The first documented arrival of Haitian refugees in South Florida dates to 1972, when a wooden sailboat, the Saint Sauveur, ran aground off of Pompano Beach, carrying sixty‑five asylum seekers fleeing the ruthless dictatorship of Jean-Claude Duvalier. Many Haitian families gravitated to Lemon City, one of the oldest settlements in Miami, developed in the late eighteen-hundreds and, at the time, largely populated by lemon-grove workers from the Bahamas. As more Haitians arrived in the area in the nineteen-seventies and eighties, they opened businesses, churches, markets, and cultural centers. Viter Juste, a businessman and activist who’s often called the father of Miami’s Haitian community, coined the name of the neighborhood in the early nineteen-eighties, and it stuck.
Today in Little Haiti, a seven‑foot bronze statue of Toussaint Louverture, one of the leaders of the Haitian Revolution, stands in a small plaza known as the City of Miami Freedom Garden. The plaza sits across from a gas station and bakery, surrounded by rows of modest homes, some purchased decades ago by newly arrived Haitian immigrants, before gentrification began to reshape the neighborhood. Since the statue’s installation, in 2005, three years after I moved to Miami, and a little more than a year after the bicentennial of Haitian independence, the spot has become a neighborhood gathering place. On January 1st, Haitian Independence Day, people stop by to take photos while area churches and neighbors share bowls of soup joumou, “freedom soup,” eaten to commemorate that day. Some afternoons, elders sit on the green benches surrounding the statue to talk or look out at the neighborhood, as they might once have done from their front porches back in Haiti. Occasionally, a group of tourists passes by, led by a tour guide dressed in a traditional blue denim karabela shirt and a straw hat, pausing to look up at the Haitian and American flags perched on tall flagstaffs, before reading the English translation of Louverture’s most famous declaration, at the statue’s base: “By overthrowing me, you have cut down the trunk of the liberty tree of the Blacks in Saint Domingue. It will grow again from its roots for they are numerous and they run deep into the ground.”
On January 12th, at the foot of the statue, a group of elected officials and community members gathered to commemorate the 7.0-magnitude earthquake that struck Haiti in 2010, killing more than two hundred thousand people and displaced 1.5 million. The event has been held annually for the past fifteen years, but this year there was an extra layer of sombreness to the proceedings, which the overcast skies seemed to reflect. On February 3rd, the Trump Administration is set to terminate Temporary Protected Status (T.P.S.) for Haitians in the United States, placing some three hundred and thirty thousand men, women, and children at risk of deportation. T.P.S., granted to certain immigrant populations when the conditions in their home country make safe return impossible, does not provide a path to citizenship, but gives recipients the crucial ability to work legally in the U.S. and, in many states, to obtain a driver’s license. After the 2010 earthquake, Haitian community leaders successfully appealed to the Obama Administration for T.P.S., and it has been extended ever since. Under Donald Trump, though, several countries with T.P.S. status, including Venezuela and Somalia, have recently had their designations terminated, and Haiti’s status is in limbo, as a pivotal lawsuit before the U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., challenges the Trump Administration’s decision to revoke it. During hearings in early January, the presiding judge, Ana C. Reyes, questioned the government’s assertion that it would be safe to return to Haiti, pointing to the fact that the F.A.A. has restricted civilian flights over the capital of Port-au-Prince, and the State Department has warned against travel to Haiti. Reyes’s ruling is expected on February 2nd, one day before the T.P.S. designation for Haitians is set to expire.
According to the U.N., Haiti is facing one of the worst humanitarian crises in the world. Since the assassination of President Jovenel Moïse, in 2021, armed groups have assumed control of large portions of the capital and surrounding areas, terrorizing civilians and causing 1.4 million people, including seven hundred and forty-one thousand children, to be displaced. Friends and family members of mine have moved from neighborhood to neighborhood to escape the violence. Some have had to abandon their homes, with all of their belongings still inside, only to find out later that those houses were burned to the ground. Displaced families often spend weeks, sometimes months, in makeshift dwellings, including public squares and deserted government buildings, while children lose months or even years of education as schools close or become inaccessible owing to gang activity. Sexual violence against women and girls has been on the rise as a tool of control by gangs. Five million and seven hundred thousand Haitians, close to half the population, are now facing high levels of food insecurity. Since Moïse’s assassination, Haiti has had no elected officials. The country’s interim governing body, the Transitional Presidential Council, has been mired in infighting and corruption allegations, and though its mandate ends on February 7th it has yet to reach consensus on who will lead the country or what form the next government will take.
