Letters from an American - February 3, 2026

Episode Date: February 4, 2026

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February 3, 26. Yesterday, the day before Homeland Security Secretary, Christy Noem's termination of Haiti's temporary protected status or TPS designation, U.S. District Court Judge Anna C. Rays stopped that termination until a pending court case worked its way through the courts. At stake, first of all, were the lives of about 353,000 Haitians living legally in the United States since the catastrophic Haitian earthquake of 2010, whom the termination of that status would render undocumented overnight. The impact on their lives would also affect their families, friends, and employers. Also at stake, though, is Trump administration officials rejection of both facts and the rule of law

on which the United States was founded in order to advance their white nationalist ideology? As Judge Rays explains, Congress established temporary protective status in 1990 to change previously haphazard executive decisions about whether to receive immigrants from disaster-stricken countries that left recipients unclear about their immigration status. In its place, Congress created a system of temporary status that was predictable, dependable, and insulated from a state. electoral politics. It established criteria and a process for designating a country under TPS, accepting applications for immigration under TPS, and reviewing that designation periodically to determine if that designation should be extended. The system leaves to the Secretary of Homeland Security

the power to evaluate those extensions. And yet, the judge explains, Secretary Nome, ignored the process and the criteria, instead relying on ideology. On December 1st, 2025, Noam posted, I just met with the president. I am recommending a full travel ban on every damn country that's been flooding our nation with killers, leeches, and entitlement junkies.

Our forefathers built this nation on blood, sweat, and the unyielding love of freedom. not for foreign invaders to slaughter our heroes, suck dry our hard-earned tax dollars, or snatch the benefits owed to Americans. We don't want them, not one. Nome's statements echo those of President Donald J. Trump, who referred to Haiti as a shi-hue country

and tried to end TPS for people from Haiti beginning in 2017. During the 2024 campaign, Trump falsely accused Haitian immigrants of eating the dogs, eating the cats, and eating the pets of people who live in Springfield, Ohio. He insisted he would revoke Haiti's TPS designation and send immigrants back to their country. Five Haitian TPS holders sued to stop the administration from ending their protected status, claiming Nome ignored the legal procedures because of her hostility to non-white immigrants. Rays says Noam did indeed ignore the law

and that it seems substantially likely she did so because of her white nationalist ideology, noting that Noem has terminated all 12 TPS designations that have reached her desk. But, as Reyes points out, the facts simply don't match their ideology. TPS holders participate in the workforce at the exceptionally high rate of 94.6%.

Far from being killers, leeches, and entitlement junkies, the plaintiffs in the case challenging Nome's decision are a neuroscientist researching Alzheimer's disease, a software engineer at a national bank, a toxicology lab assistant, a college economics major, and a registered nurse. When Nome claimed that it was contrary to the national interest to permit about 350,000 Haitian immigrants to stay in the country until it is safe

to go back to Haiti," Ray's noted. She characterized them as criminals without any actual evidence. She also ignored the public's interest in the fact that Haitian TPS holders pay $1.3 billion a year in taxes and that through their work in sectors that are desperate for laborers, they add about $3.4 billion to the U.S. economy annually. They are deeply embedded in their communities, and tearing them out would shatter families and work sites. There is an old adage among lawyers, Rae's wrote, as she decided against the Trump administration. If you have the facts on your side, pound the facts. If you have the law on your side, pound the law. If you have neither, pound the table.

Secretary Nome, the record to date shows does not have the facts on her side or at least has ignored them, does not have the law on her side, or at least has ignored it. Having neither, she pounds X, formerly known as Twitter. Christy Nome has a First Amendment right to call immigrants, killers, leeches, entitlement junkies, and any other in-app name she wants. Secretary Nome, however, is constrained by both our Constitution and the Administrative Procedure Act to apply faithfully the facts to the law in implementing the TPS program. The record to date shows she has yet to do that. In the conflict between reality and white nationalist ideology, reality appears to be gaining ground. Americans do not like federal agents from Immigrations and Customs

enforcement and border patrol terrorizing their streets, detaining children, and shooting American citizens. As G. Eliot Morris noted in strength in numbers on Sunday, a new Fox News poll shows that Americans support Democrats over Republicans on a generic ballot at higher percentages than they have since the survey began. 52% of the vote for Democrats to 46% for Republicans. That 52% for Democrats is the highest support recorded for either party. Democrats hit the polls previous high in October 2017 at 50%. Morris notes Democrats are firmly in wave territory for November's elections. Republicans are trying to regain support by seeming to back off their extremism.

