On July 27, 2026, Michael Rulli — the Republican congressman from Ohio's 6th District — went on Fox News to talk about federal plans to arrest and deport Haitian immigrants living in Ohio.

Here's what he said:

"Let's get them out of here. Let's get 'em all out of here, and let's start from the beginning."

Raw Story reported the remarks, which spread quickly online. People asked the obvious question: start what from the beginning?

The people he's talking about

Rulli wasn't discussing an abstraction. He was talking about specific families living in his state right now.

More than 300,000 Haitians across the country are preparing to lose their deportation protections and work permits after the Supreme Court sided with the Trump administration on ending Temporary Protected Status for Haiti. ICE is planning to ramp up arrests, including in Ohio, with rapid deportation flights back to Haiti.

Temporary Protected Status isn't a loophole. It's a legal program for people from countries where it isn't safe to send them back. Haiti has spent years in a security and humanitarian collapse. These are people who came here legally under that program, who have work permits, who pay taxes, whose kids go to Ohio schools.

Rulli's answer to their situation was "let's get 'em all out of here."

A federal judge already said what this was about

There's a detail in this story that makes Rulli's enthusiasm harder to shrug off.

In February, U.S. District Court Judge Ana Reyes found the decision to end Haitians' protections was rooted "in part" in racial animus. The Supreme Court's majority did not overturn that finding on the merits — it ruled that federal law bars judges from reviewing TPS decisions at all, and separately said Trump's comments were not "overtly racial."

So the legal question was decided on who gets to review the policy, not on whether the judge was wrong about why it was made.

Ohioans know exactly where that history comes from. In September 2024, Trump and JD Vance amplified a false claim that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio were eating residents' pets — something city officials said was baseless. What followed was at least 33 bomb threats, by Gov. Mike DeWine's count: elementary schools evacuated, City Hall and county buildings closed, two hospitals locked down, and two colleges moved to remote classes. Springfield's Haitian community is one of the places now bracing for ICE.

That's the context Michael Rulli chose to step into, on national television, with a punchline.

The Department of Homeland Security's own joke

Rulli wasn't alone in treating this as entertainment. DHS's public statement on the operation was: "What we would say now is it's closing time which means you don't have to go home, but you can't stay here."

That's a bar-closing joke about deporting 300,000 people to a country in collapse.

When the officials carrying out a policy and the congressmen cheering it on are both making jokes, it's worth asking who exactly they think is watching — and whether they'd say it the same way to a Haitian family in Ohio.

Rulli's record on this is consistent

If you follow Michael Rulli's record, this fits a pattern rather than breaking one.

Earlier this year, Rulli introduced a bill to make it a federal crime to "harass" ICE agents — legislation aimed not at the agency's conduct, but at the people watching and protesting it.

That's the through line. When the question is ICE, Rulli's instinct is to give the agency more power and its critics less room.

What his district actually needs

Rulli represents Ohio's 6th District — the Mahoning Valley and eastern Ohio, communities that have been hit by decades of plant closures and job loss, where people are dealing with high grocery prices, rising utility bills, and health coverage that keeps getting more expensive.

He's had 2 years in Congress to work on any of that. His League of Conservation Voters score is 0% for 2025 and 2% lifetime.

What he brought to the microphone this week was a demand to remove an entire nationality from his state.

The bottom line

A member of Congress looked at 300,000 people losing their legal status — people a federal judge found were targeted in part because of racial animus — and said "let's get 'em all out of here."

Not "let's follow the law." Not "let's make sure kids and families are treated humanely." All of them, out.

That's not immigration policy. That's a congressman telling his own state's residents they don't belong here.

Source

This post is based on reporting from Raw Story and CBS News. Photo: official congressional portrait via Wikimedia Commons.