clear recognition that the State can no longer perform core functions. By mid-2025, only around 1,000 personnel had been mustered for the force, which is not "blue-helmeted" and is therefore not funded from the UN's peace-keeping budget and relies instead on individual country donations.
By the time of the first Trump administration, Haiti had already began to drift from Washington's attention. Early on, Trump terminated the Temporary Protected Status [TPS] for Haitian nationals arguing – some would say correctly – that the conditions that justified such protections of the devastating 2010 earthquake no longer existed. Others, mainly economists and aid and development specialists disagreed.
Haiti policy in Trump's second term has hardened even further. Earlier in 2025, the US revoked a humanitarian parole scheme allowing Haitians to enter or remain in the US under safety provisions and it reimposed travel bans on most Haitians under sweeping security rationales.
To be sure, it is a legitimate argument – albeit one which is devoid of compassion and morality – that the United States can no longer accept an influx of migrants from Haiti [although mythologies around Haitian immigrants to the US eating local pets is probably a better illustration of the underlying motives being social and racial, rather than security focused].
But it is very hard to understand the political calculus for the United States' decision on 1 October 2025 not to renew the Hemispheric Opportunity through Partnership Encouragement [HOPE] and the later Haiti Economic Lift Program [HELP] initiatives. These are US trade preference programs designed to support Haiti's textiles and apparel sector, historically one of the few large scale formal employers in the country. According to the Wall Street Journal, allowing HOPE and HELP to expire
". . . is expected to crush what is left of Haiti's biggest industry, which accounted for 90% of exports in a country mired in a gang war that has stoked hunger, generated a refugee crisis and left the government teetering on the brink of collapse. . . Haitian businesses said the end of the program will deepen poverty and bolster gang recruitment while costing jobs in factories that produce clothing for well-known brands—including Hanes, Calvin Klein, Gap and Victoria’s Secret—as the industry relocates to Asia. The development could force desperate Haitians to flee to the Dominican Republic or board flimsy boats to other nations".
The HOPE / HELP preferences previously allowed for duty-free entry into the US for finished garments, overwhelmingly made with US grown cotton and other fabrics. The revenues generated for Haitian apparel workers was then spent on buying food and consumer goods largely from the US.
Allowing HOPE / HELP trade preferences to expire is just plain dumb. It reveals a Haiti policy in Washington that is cruelly indifferent to Haitian lives but is also strategically incoherent per se. The engineered lapse of these preferences at a moment of unprecedented political and humanitarian collapse is an act of policy vandalism. It guts Haiti's last functioning export sector, guarantees further social disintegration, and ensures more people will flee northward, precisely the kind of migration crisis Washington claims it wants to avoid.
Nor does the decision serve US businesses. Haiti’s apparel plants supplied affordable garments for the American consumer market. Removing trade preferences shifts production elsewhere at higher costs, while ceding influence to Asian competitors. For decades, American policymakers understood that a stable Haiti was in the US' own best interests, not out of charity but out of realpolitik: instability in the Caribbean basin inevitably spills across US borders.
Instead, the Trump administration has opted for a gesture of racially tinged contempt. Its Haiti policy is rooted in ideology — a reflexive hostility to multilateralism and foreign assistance, and a disdain for "shit hole" countries — and a wilful amnesia about America's own role in Haiti's tortured history. It also ignores strategic logic and economic pragmatism. The result is a short-sighted, self-defeating policy that betrays both Haitian workers and American interests. In abandoning HOPE / HELP, Washington has not just abandoned Haiti, it has also undermined itself. The administration should reverse this policy immediately.
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