One of the speakers at the earthquake vigil was Marleine Bastien, a Miami-Dade County commissioner and the founder of the nonprofit Family Action Network Movement, which organized the event. A sixty-six-year-old longtime activist, dressed in black, she clutched the microphone with both hands as she described the dire state of Haiti today. “This is a country at war,” she said. Bastien often reminds audiences that her own story is shaped by immigration. She grew up in a small town in the north of Haiti, in a family that practiced the Bahá’í faith, and as a teen-ager she spent her summers volunteering at a hospital near her home town, caring for malnourished babies. In 1981, her father, who had migrated to South Florida years earlier, encouraged her to seek political asylum in the U.S. after she denounced the dictatorship in a radio interview. When she arrived in Miami, at the age of twenty-two, she enrolled at Miami‑Dade Community College, then earned a master’s degree in social work at Florida International University. For more than a decade, she served as a medical social worker, supporting children with sickle-cell anemia, cancer, H.I.V., and AIDS, and she was one of many members of Miami’s Haitian community who were instrumental in securing T.P.S. after the earthquake. Now, lobbying Congress and speaking out in the media, she warns of the consequences of revoking T.P.S. status for Haitians. To deport them, she said, would be to “send them to a place where some will lose their lives.”
At 4:53 P.M., the same moment the earth in Haiti began to shake for an interminable thirty-five seconds in 2010, people bowed their heads to observe a moment of silence. Afterward, we marched to the nearby Caribbean Marketplace, a bright open hall designed by Charles Harrison Pawley, an architect born in Haiti to American parents, to resemble the famed Victorian-style Iron Market, in Port-au-Prince. During the procession, the sky opened and it started to rain, lightly at first, then in steady sheets. In years past, the vigil has attracted a crowd that fills the whole street. This year, attendance was the lowest I had seen. The rain didn’t help, but neither did Trump’s brutal immigration crackdown, which has left many in the community in a constant state of anxiety. Just a few days earlier, as part of a large-scale ICE operation in Minneapolis, an agent had fatally shot Renee Good, a thirty‑seven‑year‑old American citizen, in her car. As Bastien told me later, “People are, of course, afraid that what’s happening in Minneapolis can easily happen here.”
In the past, members of the Haitian community have felt betrayed by American politicians on both sides of the aisle. A decade ago, during Trump’s first Presidential campaign, he held a town-hall-style meeting with Haitian American allies during which he said, “I will be your champion.” Many of the MAGA-friendly Haitians who hosted Trump were angry about Bill and Hillary Clinton’s long history of fraught involvement in Haiti, including the former President’s role in failed post-earthquake recovery efforts, and the former Secretary of State’s support for the controversial musician turned politician Michel Martelly. In October of 2020, Joe Biden took his turn visiting Little Haiti during his bid to unseat Trump, promising that, if elected, he would make sure that the Haitian community had “an even shot.” As President, Biden extended Temporary Protected Status for Haiti throughout his term, in response to worsening conditions in the country, including an earthquake in the southern peninsula, in August 2021. In early 2023, the Administration introduced a humanitarian-parole program intended to reduce the number of people attempting dangerous migration routes to the United States. The C.H.N.V., or “pwogram Biden,” as it’s known among Haitians, allowed up to thirty thousand people from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela to enter the United States each month and remain for two years, provided that they passed security checks and had a U.S.‑based financial sponsor. The program ended in March, 2025, and under the Trump White House’s current policy all five hundred thousand beneficiaries could be subject to deportation unless they have secured another form of legal protection, such as asylum or T.P.S., both of which have become increasingly beyond reach.
In the Marketplace, we sipped ginger tea and ate Haitian patties and warm bouyon, a hearty stew provided by the vigil organizers, as Tessa Petit, the executive director of the Florida Immigrant Coalition, addressed the crowd. Born and raised in Haiti, Petit lost her mother in the 2010 earthquake. She spoke of the Haitian American community’s ongoing grief, now compounded by fear of deportations, but she also stressed the wider economic consequences of ending T.P.S. “We deserve to be recognized for what we have contributed and continue to contribute to this nation,” she said, adding that a hundred and thirteen thousand Haitian T.P.S. holders are members of Florida’s labor force, contributing an estimated $1.3 billion in state and local taxes. Elsewhere in the country, she said, Haitians “have revived towns that were dying.” She was referring to places such as Springfield, Ohio, where Haitian immigrants have helped reverse decades of population loss and fill essential jobs in manufacturing and food processing, even as Donald Trump and Vice-President J. D. Vance spread the lie that they were “eating the dogs.” Many advocates I spoke with hope that evidence of Haitians’ contributions might appeal to the Trump Administration where pleas for compassion have failed. A recent letter to Trump from the San Diego-based immigration-rights organization Haitian Bridge Alliance and the A.F.L.-C.I.O. argues that Haitian T.P.S. holders contribute 5.9 million dollars to the U.S. economy and that it is “counter-productive” to decimate a “legal, tax-paying workforce that is already filling critical gaps in the U.S. labor market.”
