"We don't see our future": Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio "panicking" after Trump's victory

Since President-elect Donald Trump won the election earlier this month, Haitian residents of Springfield, Ohio, have been living with a renewed fear of what may come should he follow through on his vow to terminate their temporary legal immigration status.

Many have packed their bags and left, while those who’ve called the Dayton suburb home for years and can't easily relocate scramble for information on their options for remaining in the United States as the threat of deportation during Trump's second term looms.

"Every place here — at church, at school, at work, everywhere — people are talking about what's gonna happen after [Temporary Protected Status] expires," said Evens Edouard, a Haitian resident of Springfield who works as a quality inspector for an automotive safety glass company in a nearby town. "We don't know. We don't know the plan."

Edouard, who said he received the status after losing his immediate relative visa following his divorce from a U.S. citizen he said abused him during their marriage, told Salon in a phone interview that he's most concerned about what his kids' lives will look like if Trump strips his legal status. Three of the 38-year-old's six children, five of whom are minors, hold temporary legal status. His other three children are U.S. citizens.

"I cannot take my kids who were born in the USA, and go back with them to Haiti. How are they gonna leave?" he said, adding: "When you say you have to send them back home, you send your own kids to a country that they don't know. They have the right to live here."

Though he said he believes Trump's campaign trail promise to end Temporary Protected Status was little more than political posturing to win over voters critical of immigration, he does feel the weight of what the election results could mean for his community. 

"I think this election blocked our progress. This election blocked our future in this country," he said, asserting that they're unable to plan for the future because of the uncertainty around what Trump will ultimately do with their legal status and what will happen after. 

"We don't know exactly if we're gonna have a chance to stay or not. We don't know if we have to move to Canada. We don't know if we have to plan to go back to our country. We don't know if we have to plan to go to another country — that's the impact of this election for the Haitian community," he added. "We don't see our future."

Thousands of Haitian people have built new lives in Springfield, and the majority of them live there legally, often via TPS. Their presence has given rise to an economic boost as local industries hire them to fill much-needed roles, but the influx of new residents has also sparked community tensions and strained the city's resources — conflicts that Trump capitalized on during his campaign promise to end the program.

The now-president-elect repeating a false rumor that Haitian residents of Springfield, Ohio, were abducting and eating cats brought the community into sharp focus during the presidential debate in September after his running mate Ohio Sen. JD Vance first amplified the falsehoods on social media. Since then, the community has been at the center of his promises to carry out mass deportations and with it, eliminate the Temporary Protected Status that grants them the legal ability to live and work in the U.S. temporarily. 

Slashing the program could disrupt the lives of thousands of people who have lived in the United States for years. Many would lose work authorization and have to return to untenable conditions in troubled countries, and families would splinter with parents forced to leave their U.S.-born children here.

But even as he beefs up his Cabinet picks with immigration hardliners, Trump's vow of a mass removal of TPS holders currently functions more as a scare tactic than an easily executable plan, legal experts told Salon — and that tactic is working.

"With this type of rhetoric that they've heard, then the fear rips up, and [Haitian clients] believe that maybe they will be deported," said Lana Joseph, a founding partner of Georgia-based immigration law firm L. Marcius Joseph and Associates. "I have explained to them that even though Trump has promised to terminate TPS, it's not a process that is 1, 2, 3, meaning that once he is sworn in on January 20, he's going to get rid of it. It is a process."

Who is at risk if Trump eliminates TPS

In an interview with News Nation last month, the president-elect said he'd "absolutely" revoke the status and vowed to send immigrants back to their country. Vance has also consistently characterized Haitians in Springfield and other TPS recipients as "illegal aliens" granted "amnesty" by the Biden administration with the wave of a "magic government wand."

Trump's advisors have doubled down on the future administration's intent to terminate TPS. His recent spate of Cabinet picks including immigration hardliners makes that threat more pronounced.

