Since returning to the White House, there is perhaps no promise President Donald Trump has fulfilled more than his vow to crackdown on U.S. immigration and execute mass deportations.
In his pitch to Black voters during the 2024 election, Trump infamously claimed that immigrants were taking “Black jobs” away from Black communities. However, access to jobs has become increasingly difficult for Black Americans during Trump’s second term in office. The Black unemployment rate has risen to the level it was during the COVID-19 pandemic at 7.1%.
During a Tuesday press conference on Capitol Hill advocating to protect Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for Haitian and other migrants living in the U.S, Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley, D-Mass., said the economic woes of Black Americans, even amid the execution of President Trump’s immigration policies, shows he isn’t a man of his word.
“Donald Trump has not kept one word, one promise,” Pressley told theGrio. “Instead of attacking affordability, he’s attacking everything and everyone; our civil liberties, our civil rights, our peace of mind has taken a complete hatchet to the infrastructure of our federal workforce and now seeks to completely dismantle the critical infrastructure that is our health care and our caregiving workforce.”
Despite Trump’s claims that immigrants were responsible for the lack of job opportunities in the U.S., Pressley, joined by U.S. Senators Mark Markey, D-Mass., and Lisa Blunt Rochester, D-Del., and U.S. Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, D-Fla., said the U.S. economy stands to collapse if the Trump administration sees through its plans to terminate TPS for Haitian immigrants, who comprise a significant portion of the workforce in the health care and hospitality industries.
If the Trump administration gets its way, Black Americans will also suffer, say advocates and members of Congress.
“When it comes to Black voters, listen, this is an administration that traffics hourly in anti-Blackness, and that must be named. And there are too many examples of that,” Pressley told theGrio. “But on the issue of unemployment, it was never your Haitian neighbor that was coming for a Black job. It was always Donald Trump and Elon Musk and the alleged DOGE Bros, who in the name of so-called efficiency, pushed out Black women from the federal workforce, who comprised 12% of the federal workforce.”
The progressive congresswoman continued, “It is Donald Trump and his anti-Blackness using DEI as a proxy for Black people that has dismantled, degraded, and defunded diversity, equity, and inclusion, which has also had a devastating impact on Black unemployment. This is a crisis for Black women, for Black families, for Black futures.”
Pressley said she is especially appealing to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and to Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell to address the more than 300,000 Black women who have lost employment as a result of the Trump administration’s policies.
“Black people have always bore the brunt and been the canaries in the coal mine, but this harm is coming for everyone,” said the congresswoman. “Black unemployment for Black women is at nearly 7% and overall [national] unemployment by recent numbers I think is still maybe at 4.3, so that just shows the disparate harm.”
As the 2026 midterm elections near this upcoming November, Black voters will have a chance to make their voices heard after the 2024 election of Trump.
“He hasn’t kept one promise to anyone,” said Pressley. “He just pushes, unfortunately, a campaign of division and of othering. But this is a movement right here that knows better. The path forward to keep all of us safe is one of solidarity from every walk of life.“