Many T.P.S. recipients are reluctant to speak publicly for fear of attracting ICE’s attention, but at the vigil a few chose to share their stories. One of them was Corinne, a stylish twenty-five-year-old with a cloud of voluminous curls. She was nine when she arrived in the U.S. with her mother and her one-year-old sister, after the 2010 earthquake. They entered on visas and soon became beneficiaries of T.P.S. After graduating from high school, she enrolled at a local private university, paying out of pocket because, as a T.P.S. holder, she was ineligible for financial aid. During her first year of college, her mother fell ill with a chronic pulmonary illness and could no longer work, so Corinne took a job in a retail store to support her family. She dreamed of pursuing a Ph.D. in psychology, and she earned a 4.0 G.P.A., but she eventually had to withdraw from school. In her retail job, she began as a seasonal worker in the shipping department but was eventually promoted to business manager. She now oversees a hundred and twenty employees, and she remains the sole provider for her mother and her sister, who is now seventeen and applying to college. Corinne fears being sent back to Haiti, a country she has not seen since she was nine. “But I also keep thinking about my sister,” she told me later. “What’s going to happen to her and her future if she has to go back with us?” At the vigil, she said, “We are not a status. We are human beings.”
Alongside the federal immigration crackdown, Florida has launched its own state-run immigration-enforcement program, Operation Tidal Wave, with some of the most punitive measures in the country. In recent legislative sessions, state lawmakers have introduced bills that would bar undocumented immigrants from opening bank accounts and restrict the money-transfer services that many immigrants use to send remittances back to their home countries. These proposed measures come on top of existing laws that restrict driver’s licenses and expand local law enforcement’s authority to turn people over to ICE. Since late 2025, under new agreements with the Department of Homeland Security, Florida has deputized more than eighteen hundred state troopers to perform federal-immigration functions. The state has also expanded its detention infrastructure, opening a “deportation depot” in Baker County, and the Everglades complex known as Alligator Alcatraz, where advocates report that detainees are held in extreme heat in overcrowded and unsanitary dorms with inadequate medical care and little or no access to legal representation.
The day after the vigil, at the Sant La Haitian Neighborhood Center, in North Miami, I met a couple in their forties who arrived in the U.S. in 2022, with their four children, now five, fourteen, nineteen, and twenty. They had walked to the U.S. border after travelling from Brazil through Colombia and crossing the perilous Darién Gap. Three years ago, their youngest child, a boy, was born in Miami with Down syndrome and gastroschisis, a rare condition in which a baby’s intestines, and sometimes other organs, develop outside the body, requiring specialized medical care. They worry that he would not survive if they were forced to return with him to Haiti, and like many “mixed‑status” families they’ve grappled with the wrenching dilemma of whether their child would be better off remaining in the U.S. without them. But they have decided that they could never leave the boy behind.
Attorneys at the Haitian Lawyers Association, a Miami-based nonprofit, have created a dedicated task force to help those at risk of deportation. They have organized free law clinics and offered pro-bono counsel, while also helping clients prepare for possible deportation by organizing powers of attorney, wills, trusts, and guardianship documents for their children and elderly parents. The attorneys consult with counterparts in Haiti, as well as in Canada, where many Haitians have fled, sometimes by walking long distances in freezing temperatures and crossing the northern border on foot.
Vance recently said that ICE agents could begin going door to door in the coming months, exacerbating fears. The husband I met at Sant La told me, “We jump every time there’s a knock.” Josette Josué, the center’s director of community health, told me, “Some of the people we serve are so afraid, they don’t even answer phone calls. They won’t open the door if you visit. They’re afraid to go to church or the supermarket. They barricade themselves inside.” One fifteen-year-old girl, whose family fled Haiti after being caught in the middle of a battle between two gangs, told her mother, who then told Josué that she would rather die than return. Florida school districts have seen dwindling enrollment since 2024, owing, in part, to immigrants leaving the state or fearing being detained by ICE.
Bastien, the H.L.A. lawyers, and others told me that, even if the federal court in D.C. issues an injunction blocking the termination of T.P.S., and even if the program is extended, the community will experience only a temporary sense of relief. The Trump Administration is likely to appeal the decision, reviving the threat of deportation. The only durable solution is a pathway to permanent residency for those who have spent years working, raising families, and paying taxes in the United States. Guibert St. Fort, the program coördinator at Sant La, told me that the people who walk into the center every day somehow hold out hope. “Their faith has been tested again and again,” St. Fort said. “They feel that, if God wanted me to die, he would have let me die where I came from or somewhere along the way.” The couple I met proudly showed me photos of their children—sitting beside a Christmas tree in matching holiday‑themed pajamas, wearing their school uniforms. Their two eldest daughters would like to go to college; one wants to become a nurse. “We have gone through so much,” the wife said. “Like all parents, we hope our children accomplish all that we’ve sacrificed for. We hope their dreams will come true.” ♦