Trump selected South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem to run the Department of Homeland Security, which would give her the authority to decide whether a country's conditions merit a TPS designation. He also chose Thomas Homan, who led the Immigration Customs Enforcement agency during the first Trump term, to manage border policy for the White House, and Stephen Miller, who was instrumental to Trump's first term crackdown, to be the White House deputy chief of staff and oversee deportations, according to The New York Times.

Joseph, also a Haitian woman who goes by "Avoka Pèp La" (the people's advocate) in Kreyol, told Salon that her office has received an influx of calls from distraught clients across the nation — including Springfield — since Trump won the election. People have called, crying and stressed, with fears of family separation, deportation and leaving their homes.  

"We understand, once there is mass deportation, that he will use different ways to see how they can deport people, and even those who are here legally can probably face wrongful deportation and that brings fear to families," she said. "That's, I think, why people are panicking — because even those who are here legally [know] that they can still face wrongful deportation or wrongful action against them."

The Temporary Protected Status program began in 1990 to assist people residing in the U.S. who could not return to their home country because of violent conflict or humanitarian crisis and who had no serious criminal record. More than 800,000 immigrants from 16 countries currently hold the legal status, which lasts for up to 18 months, before the government must reevaluate whether to renew it with end dates varying by country. 

The largest group of people with protection under the program, at around 350,000 holders, comes from Venezuela, due to economic devastation and political repression under the Maduro regime, according to the Times. Immigrants from other countries, including El Salvador, Honduras and Nicaragua, have been eligible for TPS for more than 20 years, a fact that fuels program critics' concerns that the status can run indefinitely. Other countries, like Ethiopia, Ukraine and Lebanon, were made eligible more recently.

About 300,000 Haitians are currently eligible for TPS through to Feb. 3, 2026, as the Caribbean nation faces government collapse and thousands killed by gangs that have since seized control in the wake of the 2021 assassination of the country's president. Some Haitian TPS holders have lived in the U.S. since former President Barack Obama granted the status in 2010, after a magnitude 7.0 earthquake killed around 250,000 people, displaced over a million more and caused environmental devastation the nation hasn't yet been able to fully recover from. 

Should the Trump administration end TPS status for Haitian and other immigrant groups nationwide, the Department of Homeland Security would make the decision at least 60 days prior to the status' expiry date, according to the American Immigration Council. 

Julie Nemecek, the founder of immigration law firm the Nemecek Firm in Columbus, Ohio, told Salon that TPS holders with more serious criminal records, alongside those who have prior removal orders and no other recourse, would be at the highest risk of immediate deportation if Trump revokes TPS.

"Those people, many of them, are even checking in with ICE as part of the protocol," Nemecek, who's practiced immigration law since 2004, said in a phone interview. "So what can happen to them? They can go to an ICE check, and they can be detained and they can be deported. Or they can be picked up on the street and deported. Those people are the high-risk group."

People with active court cases before an immigration judge, though in a "pretty good position," face the next greatest risk as most of them likely have asylum applications while having sought TPS, Nemecek said. If they're in court with applications for asylum and TPS, the TPS being approved for the next month or two would allow an immigration attorney to "get them out of court, get their cases terminated, and then refile with [U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services]," which has a "friendlier" climate. 

TPS holders who were given parole or never placed in removal proceedings are in the "best shape" even though, without status, they'll have to figure out their next steps, Nemecek explained. While they may have to leave the country and return in order to seek relief, most of them could file affirmative asylum applications with USCIS, or pursue benefits through family relationships. 

While a large-scale mass deportation spectacle is unlikely, Nemecek argued, the country will likely see the administration make efforts to make winning immigration cases or filing applications for the relief immigrants are entitled to more difficult. Trump's mass deportation plan also makes family separation like what the nation witnessed in his first term almost an inevitability, she added.

What could happen to communities like Springfield, Ohio next

But Trump ending TPS doesn't beget an immediate end to life in the U.S. for immigrants currently holding the status. While some will be forced to uproot their lives, others will have other immigration relief options, Joseph explained. If the circumstances in Haiti remain the same or worsen in the next few years, people with a fear of persecution upon returning to the country may become eligible for asylum relief. Those who are legally in the country also have a Constitutional right to due process before being deported.

