Haiti – Black and Brown Immigrants Belong in America’s 250th Anniversary

This July 4, 2026, the United States turns 250 years old. There will be fireworks, parades, and speeches about the ideals written into the Declaration of Independence: that All People are created EQUAL, and that Liberty is a birthright. However, this anniversary is an invitation to ask a difficult question: Who actually built the country being celebrated, and who id being asked to carry its unfinished promises today?

The honest question is that Black and Brown immigrants have been present at every chapter of the USA’s story. Not as an afterthought. But as builders, defenders, and drivers of its progress. And nowhere is that truer, or less told, than with Haiti.

Then and Today, Haitians help carry the Promise of Liberty

Most U.S. nationals have never heard of the chasseurs-volontaires de Saint-Domingue. In October 1779, more than 500 free men of color from the French colony of Saint-Domingue – while in the midst of the Revolution for Liberty themselves – sailed to Savannah, Georgia, and fought alongside U.S. revolutionaries against the British. It remains one of the largest units of soldiers of African descent to serve in the Revolutionary War. And it didn’t end there.

A generation later, the Haitian Revolution reshaped the map of the United States itself. Napoleon Bonaparte had planned to use Saint-Domingue as the anchor of a North American empire. Hen Haitians revolutionaries defeated his army, he abandoned that ambition and sold the Louisiana territory to the United States in 1803, doubling the size of the young nation almost overnight. USA, as we know it geographically today, exists in part because Haitians fought for their own freedom and, in doing so, changed the fate of a country not their own.

That is the deeper truth beneath the United States of America’s 250 th anniversary: this nation’s freedom, its physical shape and its thriving economy were never built by one people alone. They were in a relationship with Black and Brown people who came from somewhere else and who kept showing up.

The pattern set in Savannah repeated for two and a half centuries. Black and Brown immigrants dug canals, built railroads, staffed hospitals, taught in classrooms, fought in every US war since, and started small businesses that anchor Main Streets across the country. Haitian Immigrants and their children have become nurses and home health aides caring for seniors, engineers, small business owners, entertainers, and civic leaders in Miami, New York, Boston, and beyond,

Immigrants from across the Caribbean, Africa, Latin America and Arab have paid taxes, raised citizen children, and invested in communities that, in many cases, and contribute shaping this country celebrating its 250th Anniversary, with the Sword of Damocles hanging over their heads today—the threat of losing everything and being separated from their families because of the last week Supreme Court’s two rulings: TPS and Birthright Citizenship.

Today, two Rulings, One Contradiction

Birthright citizenship has been part of the Constitution for more than 150 years, guaranteeing that every child born on U.S. soil is automatically a citizen. It is one of the country’s most important commitments to fairness — the idea that where you are born, not who your parents are, determines your place in the American family. So when the Supreme Court recently affirmed birthright citizenship, after the administration tried to undo it by executive order on day one, it was the right outcome. But it was also a split decision, and split decisions on a settled constitutional guarantee should alarm everyone who cares about it.

That alarm became concrete just one week later, when the  Court ruled in the TPS cases affecting Haiti and Syria. The Court held that the “No Judicial review” clause in the TPS statute blocks courts from using the Administrative Procedure Act to stop the government from ending TPS protection, even for terminations that TPS holders argue were driven by racial animus. The Practical result is devastating for nearly 400,000 citizen children who could now see their parents deported, even though those exact children are the same citizens the court just went out of its way to protect in the birthright ruling.

Read together, the two rulings expose the contradiction at the heart of this moment. A child’s citizenship is untouchable. But that same child’s parent can be taken away. The Child doesn’t lose the Constitution’s promise. They just lose their mother or father, or both. It is the present-tense consequence of a ruling handed down last week, layered onto an administration that has poured hundreds of millions into ICE and CPD enforcement, funded in part by cuts to health care.

It is worth being precise about what the TPS ruling did and did not do, because headlines have blurred the line. The Court limited one legal pathway — APA lawsuits — for challenging TPS terminations. It did not resolve the constitutional claim that the terminations of TPS for Haiti and Syria were motivated by racial discrimination; that fight continues in court. Nothing about anyone’s status changes today because of this ruling. Terminations still follow a legal process with dates and formal notice. That distinction matters because in moments like this, fear and misinformation move faster than facts — and fear is what leads people to make devastating decisions: quitting jobs, missing school pickups, signing away rights, falling for scammers charging fake “emergency filing fees” that do not exist.

What does history demand from USA Now

Two hundred fifty years ago, Haitian soldiers crossed an ocean to fight for a country’s freedom that was not yet theirs. Today, Haitian families — many of them protected for years under Temporary Protected Status, working legally, raising U.S. citizen children, paying into the systems that sustain this country — are being told that their belonging is conditional, revocable, and disposable.

The profound historical obligation this nation holds toward Black and brown immigrants—specifically the people of Haiti—stands in stark contrast to the precarious and immediate threats currently imperiling these very communities. A 250th anniversary is not just a celebration of the past; it is a test of whether the nation intends to live up to its founding promise going forward — for the people who have always helped build it.

Congress is the only institution that can permanently fix what the courts cannot. A permanent pathway to citizenship for TPS holders is not a talking point; it is the only way to prevent the birthright citizenship ruling from becoming, in practice, a guarantee of mass family separation. Without it, nearly 400,000 American children remain at risk of losing their parents — not their citizenship, but their families — because of decisions made in Washington, not because of anything they or their parents did wrong.

If America’s 250th anniversary means anything, it should mean an honest reckoning with who built this country and who continues to build it. Haiti helped secure American independence in 1779 and reshaped its map in 1803. Black and brown immigrants have been rebuilding and renewing this country in every generation since, including this one.

The commemoration belongs to them too. So does the promise.