(CNN) — A nurse who’s no longer allowed to work at one of the city’s top hospitals hunkered down in her Boston home, afraid ICE could be in the neighborhood.
A man in Ohio collapsed to the ground in tears after leaving an ICE check-in wearing an ankle monitor.
And residents in eastern Maryland came upon a jarring sight: cars left behind at gas stations with their engines still running.
“They’ve been arresting people left and right — some people in the middle of the streets. … We have people who went to the grocery store to cook for their kids and didn’t return home,” said Dr. Marie D. Fouché, founder and executive director of Safe Harbor Circles, an organization in Salisbury, Maryland, that provides support to immigrants.
In the weeks since the Supreme Court cleared the way for the Trump administration to end deportation protections for roughly 350,000 Haitians, and in the days since a lower court judge took a key legal step that made it official, a new reality has started to come into focus in communities that had been holding out hope for a last-minute reprieve.
Fear and confusion are widespread among former holders of Temporary Protected Status, or TPS, who had been allowed to work legally in the United States for years as part of the program and suddenly find themselves vulnerable to detention and deportation.
“Now we have no protection,” said Vilès Dorsainvil, co-founder and executive director of the Haitian Community Help and Support Center in Springfield. “Anything can happen any time.”
Federal authorities have been tight-lipped about details of this phase in the administration’s immigration crackdown, repeatedly stating that they won’t discuss ongoing or future operations. They haven’t released data about how many Haitians have been detained since TPS ended. And as of Saturday, advocates who closely track deportation flights hadn’t logged any bound for Haiti in the past two weeks.
But Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said last week that operations targeting Haitian TPS holders were underway.
“We’re going after them right now. … These individuals can either self-deport, or we will arrest you and send you back. It’s that simple,” he told NewsNation on Tuesday.
Enforcement targeting former TPS holders, including Haitians, kicked up in late July and is expected to be ongoing, two sources with knowledge of the operations told CNN.
At least five people contacted the Haitian Bridge Alliance advocacy organization last week reporting loved ones who were detained across the US, according to Guerline Jozef, the organization’s executive director. Callers reported arrests of former TPS holders, who often were driving when they crossed paths with ICE, in Arizona, California, Indiana and Maryland, she said.
“The fear is that the numbers will increase. Enforcement always happens, even when we don’t hear it on the news. It is happening on a daily basis within the community,” she said.
Letters leave a community on edge
Residents of one of the nation’s most recent — and well known — Haitian enclaves say they haven’t yet seen an increase in ICE arrests. Springfield drew national attention after President Donald Trump baselessly accused Haitians there of eating pets during a campaign debate in 2024. And some have speculated that the Midwestern city and its some 15,000 Haitians residents would be a focus of arrests after TPS ended.
Leaders in Springfield say the growing ICE presence many fear hasn’t yet materialized. Hundreds of Department of Homeland Security letters arriving in the mail, however, have put the community on edge.
“Please come to the office listed below at the time and place indicated in connection with an official matter,” the letters read, according to a copy Dorsainvil shared with CNN.
Those who’ve reported to ICE offices after receiving the notices have been outfitted with ankle monitors that allow authorities to track their location, Dorsainvil says, and many have been assigned court dates in about a month.
The ankle monitors are part of a frequently used ICE program known as “alternatives to detention.” But Dorsainvil says for many Haitians in Springfield, the devices evoke the painful history of shackles worn during slavery, and that he and other advocates unsuccessfully attempted to convince authorities the monitors weren’t necessary.
Now, he says, many Haitians find themselves facing not only the social pressures of being unable to work and provide for their families, but also the psychological pressure of dehumanizing treatment.
“It’s so…humiliating,” he says.
Photos and video captured by journalists outside an ICE office in Blue Ash, Ohio, on Sunday showed a man who was overcome with emotion after leaving with a monitor on his left ankle. Monsanto Maler has lived in the US since 2023 and said he left Haiti because he didn’t feel safe, according to photojournalist Carol Guzy, who photographed Maler collapsing in tears as Dorsainvil comforted him.
“He was confused,” Dorsainvil says. “He was asking us how long he would need to wear it. We couldn’t answer this.”
The letters and ankle monitors have exacerbated an already tense situation, says Marjory Wentworth, a board member of the Haitian Community Help and Support Center who also works with G92, a faith-based organization advocating for immigrants in the community.
“It’s terrifying… the emotional and psychological stress on these individuals and these families,” she said.