The other challenge to Trump's grand plan to remove immigrants is the "manpower" and "mechanisms" needed to carry it out, she said. More government resources will have to go into hiring more Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers, potentially creating more detention centers and adding personnel to transport people back to their home countries, which will also take time to materialize.

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In the meantime, organizations like the Immigration Attorneys Association and the American Civil Liberties Union are gearing up to fight legal battles against the Trump administration if he decides to terminate TPS arbitrarily or for political reasons, Joseph said, noting that this happened before. 

The Trump administration attempted to cut TPS in 2017 and 2018 for Haiti, El Salvador, Honduras, Nepal, Nicaragua and Sudan, but was challenged in federal court in the Ramos v. Nielsen case. The ACLU won a preliminary injunction in 2018 that allowed the program to continue, with the court finding, in part, that the Department of Homeland Security had not provided any justification for its new rule and that the Trump administration had, if anything, implemented it out of racial animus in violation of equal protection.  

The Trump administration appealed, and the case remained before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit even after Trump left office. But the Biden administration's support of the program — which has seen 16 countries' protections renewed, reinstated or added during his term — led the court to vacate the appeal in late 2023. 

Any legal challenges to the incoming Trump administration's effort to revoke TPS "could be a long, drawn-out process in court" that could take years, "although we do understand with this term that maybe he may have more leeway with the courts," Joseph said. "But we're also confident that the law must be upheld." 

Still, the impact of Trump's administration cutting off TPS will be widely felt, Nemecek said. The economic boom in places like Springfield will flatline as workers lose their authorization and homelessness will rise as immigrant families with lower incomes are forced to live in shelters and cars — an outcome Nemecek said she's already seen among her clientele. Should ICE detain people en masse, certain immigrants may be unable to pay bonds, and language barriers will compound all those issues, she said.

"When we're moving an entire community and shipping them off, that has a much larger effect," she said, referencing the ICE deportations of Mauritanian immigrants in Columbus in 2018. 

Those possibilities aren't lost on Edouard, the Springfield resident. Part of the appeal for settling in Springfield was its affordability relative to other cities, the tight-knit community that allows for newcomers to rent rooms from more established residents without the typical financial hurdles of apartment hunting and the relative ease in finding work. Cancelling TPS, he said, will only place many holders in limbo without work authorization or immediate relief, making it harder for them to provide for themselves and their families. 

As he urged the incoming administration to consider amnesty to remain in the country permanently, he also said he blames the U.S., in part, for the violent upheaval Haiti has seen in recent years, pointing to its backing of Haiti's unpopular prime minister and the influx of U.S. guns that have been trafficked into the country.

"You choose who can be the president, who can be the prime minister. You do whatever you want. You give guns, you give everything, and then you destroy the country," he said. "Because people cannot stay in their home country, they leave and they come to your door. They knock [on] your door, they enter. Now you want to send them back? No."

But Joseph remains hopeful that Haitian communities across the country will be able to overcome the next four years of likely hardship under Trump. Her office, along with other immigration offices and the Haitian Lawyers Association, have met to strategize ways to assist immigrant communities, help them navigate the process and provide legal services. Her office has also conducted direct outreach with communities, holding conferences, seminars and free consultation drives, connecting with community leaders — including those in Springfield — and visiting churches to educate congregations on what protections they have in the immediate future and how to prepare. 

While those community support networks will be crucial to the months and years ahead, she underscored that the Haitian community has been here before and "endured unimaginable hardship in the past." 

"We've been through all of it, but one thing with Haitians is that we have proven over and over that we are people of strength, resilience and unwavering faith, that no matter what, we will thrive, we will stand and we'll continue to fight," she said. "That spirit still lives within us, and we will continue on no matter what. That's why our motto for our flag is 'Unity makes strength,' because united, we stand strong."