Pierre Damas Bel was 20 years old. He came to the United States from Haiti to join his parents and pursue an education. He graduated from high school with honors, participated in JROTC, played soccer and dreamed of becoming a doctor.
Then the Trump administration terminated Temporary Protected Status for Haitians. Although Bel had a pending asylum claim, immigration authorities summoned him and placed a GPS monitor around his ankle.
Bel expressed that humiliation himself in an Instagram post on July 30: “I didn’t come here to commit a crime or hurt anyone. Yet now I’m walking through the streets of the United States with a GPS monitor on my leg, carrying a feeling of shame and humiliation that I never imagined I would experience.”
On Monday, Bel pulled his car onto the shoulder of Interstate 70 near Springfield, Ohio, got out and walked into traffic. A tractor-trailer struck and killed him. His grieving father refused to believe that he died by suicide.
I didn’t come here to commit a crime or hurt anyone. Yet now I’m walking through the streets of the United States with a GPS monitor on my leg, carrying a feeling of shame and humiliation that I never imagined I would experience.
Pierre Damas Bell
We should be cautious about drawing straight lines between government policy and an individual human tragedy. Suicide is complex, and only those closest to Bel knew everything he was carrying. But we must be equally careful not to look away from the burden our government deliberately placed upon him: fear, humiliation, uncertainty and the constant threat of expulsion to Haiti.
I know what that threat means.
I have spent most of my adult life telling stories about Haiti and its people, and for decades I traveled there as a journalist, as a publisher and sometimes just to visit home. During a 2021 reporting trip with my colleague Vania André, I asked our driver to pull over so we could send up a drone to capture a landscape I found haunting and strangely beautiful.
He said it was too dangerous.
The landscape looked perfectly tranquil, and I almost argued with him, but I thought better of it. Months later, the gang 400 Mawozo kidnapped 17 missionaries, including several Americans, in that exact part of the capital, Port-au-Prince.
I have not returned to my country since.
Haiti today is not merely experiencing political instability; it is unraveling. Armed groups control large swaths of Port-au-Prince. Families have been driven from their homes, schools and businesses have shuttered, and kidnappings and massacres are part of daily life.
The United States warns its citizens against traveling to Haiti. Yet Washington continues to deport Haitians to the island. Consider the moral contradiction: Haiti is deemed too dangerous for an American citizen to visit, but perfectly acceptable as a landing pad for people America chooses to expel.
Nobody is forcing the United States to send people like Bel there. The Trump administration is choosing to do so.
Many Haitians facing removal have spent years fleeing instability. Some left Haiti for Brazil, then moved to Chile as Brazil’s economy slowed. When doors closed there, they traveled north — through jungles and across borders — until they reached the United States.
Nobody is forcing the United States to send people like Bel there. The Trump administration is choosing to do so.
They settled in places like Indianapolis and Springfield, Ohio, where local industries needed workers. They took jobs in factories, warehouses, healthcare facilities and small businesses. Their children enrolled in local schools. They opened churches and barbershops, paid rent and taxes, and became our neighbors.
And now the government is telling them to leave.
We debate immigration in America as though it were strictly a numbers game: border encounters, deportation metrics, visa categories and court rulings. But government policy eventually arrives at someone’s front door.
It arrives as a GPS monitor around a 20-year-old’s ankle. It arrives when a mother wonders whether sending her child to school will alert immigration authorities or when a person who built a life in Ohio is forced to contemplate returning to a country where armed warlords control the road to his childhood neighborhood.
I have covered Haiti for more than three decades. I founded The Haitian Times because I believed Haitian lives deserved to be understood in their fullness, not merely as recurring victims of the latest catastrophe.
I founded The Haitian Times because I believed Haitian lives deserved to be understood in their fullness, not merely as recurring victims of the latest catastrophe.
I know Haiti’s resilience. But I have grown weary of that word. Resilience is too often the praise we offer when we have grown comfortable watching people suffer.
Pierre Damas Bel should have been allowed to build his future. Instead, at 20 years old, he appears to have been driven to despair by the threat of expulsion.
That was not inevitable. It the United States’ despicable choice.
If you or someone you know is in crisis, call or text 988 to reach the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline or chat live at 988lifeline.org. You can also visit SpeakingOfSuicide.com/resources for additional support.
The post I know Haiti well. The Trump administration placed a horrible burden on Pierre Damas Bel. appeared first on MS NOW.
