SAN DIEGO — While fireworks streaked overhead last Friday, Haitian Bridge Alliance (HBA) had a different kind of illumination in mind. Executive Director Guerline Jozef reminded America that a nation cannot market “liberty” while corralling Black and brown asylum-seekers in detention centers or fast-tracking their deportations.
“The sky is ablaze, yet families fleeing Haiti’s chaos are still in chains,” Jozef noted, condemning immigration rules that — in her words — welcome white South Africans on flimsy claims of persecution while slamming the door on Caribbean and Latin American migrants.
HBA’s critique landed squarely on Independence Day’s contradictions: a republic celebrating 249 years of self-determination as it enforces travel bans and border expulsions that undercut the very ethos etched into the Declaration of Independence.
A Celebration Coupled With a Challenge
In Brooklyn, Assemblymember Rodneyse Bichotte Hermelyn (herself the daughter of Haitian immigrants) struck a dual chord. She saluted the audacity of July 4, 1776, yet warned that “unalienable rights” remain aspirational for far too many Americans. The republic’s promise, she argued, cannot be declared complete while economic inequality and voter-suppression battles rage on.
Across town, New York City Council Member Farah N. Louis, whose roots trace to Haiti and The Bahamas, sharpened the economic point: Federal proposals that jeopardize healthcare coverage for over a million New Yorkers, she said, fly in the face of the “life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness” mantra. Liberty, Louis insisted, is meaningless if families are one hospital bill away from ruin.
Independence Demands More Than Fireworks
From San Diego’s migrant-rights trenches to Brooklyn’s corridors of power, Haitian-American leaders converged on a single message: Freedom is a verb. The United States must align its immigration machinery and domestic policies with its founding rhetoric — or risk watching its moral authority fizzle out like spent sparklers.
As Jozef put it, the United States and Haiti — the hemisphere’s two oldest Black republics — should stand shoulder to shoulder on human rights. Instead, American foreign policy has long helped destabilize Haiti, and today Washington is “shutting its doors when Haitians need support most.”
Looking Forward
Independence Day pageantry will always draw crowds, but these advocates argue that genuine patriotism shows up the morning after: in budget negotiations that protect public hospitals, in immigration courts that honor asylum law, and in neighborhood precincts where every vote is counted.
Their Independence Day wish list is hardly radical: dignity for migrants, healthcare for working families, equitable opportunity regardless of skin tone or ZIP code. Yet achieving it will require the same boldness that propelled those thirteen colonies to sign a document they were willing to die for nearly two-and-a-half centuries ago.
Until then, says Jozef, fireworks are just optics. The real celebration will begin when “liberty and justice for all” stops reading like deferred maintenance on America’s balance sheet.
