The Washington Post headlined Thursday's deportation flight like a travel itinerary: "ICE begins deporting Haitians who lost TPS back to homeland." Homeland. A word with a hearth in it. The kind of noun that usually comes with a welcome-home banner and someone crying happy tears at arrivals. * The one-sentence version of the actual event: 161 people, the first ICE charter since Temporary Protected Status ended for roughly 350,000 Haitians, landed in Cap-Haïtien — in the north — because the United States currently bans its own commercial airlines from flying into Port-au-Prince, the actual capital, through early September. Gangs control an estimated 70 percent of that city. * Sit with the pairing for a second. The same government decided Haiti is safe enough to deport people into and too dangerous for an American passenger jet to land in. One of those judgments made the Post's headline. The other one is why the plane had to use a different airport. "Homeland" is carrying a lot of luggage for one word. * Here's the thing — the Post knew. Two weeks ago its own headline read: "TPS for Haitians officially ends, putting thousands out of work and in limbo." Limbo. Out of work. That's the paper's own reporting, and it was good. Then the plane actually took off, and the copy desk reached past all of it for the coziest noun on the shelf. * The AP wire wasn't sharper, just different: "First group of deportees arrives in troubled Haiti after US ends TPS program." Watch the grammar do its little magic trick — the deportees "arrive," like a delegation, and the US ends a program somewhere off in the time clause, as if the two things just happen to share a sentence. And "troubled": a capital that's 70 percent gang-run and under a foreign flight ban is "troubled" the way a house fire is "warm." * The straightest headline of the day came from Bloomberg, of all desks: "Trump Administration Sends First Haiti Deportation Flight After Ending TPS." Subject, verb, object: the administration sends, after it ended. That's the entire event, in the right order, with the right actor holding the pen. * Nobody on the plane used warm nouns. "They just sent me here," one deportee, Jean Diane Louis, told the AP. Haiti's own migration official said "it is not the Haitian state that asks for them to be sent back." So the sender won't fly there, the receiver didn't ask, and the passenger says "sent." When every party to the event describes shipping, the word "homeland" isn't describing the destination — it's decorating it.