The Trump administration flew 161 Haitian nationals back to Haiti on Thursday, the first deportation flight since a Supreme Court order cleared the way to end temporary protected status for hundreds of thousands of Haitians.

The Immigration and Customs Enforcement charter departed Alexandria, Louisiana, and touched down at Cap Haitien Airport in northern Haiti, a Department of Homeland Security official confirmed. It carried 161 passengers, all of whom were released upon landing, ABC News reported. The flight marks the first forced return to Haiti since the administration ended the country's TPS designation earlier this summer.

That designation had been in place since 2010, when a catastrophic earthquake leveled much of Port-au-Prince. Successive administrations, Obama, Trump's first term, Biden, renewed it repeatedly. By the time the current administration moved to end it, roughly 350,000 Haitians held TPS status in the United States, according to federal estimates. A Biden-era White House memo had outlined plans to shield as many as three million noncitizens from deportation using TPS expansions, a policy the current administration has reversed.

Thursday's flight is the clearest signal yet that the reversal is no longer theoretical. Planes are moving. People are going home.

Courts cleared the runway months ago

The legal path to Thursday's flight ran through the Supreme Court. In late June, the justices allowed the administration to end TPS for Haiti, Ethiopia, Somalia, Syria, Myanmar, and other countries, affecting roughly one million people from more than a dozen nations. The ruling held that Haitians with TPS could not use federal courts to delay revocation of their status while challenging the administration's policies.

Even after the Supreme Court acted, a separate federal court order in Washington, D.C., had temporarily blocked deportation flights to Haiti. That order was lifted on August 5, clearing the final legal obstacle. Two weeks later, the first plane was in the air.

The twin rulings amounted to a pair of major immigration wins for the administration, which had argued that TPS was never meant to be a permanent residency program and that successive renewals had transformed a temporary shield into a de facto amnesty.

DHS fitted ankle monitors on Haitians in Ohio before the flight

Before Thursday's deportation, DHS had already begun tightening enforcement on Haitians whose protected status expired. Hundreds of Haitian immigrants in Ohio who had been living under TPS were summoned for in-person check-ins. Some were fitted with ankle monitors, a step that signaled the government intended to track and, if necessary, remove individuals who did not leave voluntarily.

It remains unclear how many of the 161 passengers on Thursday's flight were former TPS holders. ABC News noted that the composition of the manifest has not been disclosed, and no breakdown by immigration status has been released.

What is clear is that the administration has been building toward this moment methodically, winning in court, issuing check-in orders, attaching monitoring devices, and now putting deportees on planes.

July flight removed over 100 Haitians with violent criminal records

Thursday's charter was not the first deportation flight to Haiti under the current administration, but it was the first since TPS ended. A prior flight on July 16 removed more than 100 Haitian illegal immigrants with violent offense and sex crime convictions, Fox News reported, citing DHS.

DHS Assistant Secretary Lauren Bis framed the enforcement posture in blunt terms:

"Criminal illegal aliens have NO place in American communities. Our message to illegal aliens is clear: LEAVE NOW. If you don't, we will find you and deport you."

That earlier flight focused on criminal deportees. Thursday's flight broadened the aperture, sending back individuals whose legal basis for remaining in the country had simply expired.

Haiti says it never asked for them back

On the receiving end, Haitian officials struck a different tone. Jean Négot Bonheur Delva, director general of Haiti's National Office of Migration, told Just The News that Haiti's role was limited to processing arrivals, not requesting them.

"It is not the Haitian state that asks for them to be sent back. Our mission is to welcome migrants of forced return."

Haiti's Group Supporting Refugees and Returnees went further, warning that the country is not equipped to absorb large numbers of returning nationals. "Haiti is not ready to receive this number of migrants who were in the TPS program," the group said.

Those objections carry weight in Port-au-Prince but carry less in Washington, where the legal and political question has already been settled. The Supreme Court ruled. The lower court injunction was lifted. The flights are lawful.

Liberia deportation agreement adds a second front

Haiti was not the only destination on Thursday. A separate deportation flight landed in Liberia the same day, marking the first forced third-country transfer to the West African nation under a new deportation agreement between the U.S. and Liberian governments. Details of that agreement, including its terms, the number of passengers, and their nationalities, have not been disclosed.

The Liberia flight fits a broader pattern. The administration has also moved to end deportation protections for Ethiopians, and has pursued removal agreements with governments that previously refused to accept deportees. The strategy is to close every exit ramp that allowed illegal immigrants to remain in the country indefinitely under temporary designations that became permanent in all but name.

Open questions remain about scale and pace

Several questions hang over what comes next. With roughly 350,000 former TPS holders from Haiti alone, and hundreds of thousands more from other countries whose designations ended in June, the gap between the number of people now subject to removal and the government's capacity to carry out flights is enormous. Thursday's plane held 161 people. The math is not subtle.

Whether DHS will ramp up flight frequency, prioritize criminal records over expired-status cases, or rely partly on voluntary departures remains to be seen. The ankle monitors in Ohio suggest the administration does not plan to simply wait and hope.

For sixteen years, TPS shielded Haitians from deportation under the theory that conditions in Haiti were too dangerous for return. Courts and administrations renewed that shield again and again, until it stopped being temporary and started being policy by inertia. Now the inertia has been broken. Whether Washington has the will and the resources to follow through at scale is the only question left.