Trump Has Made Haitians Fear for Their Lives

Trump officials were thwarted last week when a judge blocked their plan to cancel the protected legal status of hundreds of thousands of Haitians in the United States. But for Haitian immigrants with this Temporary Protected Status, or TPS—granted when the U.S. government deems certain countries unsafe for citizens to return, offering these immigrants safe haven—the danger is far from over.  

Many Haitians around the country, regardless of legal status, have lived in fear since the late days of Trump’s campaign in 2024, when Trump’s harmful lies about the Haitian community in Springfield, Ohio, led to an influx of Proud Boys and bomb threats. That fear has only intensified, particularly for those with temporary legal status and their family members, as communities around the country have suffered increasingly targeted and violent Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids.

Jacques, a Haitian immigrant with temporary status who asked me to use a pseudonym because he does not want to be targeted by the administration, rarely ever leaves the house; he asks friends to pick up groceries. While places like Minnesota have rightly garnered headlines, raids are being conducted everywhere, and everyone is on edge. Last year, the police department of a town near Jacques provided the FBI with the addresses of every known Haitian resident in Laurel, Delaware. 

In her decision to uphold Haitians’ TPS status last week, U.S. District Judge Ana Reyes of the District of Columbia noted that the 352,959 Haitians in the TPS program contribute billions in taxes to the nation. As Guerline Jozef, executive director of Haitian Bridge Alliance, has pointed out, they work key jobs as nurses, construction workers, caregivers, hotel workers, and manufacturers. These are, by and large, the jobs that Americans say outright they do not want to do. All of this is true, but Haitians—and other groups also targeted by this administration—contribute much more than that. 

I met Nixon Pierre-Louis outside his church one fall day a few months before the 2024 election. He was staying after the service to help other parishioners with their paperwork—taxes, immigration forms. “This is my way of contributing to society,” he said. The afternoon after the service is a rare block of free time for Pierre-Louis, who holds two jobs as a nurse and works nearly every day. When I spoke to him on a recent afternoon, he had finished his shift caring for a disabled adult and was heading to his second job at a retirement center—both jobs where he helps elderly and disabled people eat, dress, use the bathroom, and live their lives as fully as possible. He is almost unbearably kind, generous, and community-minded. You might think he’s the last person who should be looking over his shoulder right now. 

Yet Pierre-Louis, who has been a U.S. citizen for three decades, is nervous. “Why the animosity? Why don’t you want us here?” he asked. “We pay taxes, we follow the law, we follow the rules … we’re just making a living.” Yet every immigrant he knows is on edge; people have stopped showing up for church, skipping shifts at work. TPS holders live under a constant shadow of fear, but citizens don’t feel safe, either. “I am worried. I have an accent. I’m Black. They look at you by the color of your skin, the words you say and how you say them,” Pierre-Louis said. “I would never think in 2026 I would hear something like that.”

The United States is Pierre-Louis’s home; this is where he is raising a family. Yet now, when he drives to church or work, he scans for federal agents. He carries his American passport everywhere. He reads stories about the African church elder in Portland, Maine, his window smashed open, the shards of glass flying toward the man’s 1-month-old baby and wife, both left stranded on the highway when the man was seized.

Life got harder under the first Trump administration, but now it’s even worse. “I never thought of people being so cruel, being so heartless. It’s been hard, but not to this point,” Pierre-Louis said. “I am very worried for myself, for my wife, for my kids.” He has watched the surge in Minnesota carefully, and it’s only made him more worried. “U.S. citizens are killed because they tried to help other people,” he said. “If they can do it to white people in Minnesota, they can do it to anyone.”

Reading the news is now like history class, said Jacques’s brother Jean, who has been a citizen for more than 20 years but asked for a pseudonym to protect his brother. “Instead of reading about it, now you’re living it.” Jean is afraid of being detained or deported too, despite being a U.S. citizen for more than 20 years. “It’s all how you look—‘You must be different.’ It’s ruthless, heartless, inhuman.”

Pierre-Louis, Jean, and Jacques are not just puzzled about the racism and backlash against citizens. They want to know: If immigrants leave, who will do this work? “There are a lot of jobs Haitians and Latinos are doing, other people would not do,” Pierre-Louis said. There is a great need in industries like health care and poultry processing, and Haitians have been willing to work hard because “you’re contributing to the development of society, your community,” he said. “Chasing us out because you don’t like our accents, the color of our skin—that’s not practical.”

The U.S. is facing a serious caregiver crisis. There are not enough health workers to care for everyone already, and it’s getting worse. By 2060, nearly a quarter of the U.S. population—some 94.7 million Americans—will be 65 or older, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Caregiving is hard work, physically and emotionally, yet workers are underpaid, underappreciated, and mistreated. Immigrants account for about 28 percent of caregivers in the U.S., and the immigration raids are already having profound effects on caregiving.

Other industries are no different. Jacques has worked in the poultry industry, where there have been frequent raids on processing plants. Employees run a whisper network, calling each other to warn: “You don’t want to get snatched by ICE.” Yet the meatpacking industry cannot function without immigrant workers, leading to instability and uncertainty in the nation’s food supply.

Even if Haitians wanted to leave, it would be nearly impossible to get back home. “There are no commercial flights in and out of Haiti for months now because of violence,” Jean said. Haiti is still roiling from the 2010 earthquake and subsequent political unrest, with towns overtaken by violent gangs. “People are seeking refuge and fleeing for their lives,” Jean said. “To send them back, knowing what’s going to happen to them—they’re not going to survive, they’re going to get killed.” Anyone coming back from America would be thought to be carrying money and would be tortured to death, Pierre-Louis said.

In 1990, the administration of George H.W. Bush created the TPS program for citizens from certain nations to work in the U.S. with protection from deportation. When it was not safe for the citizens of a designated nation to return—because of war or natural disasters, for example—they could continue working indefinitely in the U.S. TPS holders must show that they have never committed any felony or had more than two misdemeanors. Trump tried to end TPS in his first term (and then again last summer), but the program expanded significantly under Joe Biden, especially after the Covid pandemic left jagged gaps in the workforce. It’s hard to hear the constant narrative that people are invading the country, Pierre-Louis said, when “they were invited to come.”

When the judge blocked the TPS cancellation, “you could feel the relief and the joy they felt,” Jean said of TPS holders. But their optimism is still cautious. The halt was “amazing,” Pierre-Louis said, but “I don’t know how long that’s going to last.” It’s hard to live in this kind of uncertainty, trapped between the adopted country that increasingly threatens violence and the country of origin that promises it. 

In the face of persecution, Pierre-Louis finds comfort in his faith—especially the Bible story where the people of God are enslaved, blamed for the nation’s ills, held in captivity by a cruel pharaoh and waiting for freedom. “We can’t stand before him and fight. But we know God can,” Pierre-Louis said. “This is our country,” he said, and “we’re not quitters.”