And it’s hard to know what to do to help, Wentworth says. On Sunday morning, she says, crowds of demonstrators stood outside the ICE office in Blue Ash, chanting “immigrants are welcome here” and singing “We Shall Overcome” to show support to Haitians who had check-ins that morning.
“These people are from our community, and they need to know that we care,” Wentworth said.
Asked about the letters and ankle monitors, a DHS spokesperson told CNN that TPS was always intended to be temporary and invoked the administration’s self-deportation program, which offers stipends to undocumented immigrants who choose to leave the country.
“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,” the spokesperson said. “The good news is it’s not too late to get a $2,600 check and a free flight home.”
This nurse says returning to Haiti isn’t an option
But a 29-year-old nurse in Boston told CNN that returning to Haiti now is out of the question for her and many others who fled the Caribbean nation after a devastating earthquake in 2010 only to watch in horror from afar as gang violence has made the country increasingly dangerous.
“There are no jobs. Most of the hospitals are taken over by gangs or have been destroyed, and … the economy’s not good. We don’t have leaders or a government. It’s just very unsafe,” said the nurse, who asked to remain anonymous because now, without TPS, she fears for her safety.
She’s spent more than half of her life in the US and has been working as a nurse at one of Boston’s top hospitals for eight years until last week, when she was forced to take a leave of absence after her work permit expired.
Dealing with the possible end of TPS ever since the Trump administration first announced its termination, she says, has been like going through a never-ending cycle of the stages of grief.
“I’ve gotten angry, I’ve been in denial, I’ve been frustrated…and every time I think that, ‘OK, I’m accepting that this is it, this is the reality,’ you go back through it again,” she says. “I feel like this thing has been hanging over my head for years. And I’ve tried to find a proper pathway to get me out of it, but it just feels like there wasn’t one.”
These days, she’s focusing her efforts on looking for nursing jobs abroad, and hoping another country will give her a chance to use the skills she trained so hard to learn before immigration crackdowns in the US intensify further.
“They’re losing a lot of us — a lot of people like me. We’re willing to work. We’re ready. We work very hard, and it feels like we’re not needed, we’re not valued, and all our years of service have gone (unnoticed),” she says.
‘Affecting the economy, big time’
Many businesses have been devastated by the loss of Haitian employees in recent weeks, according to Rebecca Shi, executive director of the American Business Immigration Coalition.
The organization represents CEOs and associations in manufacturing, healthcare, elder care, construction, agriculture and hospitality. And Shi says at least two of its members were particularly hard hit by the end of TPS for Haitians: a resort hotel in Florida that lost more than 150 workers, and a senior center in Massachusetts that lost more than 50 employees.
It’s already having ripple effects, she says, noting that some nursing homes are now considering closing wings because they’re short-staffed after losing so many workers.
“The American workers that are on the team are not just missing their colleagues and team members, but also they’re burning out. They’re carrying way more extra load because a quarter of the workforce is gone,” she said.
Advocates and local leaders say they’ve been observing the absence of Haitians on the streets of many communities, too.
In Salisbury, which has become a hub for Haitians who work in nearby factories and farms, ICE recently started detaining people in parking lots and other areas immigrants frequent, according to Fouché of Safe Harbor Circles.
The uptick in arrests prompted many Haitians to go into hiding, she says. “People are not coming out.”
The streets in Haitian neighborhoods of New York City have also been noticeably quieter. David Duchatellier says business has plunged at his travel agency in Cambria Heights, which also provides money transfer services.
“You don’t see people walking around as they used to. They’re staying inside because they’re not working. They’re not going to the supermarket to buy food. And that’s affecting the economy, big time,” he says.
A Haitian American who’s lived in the US for more than 50 years, Duchatellier says he’s been writing to members of Congress to urge them to come up with a legislative compromise to help Haitians, and he hopes Trump’s advisers will tell him how much a crackdown on Haitians will harm the US economy.
“You didn’t cause this, but you can solve it, once and for all. … Nobody’s giving him this advice right now. I wish I could just sit with him for just five minutes,” Duchatellier says.
There’s still an opening for the administration to change course, he says.
But many seem to be running out of hope.
Fielding a growing number of calls from Haitians unsure of where to turn is overwhelming, says Judith Polidor, who works as a paralegal in Brooklyn’s Little Haiti neighborhood.
“It’s sadness all day. … They are crying. … Everybody has an emergency. … They need somebody just to listen,” she says, “even though you cannot do nothing.”
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