MAGA know-nothing ignorant of US effort to destabilize Caribbean island nation.
On June 25, the US Supreme Court ruled that Trump is permitted to strip Haitian and Syrian immigrants of their protected status. The 6-3 ruling overturned decisions by federal judges that had blocked the administration from terminating Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for 350,000 people from Haiti and 6,100 from Syria, according to the BBC.
The ruling prompted former Fox News host Megyn Kelly to celebrate with a racist diatribe on her SiriusXM podcast. “Go home! Get out! We know our country is better than yours. That’s because we filled it with our work ethic, culture, and values. You being here only dilutes it for us. Those who built it… Go back to f**king Haiti!” she ranted.
The History of US Intervention in Haiti
Kelly is ignorant of the century-long role the United States played in destabilizing Haiti. In 1915, president Woodrow Wilson dispatched Marines to the island to impose order following the lynching of Haitian President Vilbrun Guillaume Sam, who expanded commercial and strategic relations with the United States after a coup overthrowing the presidency of Oreste Zamor. The US used the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine to justify unilateral interventions and a prolonged military occupation of Haiti between 1915 and 1934. The National City Bank of New York, now Citibank, convinced Wilson to invade and take control of the country’s political and financial interests.
Exploiting the pretense of a humanitarian mission, the United States deployed hundreds of Marines to Port-au-Prince. After establishing control of the Haitian economy, the US siphoned $500,000 ($16,486,000 in 2026) from the Haitian national bank. It imposed racial segregation and reacted violently to opposition, resulting in the death of thousands of Haitians. “The infrastructure built under U.S. supervision and constructed by forced labor and the Haitian’s own wealth was used for the production of goods meant to benefit the U.S.,” writes Kate Huntington.
Although the occupation ended in 1934, the US remained present in both the economy and internal government affairs. “Ever since the occupation and increasingly since 1946, the United States, through the power of its aid packages, has played a central role in Haitian politics. In this way the U.S. has contributed to the misery of Haiti since it has given oppressive governments comfortable aid packages which kept these rulers in power,” writes Bob Corbett.
The State Department backed Élie Lescot in 1941. Lescot was a member of Haiti’s mixed-race elite tied to the United States. His administration was responsible for a period of economic downturn and harsh political repression. Fearing for his life after a three-person junta took power in 1946, Lescot and his cabinet fled the country. He was succeeded by Dumarsais Estimé, who was also aligned with the United States. Estimé, a liberal reformist, was forced from office by military officers in 1950.
Daniel Fignolé, a popular labor leader, served a short term as provisional president in 1957. CIA director Allen Dulles warned President Dwight D. Eisenhower that Fignolé had “a strong leftist orientation” and the administration characterized his social program, said to be similar to FDR’s New Deal, as “comparable with the Soviets.” The Haitian armed forces, with US complicity, broke into the presidential chambers and forced Fignolé at gunpoint to sign a resignation letter.
Fignolé was replaced by François Duvalier, known as Papa Doc. Soon after winning the 1957 general election as a populist, Duvalier prevented a military coup d’état. He was “re-elected” in 1961 as the only presidential candidate. In 1961, Duvalier declared himself president for life. He oversaw the notorious Tonton Macoute (bogeymen in Haitian Creole), otherwise known as the Milice de Volontaires de la Sécurité Nationale (MVSN), a death squad responsible, at Duvalier’s command, for kidnapping, torturing, and murdering more than 60,000 Haitians. Declassified CIA Reading Room and State Department documents show the CIA and US government closely monitored the Macoute’s operations against dissidents.“While Haiti became the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, the Duvaliers enriched themselves by stealing foreign aid money,” write Dennis Bernstein and Laura Sydell.
Duvalier died of heart disease and diabetes in 1971 and was succeeded by his son, Jean-Claude Duvalier, nicknamed Baby Doc. Thousands of Haitians were tortured and murdered under his dictatorial reign while thousands more fled the country. Baby Doc maintained a close relationship with the CIA. Duvalier was kept in power with covert American and CIA support and functioned as an anti-communist ally. After the population rebelled against his dictatorship in 1985, Duvalier made an escape to France on a US Air Force flight. In 2011, when he returned to Haiti, Baby Doc was indicted by Haitian courts for crimes against humanity and embezzlement. He died in 2014 before he could face trial.
The International Monetary Fund (IMF) imposed structural adjustment under the Duvalier regimes, which further impoverished the Haitian people. The IMF demanded a 25% reduction in state spending and the removal of tariff protections on Haitian rice and agricultural products in exchange for a $24.6 million loan. The IMF provided a $22 million loan to the regime, but within weeks, $20 million was withdrawn and transferred out of government accounts. Consequently, the Haitian people were left to repay these misappropriated loans. An audit following Jean-Claude Duvalier’s ouster in 1986 revealed that his administration siphoned at least $504 million from the public treasury.
CIA Overthrows First Democratically Elected Haitian Government
In 1990, Megyn Kelly was a young Syracuse University political science student when Jean-Bertrand Aristide was elected president on a platform promoting social and economic rights. He advocated for the state redistributing resources and ensuring basic needs such as clean water, healthcare, and education. During the election, the US backed Duvalier’s Minister of Finance and Economy, Marc Bazin, formerly of the World Bank, and Roger Lafontant, a Tonton Macoute leader under Duvalier. Aristide, a reformed priest, was favored by the poor and won the election by sixty-seven percent. The result was opposed by the military, the middle class, and the traditional Haitian elite. In America, the government and corporate media portrayed Aristide as anti-American, demagogic, and even psychotic.
