Federal immigration officers have arrested 380 Haitian citizens in the small city of Springfield, Ohio, following the conclusion of a federal program that had allowed illegal immigrants from the Caribbean nation to avoid deportation. Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin announced during a roundtable event in Cincinnati, Ohio, on…
Page T2From§Eachthe milkman edition — 5 September 2026
ICE arrests 380 Haitians in the same city where ending their status already cost one life
As it ran on the front
Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin stood at a roundtable in Cincinnati on Friday and said what needed saying: 380 Haitian citizens, off the streets of Springfield, Ohio, the moment their temporary protected status ran out. That is not cruelty. That is a calendar. The program had an end date, everyone knew the end date, and when the date arrived, ICE enforced what replaced it.
I want to be careful here, because the sequence matters and I intend to get it right. The protections ended. Then, four days before Mullin's Cincinnati podium, on September 1, a 20-year-old Haitian-born student named Pierre Damas Bel died in Ohio. The state highway patrol's press release said he walked into traffic. Common Dreams ran a headline with the word "blood" in it. I'm not going to defend the headline. I'm going to defend the policy, which is a different thing, except — Bel lost his status on the same expiring paper as the 380. That's not a coincidence I can spin around. That's the same deadline, arriving twice.…
…(cont) Also on September 1, the same week, the administration announced 2,197 arrests in a surge through New York — a state framed as a sanctuary problem, not a first target. Springfield was named the first target back in May, months before any of this, over a claim about pets that the people who actually live there have spent months explaining wasn't true. So the target came first. The protections ended second. The student died third. The 380 arrests came fourth, four days after his death made the news.
I keep wanting to call this orderly, and I keep running into the order. Mullin's talking point is that ending the program was the humane thing to do — give people notice, let them leave on their own terms. Bel had notice. He didn't leave on his own terms; he didn't leave at all, not the way the talking point means. The 380 in Springfield had the same notice he had, the same expired paper he had, and the count of them is still climbing, past a count of one that already isn't.
That's the update from Homeland Security: 380 arrests, one ended program, one dead student — announced by the same secretary, four days apart.
“They ended the program on a calendar page, and a 20-year-old walked into traffic four days before they started bragging about the arrest count. That's not enforcement, that's a body count with a press schedule. If Homeland Security can pull the paper out from under one kid in September, the timeline says they can do it to anybody else holding the same kind of paper, in whatever month suits the next press release.”
“This is a program with a hard end date, notice was given to every enrollee, so calling 380 arrests a crackdown is just calling a calendar a crackdown — that's rule of law, plain and simple. And the student, look, that's a state highway patrol matter, that has nothing to do with the federal timeline, nothing at all, it's just — it's just the same timeline, actually. Forget I said that part about the timeline.”
The receipts
Donald Trump named Springfield, Ohio, as his first target for mass deportations. He claimed Haitian immigrants there were eating pets. We went to Springfield to hear the real story from the people who live there.
· Haitian-born student in Ohio appears to take his own life after losing immigration status from the morgue, 1 Sep 2026
· 'Blood Is On Their Hands': Haitian Student Dies In Apparent Suicide After Trump Ends Deportation Protections from the morgue, 1 Sep 2026
· White House fulfills vow to surge ICE to New York, arrests 2,197 illegal immigrants from the morgue, 1 Sep 2026
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front.