Haitians Are Settling Along California-Mexico Border, Despite Concerns Over Anti-Immigrant Politics

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n San Diego’s City Heights neighborhood, one recent day, Rosemarthe Pierre, 37, was among dozens of immigrants spilling out the doors into the sunshine after morning English classes at the city’s College of Continuing Education.

Pierre, an asylum seeker from Haiti, said she’s been studying here for a year and hopes learning English will help her find a job once her work permit is approved.

Speaking through an interpreter in her native Haitian Creole, Pierre said she fled her country when it plunged into turmoil following the assassination of President Jovenel Moïse in 2021. Gang members killed her husband before he could get out, but with the help of family, Pierre was able to bring her daughter, now 13, to the U.S., she said.

Pierre and her daughter are among more than 300,000 Haitians who have been granted temporary humanitarian parole — and an opportunity to apply for asylum — in the U.S. since January 2023.

The vast majority who come through Tijuana and San Diego travel on to jobs or loved ones in other cities, but a few thousand, including Pierre, are putting down roots here.

Yet even as they work to build more secure new lives in the U.S., Haitians are confronting a new kind of crisis — the barrage of anti-immigrant rhetoric from the Republican presidential campaign of Donald Trump, who targeted Haitians in Ohio last month with outlandish and false accusations of eating other peoples’ pets.

This week Trump told NewsNation that, if elected, he would revoke Temporary Protected Status, a humanitarian legal protection, and deport the Haitians living in Springfield, Ohio.

“Absolutely I’d revoke it,” he said. “What’s happening there is horrible … You have to remove the people. We cannot destroy our country.”

Trump’s attacks set Pierre on edge. And though his claim that Haitians were making meals of cats and dogs was patently untrue, she felt a need to rebut it.

“That’s something that I’ve never done. Never,” she said. “I don’t know where this comes from. But my parents raised me well. I would never in my life do something like that.”

‘The scars could take years to heal’

Across the street from the college, a cluster of Haitians gathered on their lunch breaks in the parking lot of El Super, a supermarket specializing in Latin American products. One man served up generous portions of rice and stewed crab from pots in the back of his minivan while others chatted.

Even though it was weeks after Trump and his running mate, Sen. J.D. Vance, first made the anti-Haitian slurs, the men were still venting their frustration and fear, said Jeef Nelson, a community advocate with the nonprofit Haitian Bridge Alliance, who joined in the conversation.

“They feel hurt. They feel betrayed to hear speech like that coming out of the mouth of a presidential candidate,” Nelson said. “It’s going to have ugly repercussions on the Haitian population. And the scars could take years to heal.”

But Zachee St. Vil, a father of three with a small moving company in San Diego, said he’d lived through much worse. Standing in the shade, he chalked up Trump’s comments to electioneering and decided not to let it get to him.

“There’s the Democrat and the Republican. One says one thing, and one says another,” said St. Vil, 52, speaking in Spanish. “But in a democracy, once the voting is over, the country unites and peace can return. We all need peace.”

In St. Vil’s life, peace hasn’t always been a given. He said he left Haiti 25 years ago when police violence and insecurity became intolerable. For years, he made a home in Venezuela, but then that country, too, fell into economic and political collapse. So four years ago, he and his family journeyed on to California, crossing the border illegally. They eventually received protection from deportation and were given work permits — but no pathway to citizenship — under a humanitarian program called Temporary Protected Status.

Then tragedy struck. St. Vil’s son, a popular and promising basketball player, drowned on a trip to the beach just days after his high school graduation. Two years on, St. Vil is still gripped by grief. Yet he said he’s found San Diego to be a welcoming place that’s finally provided his family with a baseline of security.

“I can build my business here. I feel safe to go outside at any hour,” he said. “Compared to other countries, it’s a lot better here.”

Haitians have integrated

But on the presidential campaign trail, Trump and Vance have not backed off their inflammatory, racialized claims that immigrants are “invading” and “poisoning the blood” of the country.

At rallies, Trump has declared that immigrants are “attacking villages and towns” and that predominantly white Midwestern communities “will be transformed into a Third World hellhole.”

San Diego County Supervisor Nora Vargas calls that rhetoric “disgusting.”

“Using this as a talking point to get votes, I think, signifies the racism that exists,” said Vargas, whose district hugs the border and includes City Heights, one of San Diego’s most diverse neighborhoods and home to a large share of immigrants and refugees.

