While most countries are vying for skilled laborers to join their workforce ― medical professionals or engineers ― the Trump administration wants to pay them to leave.

A tweet went viral Tuesday, in which the U.S. Department of Homeland Security shared a recent New York Times article headlined “Haitians Deported From U.S. Are Left Broke and Stranded” along with some added commentary.

“Dear Haitian doctors, lawyers, scholars, and engineers, Imagine what you could do with $3000 in Haiti! An entrepreneur’s dream!” @DHSgov tweeted, alongside a link to the department’s “assistance to voluntarily self-deport” page. (The DHS offers a $3,000 “exit bonus” and a free flight home to undocumented immigrants who voluntarily self-deport.)

The DHS tweet was shocking to many, given its bald-faced racial implications.

“This is yet another telling example of the Trump regime’s racism,” counterterrorism expert Thomas Joscelyn wrote on Bluesky. “There’s no pretense here of targeting criminals - the usual excuse for mass deportations. DHS is specifically encouraging Haitian ‘doctors, lawyers, scholars and engineers’ to leave. Any decent society would value these people.”

The mention of physicians is surprising, given that the U.S. faces a projected shortage of up to 86,000 physicians by 2036. The healthcare provider shortage is particularly bad in rural America; an estimated 60% of rural counties in the United States lack a general surgeon, and about two-thirds (roughly 66%) completely lack an oncologist to treat cancer in the community.

It’s to our disadvantage to turn away skilled workers, and it’s at odds with our more recent history, too, said Michele Waslin, the assistant director of the Immigration History Research Center at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities.

“The U.S. has historically been a destination for the world’s best and brightest, and a country that welcomes highly skilled workers because of the contributions they make to our economy,” Waslin told HuffPost. “If the U.S. wants to compete in the global marketplace for highly-skilled and highly-trained workers, this is exactly the wrong message to send.”

It’s not exactly a “dream” to head back to Haiti in its current state, as the tweet suggests: Activists have warned that Haiti, already in the grip of severe gang violence, lacks the safety and resources to receive people being deported there. More than half of its nearly 12 million people need humanitarian assistance.

Gang violence has already displaced a record 1.5 million people across Haiti. More than 3,100 people were reported killed and another 1,189 injured between January and June, according to U.N. statistics.

Even so, in August, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) carried out its first deportation flight to Haiti since the Trump administration won a legal battle to end Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for some 350,000 Haitians and thousands of Syrians living in the U.S. (TPS is a humanitarian program permitting people from imperiled nations to temporarily live and work in the United States.)

“We need highly educated people with skills, we should be making them welcome, not turning them away, especially given the dangers in Haiti right now,” said Nancy Foner, a sociology professor at Hunter College, City University of New York, and the author of “One Quarter of the Nation: Immigration and the Transformation of America.”

The tweet — and the immigration strategy behind it — suggest the administration has abandoned any claim that it’s focused on removing criminals and is now targeting the kinds of migrants the U.S. has long sought to attract, said Mary Hoopes, an associate professor who studies immigration policy at UC Law San Francisco.

The data bears that out: Despite the administration’s claim that it is targeting the “worst of the worst,” research shows that 55% of recent ICE arrests involved migrants with no criminal record.

“While the U.S. has a long history of using fear to encourage voluntary departure, this is the first time I’ve seen an administration take aim specifically at a highly educated group and treat this ‘exit bonus’ as some sort of genuine incentive,” Hoopes told HuffPost.

“It’s hard not to see race lurking behind this shift, as these are typically the kinds of migrants that prior administrations, and most other countries, would welcome,” she said.

Even before the 2024 election — when the Trump campaign began amplifying false claims that Haitian immigrants were stealing and eating pets in Springfield, Ohio — the administration had targeted Black immigrants, specifically Haitians and Somalis, “with both heightened enforcement and public vitriol,” said Llana Barber, a professor and Rudolph J. Vecoli Chair in Immigration History at the University of Minnesota.

The tweet sends a strong message that even the most highly educated Black immigrant professionals are not welcome in the U.S., Barber said.

Fernando Chang-Muy, an adjunct law professor at the University of Pennsylvania, pointed to a glaring disparity in Trump-era immigration policy: restricting protections for Haitians while fast-tracking refugee status for white South Africans the administration says are facing “white genocide,” a claim South Africa’s government has rejected.

“The administration has decreased worldwide overseas refugee flows into the U.S. from a high of 110,000 refugees when President Obama was president, now down to 7,500, and only white South Africans being admitted,” Chang-Muy told HuffPost.

“Now they’re encouraging Haitians to go back,” he said. “You can read between the lines and interpret this administration’s perspectives on race.”

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