Although they are not backing far, not a single Republican showed up for public forum held today in Washington, D.C., by Senator Richard Blumenthal, a Democrat of Connecticut, and Representative Robert Garcia, a Democrat of California. At the hearing, Maramar Martinez, a U.S. citizen shot five times by federal agents, told her story. So did Alia Rahman, another U.S. citizen detained by ICE, and so did the brothers of U.S. citizen Renee Good, killed by federal agents. Representative Garcia showed a picture of White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, who is a key instigator of the ICE attacks and said, There's probably no single person in this government who has done more damage and more harm to people across this country,

immigrants and U.S. citizens, than this man right here. And it's our job to hold him responsible for the crimes that are happening to United States citizens. A new data for progress poll shows that 51% of American voters think Miller should be removed, while only 33% think he should not. But lawmakers have at least had to adjust their actions to acknowledge the fury of American voters at the behavior of federal agents. Today, the House passed the budget to fund the government, except for the Department of Homeland Security, or DHS,

which was funded only for two more weeks to give Congress time to hash out terms for funding the department that Democrats will accept. Republicans had been clear they did not want to separate out DHS funding. Ultimately, Senate Majority Leader John Thune, a Republican of South Dakota, had to accept the separation

in order to prevent a long-term shutdown and how Speaker Mike Johnson, a Republican of Louisiana, got enough Republicans to go along that the measure, without DHS funding, passed. Trump signed it later in the day. As of yesterday, the head of the weaponization working group created in the Department of Justice on Attorney General Pam Bondi's first day in office to punish the people, Trump insisted had weaponized the legal system against him, has been removed. Right-wing lawyer Ed Martin had been a leader in Trump's attempt to overturn the 2020 election and had claimed those convicted for crimes relating to that

attempt had been unfairly prosecuted. Once in power, he had turned the department's resources toward prosecuting those Trump perceived to be enemies, including former Federal Bureau of Investigation director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James. So unpopular has it become to be associated with Trump that an attempt to distract from plummeting ticket sales and artists boycotts after he took over the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and put his name on it may be behind Trump's Sunday night announcement he is closing the venue, claiming it needs two years of renovations. As voters turn against the administration,

Trump is openly working to rig the 2026 election to guarantee Republicans win. On Wednesday, January 28th, FBI agents raided an election office in Fulton County, Georgia, walking away with 700 boxes of ballots, tabulation tapes, and other election-related material from the 2020 election. Mark Elias of Democracy Docket, noted that the warrant came from Thomas Albus,

whom Trump appointed U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Missouri. Albus should not have had anything to do with a raid in Georgia, but Bloomberg reported that Attorney General Bondi appears to have appointed Albus a special assistant to the Attorney General, giving him the ability to operate across the nation.

Elias points out that this gives Albus dramatic power over future elections. The raid was significant not just because the FBI took the ballots Trump has complained about for years, ballots that have been counted three times, but also because Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard was there. The DNI has no law enforcement role in our system. She is supposed to coordinate and oversee the agencies in the U.S. intelligence community. At first, officials tried to suggest she was there by charge. chance. But yesterday, William K. Rashbaum, Devlin Barrett, and Julian E. Barnes of the New York Times

reported that she met with some of the FBI agents who had conducted the raid. During the meeting, she reached Trump on her cell phone, and he spoke to the agents himself. David Loughman, who served in the Justice Department in both Democratic and Republican administrations, told the New York Times reporters, it is extremely dangerous to our democracy and a shocking abandonment of years of sound policy for the president to be directly involved in the conduct of domestic criminal investigations, especially one that seeks to redress his personal grievances and to make the Director of National Intelligence an instrument of his political will. Then, yesterday, Trump told former deputy FBI director Dan Bongino, who has gone back to podcasting, that he loses elections only because

Democrats import undocumented immigrants to vote. This is bonkers. Voting by undocumented immigrants or any non-citizens is both illegal and incredibly rare, but Trump has made it part of his standard rhetoric since 2016. He said to Bonjino, These people were brought to our country to vote, and they vote illegally, and the, you know, amazing that the Republicans aren't tougher on it. The Republicans should say, we want to take over. We should take over the voting. The voting in at least many, 15 places. The Republicans ought to nationalize the voting. We have states that are so crooked, and the county votes, we have states that I won that show I didn't win. Now you're going to see something in Georgia where they were able to get with a court order. The ballots, you're going to see some interesting things come in.

But you know, like the 2020 election, I won that election by so much. Although the Constitution gives control of elections exclusively to the states, at a bill signing in the Oval Office today, Trump doubled down on his call for Republicans to nationalize elections. Letters from an American was written and read by Heather Cox Richardson. It was produced at Soundscape Productions, Dead in Massachusetts. Recorded with music composed by Michael Moss.