Dara Lind writes:

In early 2010, an earthquake devastated Haiti—but, even as Haitians in the U.S. had far less to return to, they received a new opportunity to stay. Reasoning that it was no longer safe to deport anyone back to Haiti, the Obama Administration allowed them to apply for Temporary Protected Status, which meant a U.S. work permit and a written assurance that they wouldn’t be deported. They might not be able to go home again, but they could make a new one. And tens of thousands of them did.

Many found steady jobs: an estimated thirteen thousand Haitian T.P.S. holders currently work as nursing assistants. If they had children, the older ones grew up among Americans; the younger children were native-born citizens. (Nearly four hundred thousand U.S.-born children have at least one parent with T.P.S.) In theory, each T.P.S. grant lasted eighteen months, at the end of which the U.S. could tell the immigrants benefitting from it to go home—but, when the first Trump Administration tried to do just that, a federal judge stopped it. The longer the U.S. extended T.P.S. protections, the more remote the prospect of losing them seemed.

Until it wasn’t. In July, 2025, the second Trump Administration announced that it would end Temporary Protected Status for Haiti. In February, as rumors spread of coming U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement sweeps through Haitian communities, a federal judge blocked the Administration from carrying out the termination, ruling that the Department of Homeland Security was likely motivated by racism and not, as federal law requires, by current conditions in Haiti. This decision left Haitian T.P.S. holders with work permits that would remain valid as long as the court ruling held. Then, on June 25th, the Supreme Court ruled 6–3 that the Trump Administration could move forward with stripping protections from three hundred and thirty thousand Haitians living in the U.S. under T.P.S., along with some four thousand Syrians. The Court found, among other things, that the Administration cannot be sued for violations of the law governing T.P.S.

The subsequent weeks brought chaos. The Trump Administration kept declaring expiration dates for Haitian T.P.S.-based work permits, even though the federal courts hadn’t completed the paperwork implementing the Supreme Court’s ruling. Some employers—who are on the hook for insuring the legality of their workers—fired Haitians who had T.P.S. protections. ICE’s Ohio field office called Haitians in to fit them with ankle monitors. [Continue reading…]