Seven months later, Army General Raoul Cédras, Army Chief of Staff Brig. General Phillipe Biamby, and National Police Chief Michel François led a CIA organized coup. “The CIA has provided training, funds, and equipment to the corrupt Haitian military,” writes Kathleen Marie Whitney. The coup was put in motion by the Haitian Service d’Intelligence National (SIN). It was set up and financed ($1 million annually) by the CIA in the 1980s. SIN used the war on drugs as a cover for its activities—the kidnapping, torture, and assassination of political rivals and opponents. The CIA continued funding SIN despite evidence of brutal repression.
Following the coup, Emmanuel Constant, the founder of FRAPH, the Front for the Advancement and Progress of Haiti, a paramilitary death squad, was on the CIA payroll. Constant confirmed during a 60-Minutes episode in 1995 that the CIA paid him around $700 a month (about $1,613 today). FRAPH tracked down and assassinated Aristide supporters. “FRAPH leader Emmanuel Constant was a former employee of the CIA. Largely at the CIA’s wishes, the organisation was set up in 1993 to counter the pro-democracy movement backing Mr Aristide,” Rupert Cornwell writes for the Independent,
Aristide went into exile, first in Venezuela, and then the United States. In 2000, he won the presidency for a second time, only to be removed. “Once again, a few years after being elected, Aristide has been overthrown in a coup—by many of same men who led the armed insurrection against him a decade earlier.”
“The groundwork for this coup was laid during the months when Aristide was first re-establishing his government,” writes Amy Wilentz for The Nation. “When the Clinton Administration reinstated Aristide, it too brought in the Marines, ostensibly for nation-building but also to make sure the reinstalled president didn’t get up to any populist shenanigans.”
The Haitian opposition, Wilentz writes, was financed and organized during the Aristide years by US-funded groups such as USAID’s Democracy Enhancement Project and the International Republican Institute, established in 1983. “These have played a central and critical role in keeping an unpopular Haitian opposition alive and obstructionist. At every turn, the US-backed opposition tried to bring political life under Aristide to a halt.”
In addition to USAID, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) played a direct role in supporting opposition and paramilitary forces leading up to a 2004 coup against Aristide. ”The U.S. government saw the emergence of Haiti’s popular movement as a threat,” write Marx V. Aristide and Laurie Richardson for the North American Congress on Latin America (NACLA). Haiti’s poor were undermined by NED, USAID, and the CIA.
Under the guise of “democratization,” “development,” and “the war on drugs,” these agencies have funneled millions of dollars to military and intelligence agencies, political parties, and non-governmental organizations within Haiti in order to destabilize genuine popular organizations and build conservative alternatives.
“Every year, for the past couple of years, $56 million U.S. dollars went to Haiti to finance political parties—radio stations, TV stations, journalists, who got all visa from embassies, lying to discredit our fragile democracy, our money from those $56 million U.S. Dollars,” Aristide told Amy Goodman of Democracy Now in 2004. “Recently, for the past year, it became $70 million U.S. dollars. So, this is well known. It is not a secret.”
MAGA’s Blindspot
For Megyn Kelly and Trump’s MAGA, refugees from countries victimized by the US and globalist financial institutions are freeloaders, welfare fraudsters, and people from “sh*thole countries,” as Trump said in 2018, primitives not worthy of humanitarian consideration, despite protected status afforded by international law. Following the reign of the Duvalier regimes, and the coups against Jean-Bertrand Aristide, over 1.4 million internally displaced Haitians and hundreds of thousands of asylum-seekers sought refugee in the United States.
Following the SCOTUS ruling on Temporary Protected Status, White House deputy chief of staff for policy and homeland security advisor, Stephen Miller, declared asylum seekers entering the US are “criminals, benefit seekers, economic migrants, welfare seekers, etcetera, etcetera.” In June, Miller accused Democrats of illegally airlifting “a large chunk of Haiti to the Midwest mere months ago. Now the leftist media proclaims their ‘right’ to remain here with the same reverence as an ancient Shinto shrine in Japan.”
Kelly’s emotional tirade demonstrates that key figures in the so-called MAGA movement are woefully ignorant of the foreign policy practices and history of the government they desire to “make great again.”
In addition to Haiti, Cuba, and Venezuela, major influxes of refugees have arrived from Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and Yemen, as well as Somalia, Sudan, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The Costs of War Project at Brown University estimates that post-9/11 military actions in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and Yemen have displaced tens of millions of people.
The “pattern of military adventurism, subsequent displacement, and deferred moral responsibility is not a new phenomenon in American statecraft,” explain Susan Hammond and Sera Koulabdara. “Following the violence that ravaged Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam in 1975, millions fled, culminating in the largest refugee resettlement in American history.”
Today, we are witnessing Washington fuel this very cycle of displacement in real time. In early 2026, joint U.S. and Israeli military strikes on Iran, and the ensuing escalation of war across the region, ignited a catastrophic new humanitarian crisis… Washington must decisively break the endless cycle of militarism, and take full, unflinching accountability for the deadly remnants of our past wars. True American greatness lies not in the violence we export, but in the sanctuary we fiercely defend and the justice we uphold.
The political class in the United States, along with the establishment media and government education, have diverted attention away from the true reason for political instability, conflict, and resultant humanitarian and refugee crises in countries victimized by the hegemonic foreign policy of the financial elite.
As Megyn Kelly reveals in her video, MAGA, with its xenophobic reaction to an influx of refugees from countries victimized by war and the “Washington Consensus,” is largely a historically ignorant nativist and reactionary movement. Despite recent fractures in the movement, based largely on the inability of Trump to defeat Iran, the MAGA movement appears incapable of facing the stark reality that is US foreign policy.
Article posted with permission from Kurt Nimmo
