Expect conflict when President-elect Donald Trump revokes, as planned, the “Temporary Protected Status (TPS)” program that President Joe Biden massively expanded to shield almost one million immigrants from deportation. Biden did so on grounds that these illegally present immigrants cannot be returned to, as the New York Times recently put it, “dangerous and deeply troubled countries.”

But Trump opponents have sold the American public on an entirely bogus propaganda narrative. The key premise of their legal and rhetorical arguments is that TPS-protected people are fleeing home-nation death traps to which it would be cruel, inhumane, and deeply immoral to forcibly return them. Already, legacy news outlets have taken that ball and run with it, describing the many horrors that supposedly await the roughly 700,000 TPS arrivals that came in during the great Biden mass migration crisis (2021-present). These include the 350,000 TPS-covered Venezuelans who mostly crossed the U.S. Southern border, the 300,000 from Haiti who did the same, and 50,000 from Ukraine.

“Deporting people to dangerous countries could amount to a death sentence,” wrote Raul A. Reyes, a pro-illegal immigration editorialist in a November 25 column for The Hill. “Look at Haiti, which in recent years has suffered civil unrest, gang violence, earthquakes and hurricanes. Sending migrants back into such dire conditions would likely constitute a violation of basic human rights.”

But what Reyes didn’t say, and what most Americans probably don’t know, is that Haitians, Venezuelans, and Ukrainians never came from those terrible home countries and were perfectly safe for years in other prosperous countries that granted them asylum, residency, and work authorizations—or otherwise tolerated their presence off-book.

With a little diplomatic muscle, the incoming Trump Administration can, in good conscience, return these TPS recipients to the comparative nirvanas they abandoned in their gambits to easily upgrade to the far richer American lifestyle when Biden opened the border in early 2021.

The Haitians

Take Haiti first, since Reyes mentioned it as the horror show that it is.

In all likelihood, almost none of the hundreds of thousands of Haitians who entered the United States under Biden had lived in their homeland in many years. Chile and Brazil took in hundreds of thousands of Haitians over the decade preceding Biden. The many hundreds of Haitians whom I interviewed on the migrant trails said they only left Chile and Brazil upon seeing Biden open the Southern border.

The South American country had taken in as many as 237,000 Haitians over the years before Biden granted asylum, residency cards, and work permits to any who asked. Many more than that probably lived there unregistered, but tolerated.

Meanwhile, Haitians made up the largest immigrant nationality in the formal labor market in Brazil. In 2019, Brazilian agencies reported 128,968 were welcomed in since 2010 and were issued 90,607 work permits.

That is why I have never met a single Haitian on the migrant trails who’d felt fear in Haiti for many years; every one of these native Creole-speakers I met had lived long enough in Chile to have learned fluent Spanish or spoke Portuguese learned in Brazil. They all told me they made decent livings at jobs and bore children who became Chilean and Brazilian citizens and carried those passports.

No one should feel sorry for Haitians returned to these two countries, for they all told me they appreciated these places and had no tales of human rights abuses to offer—though I always asked.

None of my interviewees said they left Chile and Brazil because the coronavirus pandemic hurt the economies of either country. By the time Biden took office, Chile boasted the continent’s strongest economy, which drew economic migrants seeking opportunity, according to the CIA’s World Fact Book. Brazil ranked as the world’s eighth largest economy and was strongly rebounding from the pandemic by 2021.

Every Haitian I’ve ever interviewed openly admitted they decided to abandon these comparatively good, safe countries for an easy upgrade to the world-famed American lifestyle, an opportunity Biden gave them when he began letting all comers in to stay, then quickly provided TPS to shield them from deportation. Simply irresistible.

Burn Your I.D.

For these new arrivals to disclose to American immigration officials that they were safe and sound in other countries would disqualify them for TPS, U.S. asylum, and humanitarian parole programs. So, how to dodge this little personal history problem?

Easy: lie. Say you came directly from Haiti and throw away the contrary evidence. I saw this happen constantly.

The evidence came in the form of hundreds of Chilean residency cards and Brazilian passports bearing Haitian faces and littering the U.S. and Mexico sides of the Rio Grande border. Torn. Burned. Twisted. Or just left in the dirt.

One story emblematic of many I heard from Haitians came from a 24-year-old Haitian man I met at a hostel full of his countrymen in the far northwestern Costa Rica town of La Cruz in 2021.

He and his brother sheltered in place in Santiago, Chile, four years earlier, in late 2016, as Trump was swearing on the campaign trail to deport illegal immigrants. While waiting out the Trump years, the young man told me he found work as a baker and an Uber Eats driver. He and his brother made good money and built their smuggling savings fund. The brother was already in the U.S. and flagged him to come too.

I wondered aloud if something bad in Chile pushed him to escape north.

“Did the government of Chile ever threaten you?” I asked, recording the conversation.

“No, that never happened there.”

