Seen on the NYC Subway. Photo by Shamira Ibrahim.

In late 2025, I found myself traveling through Flatbush’s Little Haiti, a vibrant, working-class enclave I have been honored to call home over the last few years. As the train chugged along from Beverly Road to Church Avenue, I looked up to see an urgent message written in both English and Kreyol:

What struck me wasn’t the translation—given the demographics of the neighborhood, it is fairly common to see both city-run and personal signage in kreyòl. The Kreyòl translation, however, included a small parenthetical at the bottom that simply read Tonton makout imigrasyon: “ICE is the immigration version of tonton macoutes.”

The Tonton Macoutes were the paramilitary enforcers of François “Papa Doc” Duvalier’s dictatorship, agents of terror whose omnipresent threats of arbitrary violence left Haitians in a sustained fear of friends and family disappearing, never to be seen again. Despite the repressive terror of Duvalier’s tenure being widely known, the United States not only ignored the brutality but also continued to back the authoritarian regime, prioritizing the nation’s utility as a bulwark against communism at the expense of Haitian safety.

In the American calculus of the geopolitical order, anti-Black terror has always been deemed a justifiable price to pay, and no country represents the overlapping vectors of imperialism, anti-Blackness, and forced migration quite like the sustained destabilization of Haiti’s sovereignty. After Duvalier’s death, the United States supported a transfer of power to his son, Jean-Claude (also known as Baby Doc), prompting an economic collapse that ultimately triggered large waves of Haitian migration as a means of survival. Rather than support the forced movement that the US was complicit in, the American government engaged in hostile attacks to prevent Haitian migrants from touching US soil, inviting Haitians to come aboard Coast Guard vessels only to set the refugees’ small boats on fire. Those intercepted at sea were detained at a concentration camp in Guantánamo Bay known as Camp Bulkeley, well before the military base would later become globally synonymous with indefinite detention and human rights violations.

Haitian organizers describing Immigration and Customs Enforcement as tonton macoutes is not a matter of hyperbole so much as one of precision, recognizing a structure that decides who belongs, and who can be expelled, despite being directly responsible for the events that mandated the mass movement. That reality was brought into focus last week when US federal judge Ana C. Reyes stepped in at the eleventh hour to halt the Trump administration’s attempt to terminate Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for roughly 350,000 Haitians.

In her ruling, Judge Reyes issued a sharp rebuke of Secretary Kristi Noem’s justifications for ending protections, noting that they relied on distortions and outright falsehoods about Haitian migrants. This has consistently been a prerequisite for Haitian dehumanization, from falsely declaring Haitians as dominant carriers of HIV and AIDs in the 80s and 90s to recent racialized smears that accused Haitians in Ohio of making meals out of domesticated pets.

Yet even as the court temporarily protected Haitians inside US borders, the federal government made its priorities unmistakably clear abroad. In recent days, the United States has increased its military presence near Haiti, dispatching warships and Coast Guard vessels off the country’s coast under the pretense of security and stability. This is a familiar choreography of American empire: show force, restrict movement, withhold meaningful aid.

Calling ICE tonton macoutes is not an insult as much as a recognition of the continuity between foreign policy and domestic enforcement, both then and now. The distinction in name is ultimately immaterial if the means by which they are governed are equivalent: a US state-backed paramilitary force that governs through fear, uncertainty, and the ever-present possibility of removal.

There is a popular phrase in Haitian Kreyòl: tout moun se moun—every person is a person. It is a declaration forged in the crucible of enslavement and revolution, a historical rupture that insisted Black life was neither property nor expendable. Despite this intervention being essential to Haiti’s founding itself, however, even well-intended sympathizers to the country’s ongoing battle to be liberated from empire often end up replicating dehumanizing rhetoric by engaging in the nation’s history with near-mythological reverence, rendering the Haitian struggle into a mere symbol of oppression rather than a country and diaspora that continues to demand freedom.

The controversy surrounding Haiti’s Winter Olympics uniform makes this dissonance clear. A design referencing revolutionary leader Toussaint Louverture was deemed too “political” by the IOC and replaced with a symbolic horse. The world was suddenly invested in arguing over the legitimacy of the Olympics as a site of protest. While the passion may be laudable, disputes over Haiti’s powerful symbolism begin to resemble tokenization when it is emphasized at the expense of the omnipresent threat that materially affects Haitian mobility and security. Does celebrating Haiti as part of Latin America protect its athletes from potential detention when the soccer team travels to the United States for the World Cup for the first time in 50 years? Does celebrating Bad Bunny mentioning Haiti during a thrilling Super Bowl halftime show change the reality for the Haitian migrants recently deported from Puerto Rico who were later found, reportedly decapitated, near the Haiti–Dominican Republic border?

Therein lies the core hypocrisy: the global community is willing to celebrate the idea of a revolutionary and resilient Haiti while refusing to confront the material conditions imposed on Haitians today. The country’s symbolism, even amongst sympathetic audiences, is placed at a higher premium than the citizens’ lives, engendering a macabre necropolitics in which the sustained infrastructure of Haitian suffering legitimizes its continued tokenization as a symbol of resistance.

The narrative erasure is not accidental; it is necessary for a system that depends on denying the full humanity of Haitians in order to function, where its continued positioning as both predator and victim allows both sides of the political aisle to freely exploit this contradiction to their own utilitarian ends. It is why Haitians can be rendered symbols at the Olympics while remaining abandoned in detention centers, or celebrated as revolutionaries while descendants are deported into violence. Why ICE can be likened to tonton macoutes and dismissed as exaggeration, even as families disappear into bureaucratic black holes.

Tout moun se moun exposes the moral fraud at the heart of racial capitalism and necropolitics—an intentional framework that extracts value from Black labor while rendering Black life expendable. It is a mirror reflecting the moral limits of the world. Embedded in its subtext is an indictment of the gap between what the world claims to believe about human dignity and how it continues to treat Haitians in practice. If every person is a person, then no claims of border security or distorted statistics can justify policies that treat Haitian lives as collateral damage. The question is whether we are prepared to demand something more than symbolic solidarity for a people whose suffering has been globally engineered and globally ignored, or if we will continue to ignore the dehumanization of Haitians today as a direct assault on that truth.

– Shamira Ibrahim, Francophone regional editor

There was a game of American Football sandwiching the much discussed Bad Bunny performance yesterday at the Super Bowl. Jaxon Smith-Njigba of the Seattle Seahawks is now one of the league’s break out stars. He is also Sierra Leonean and proud.