“We need to set the record straight that Haitians who are in the United States have integrated,” she said. “They’re doing their work, they’re participating.”

Today, at the U.S.–Mexico border, almost all Haitians are arriving legally through a process established last year by the Biden administration that lets migrants in Mexico make appointments on a cellphone app and be vetted by U.S. border officials for parole. Once in the U.S., they’re put into immigration court proceedings, where they can make a claim for asylum.

In Haiti, decades of political instability, dire poverty, natural disasters and weak civic institutions have led to a grave crisis, Amnesty International declared this year. Criminal gangs now control most of Port au Prince and have unleashed terrifying violence.

“It’s not that people want to leave. But they cannot stay. They can’t see a future in such chaos,” said Nelson, of the Haitian Bridge Alliance. “It’s not safe. Everybody’s living day by day, knowing that the next day they might die.”

Nelson came to the U.S. in 2018 when he was invited to be a research assistant for a California professor he had met through his job as an office manager at a Haitian university. He said his six-month position was renewed, and he eventually was able to obtain a green card and U.S. citizenship.

Now he works to support the Haitians who’ve settled in San Diego, as well as newly arrived migrants who are heading on to other destinations. (His organization, Haitian Bridge Alliance, also recently filed a criminal complaint in Ohio against Donald Trump over the incendiary pet-eating allegations.)

A recent report (PDF) on refugees and asylees in San Diego County found that between 2,700 and 4,700 Haitians had settled in the area between autumn of 2020 and summer of 2023.

However, not all the Haitians arriving at the border are entering the U.S. San Diego’s small Haitian community, which is mirrored by a similar one in Tijuana. An estimated 5,000 Haitians have settled there, beginning in 2016.

‘My American dream has evaporated’

One of those is Vivianne Petit Frere. She left Haiti in 2019 when mass protests over skyrocketing fuel prices led to a political crisis and crackdown. She settled first in Brazil, then made it to Mexico in 2021. The journey — through 10 countries and across the perilous jungle of the Darien Gap — took five months, she said.

“We came here to cross into the U.S.,” she said. “You know everyone has their American dream.”

However, three years later, Petit Frere has put down roots and become an anchor of the Haitian community in Tijuana. She runs a restaurant downtown called Lakou Lakay. The phrase translates from Haitian Creole as the patio or courtyard of a home — a place for people to gather.

“Haitians are the best at cooking rice,” Petit Frere said, serving up a plate heaped with a rice and beans dish, fried chicken, fried green plantain and a spicy, pickled cabbage slaw called pikliz. “I want Mexicans to learn how delicious Haitian food is.”

The restaurant — with aqua green walls, bright yellow beams, blue chairs and photographs of Caribbean beaches — is not only a place for Mexicans to taste a bit of Haiti but also an informal gathering spot for Tijuana Haitians, who know they are welcome to come in and sit down, whether or not they order anything. It’s also Petit Frere’s informal office.

“I’m a mother, a businesswoman, a student and a social worker,” she said, opening up her laptop at a back table. Petit Frere is studying for a degree in social work at the University of Baja California. And she’s become the Tijuana community organizer for the Haitian Bridge Alliance.

Earlier that morning, she and her husband delivered a carload of diapers and other baby supplies to a maternal health clinic serving migrants of all backgrounds.

“We help other community groups, and they help us,” she said. “We support them with donations, translation, whatever we can. And they provide things like health services and legal aid to Haitian migrants.”

Petit Frere feels that Haitians are treated with respect in Tijuana, though she said the Mexican government is sometimes slow to respond to their needs. Still, she’s become a legal permanent resident of Mexico, a process that’s somewhat easier than in the U.S.

Tijuana is where she met her husband, Joseph Saint, who’s also from Haiti. Together, they’re raising three children from their past marriages. … and a toddler who was born in Mexico.

“My son, who was born in Haiti, came here as a small child, so now he behaves like a Mexican,” she said. “And I have my Mexican daughter as well, so I see myself as part of this community. My life is here now.”

Now, when she looks at the United States, she said she sees a presidential candidate stirring up fear and revulsion toward Haitian immigrants. And she sees a culture where people’s lives revolve around making money and chasing material things rather than building community.

“My American dream has evaporated,” she said. “The United States has so many contradictions. I realized that over there, you never really belong. … I feel more free here.”