“So, you were never afraid?

“No, never.”

This fellow had loved Chile. He showed me iPhone videos of beautiful Chilean beaches he’d enjoyed and others depicting urban Santiago nightlife. His work afforded him his favorite fashionable clothing brands on the internet.

“It’s a nice country,” he said of Chile.

The brothers only decided to abandon that nice life because the Biden win “makes it easier to get into the States.”

“It’s the reason,” he added.

Asked how he would compare his Santiago life to the one he left in Haiti, he promptly answered: “A thousand times better.”

Then why come to the United States border now, when his life in Chile was so peaceful and non-threatening? I asked.

“Because,” he said, chuckling, “life in the United States will be a million times better.”

Every Haitian I have interviewed since 2021 described circumstances that made them patently ineligible for TPS. They can be safely deported back to Chile and Brazil and, indeed, would definitely prefer those countries to Haiti.

The deportability of TPS-covered Haitians to safe third countries that already had them for years extends to just about every Venezuelan I have interviewed too. The destination options for them are numerous.

The Venezuelans

I’ve met a very small number of Venezuelans coming directly from their home country. The vast majority had been living happily, comfortably, safely, and often very prosperously—for years—in the warm embrace of Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Argentina, or a dozen other Latin American countries known more for vacation appeal than persecution.

Since 2016, in fact, more than seven million Venezuelans fled the Nicolas Maduro dictatorship and disastrous national financial collapse to live in 17 different Latin American countries, the majority in next-door Colombia. Those are the ones who crossed the U.S. border and got the TPS deportation shield, according to my many interviews with them.

Then, years into their relatively happy exiles, in 2021 the American government invited a massive rush by letting them all in at the Southern border on asylum and humanitarian parole claims, and then granted them TPS on the phony grounds that they needed protection from…the Venezuela they hadn’t seen in four, five, six, eight, or even 10 years.

I reported this mass fraud in a May 3, 2023 video for the Center for Immigration Studies under the headline, “U.S. Enabling Mass Asylum and Humanitarian Permit Fraud at the Southern Border,” based on a representative sampling of videotaped interviews with Venezuelans on the trails. They all told me they hadn’t lived in Venezuela for many years and were gainfully employed, attending colleges, or raising children in safe secure homes in next-door countries like Colombia, Peru, and Ecuador.

“I loooved Ecuador! It’s beautiful. The people are very kind,” said one well-appointed Venezuelan woman I met in Juarez who had just received U.S. permission to enter on a humanitarian protection permit, as though she had just escaped torture and starvation in Venezuela.

Hardly. She smiled widely at the good memories of living the last seven years in Quito, Ecuador, where she’d made a decent living managing a Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant. She loved every minute of life there.

“They have a lot of values. The fruit, in particular, is very good. Anything with onions over there is good, spicy,” she said, beaming. “It’s a very generous place, a very beautiful place.”

She and her boyfriend only decided to abandon Ecuador’s tasty food, picturesque landscapes, and kind moral people upon learning that the Americans were letting everyone in to notch up an even richer life.

Knowing all of this, how then could any TPS-fraud advocate argue that deporting Venezuelans to Argentina, Ecuador, Colombia, or the Caribbean islands is cruel and inhumane? No problem, for the ignorant or mendacious.

Top U.S. government officials push this fraudulent narrative all the time.

“The living conditions in Venezuela reveal a country in turmoil, unable to protect its own citizens,” Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas asserted in a March 2021 statement announcing TPS coverage to Venezuelans who were by then pouring over the Southern border and being allowed to stay. “It is in times of extraordinary and temporary circumstances like these that the United States steps forward to support eligible Venezuelan nationals already present here, while their home country seeks to right itself out of the current crisis.”

Mayorkas repeated this demonstrably false narrative—and practically every major U.S. outlet reiterated it without critique—when he extended the TPS protection in 2023 to cover hundreds of thousands more Venezuelans who subsequently crossed over to exploit the gaping Southern border. Among them were some who told me in interviews that they were coming to get their own now-famed TPS shield from deportation—an alluring incentive unto itself.

The same narratives were used to frame TPS for Ukrainians crossing the U.S.-Mexico border, as though they had nowhere else to take refuge. That, of course, is pure fable. The European Union bestowed upon all Ukrainians the exceptional generosity of a three-year subsidized residency to live and work in all 26 of the E.U.’s most secure and developed economies right next door. The U.K. offered those bells and whistles plus a 350-pound monthly stipend to British families who take in Ukrainians.

The Trump Administration will, of course, need diplomatic finesse to get countries to take back their former residents. But the administration and its supporters should know that doomsday predictions about removing TPS from the most numerous nationalities are simply invalid—a flagrant public lie. Deportations after TPS is removed will not send immigrants back into harm’s way; they will send at least three quarters of the one million TPS-protected migrants back to safe, happy places they liked for years—places which, by all accounts, liked them back.