- 19 hours ago
- 8 min read
Haitians in the USA fear deportation following
the Supreme Court's TPS ruling
Springfield, Ohio, faces a second social and economic upheaval in a decade
Up to 12,000 Haitians call Springfield, Ohio, home. To protect their neighbours from immigration raids, some residents have converted their basements and spare bedrooms into shelters for Haitian families who could be targeted by the Trump administration's deportation campaign. (Source: New York Times)
Introduction
August 2026: Temporary Protected Status (TPS), a humanitarian provision that has shielded more than a million people from deportation from the US since 1990, is being wound down at the fastest pace since its creation. A US Supreme Court ruling in June 2026 removed the main legal obstacle to the process, and Haitians, one of the largest groups covered by the programme, are the first to feel its full effect.
TPS allows the US Secretary of Homeland Security to designate nationals of a country for protection from removal and work authorisation when conditions there, such as armed conflict, environmental disaster, or other extraordinary circumstances, make return unsafe. It does not lead to permanent residency and must be periodically renewed or terminated by the Secretary.
On 25 June 2026, the Supreme Court ruled 6–3 in Mullin v. Doe, consolidated with Trump v. Miot, that the TPS statute bars courts from reviewing the Secretary's non-constitutional decisions to end a country's designation. The ruling reversed lower-court injunctions that had paused terminations for Haiti and Syria, and separately found that a claim alleging that Haiti's termination was racially motivated was unlikely to succeed.
The judgment did not itself end anyone's status; it remanded the cases to district courts to issue implementing orders. For Haiti, whose designation was due to expire under its own terms on 27 July 2026, the practical effect was immediate.
The Trump administration has consistently argued, across multiple terminations since 2025, that conditions in the affected countries no longer meet the 'extraordinary and temporary' threshold Congress intended, and that continued designation is not in the national interest.
TPS holders contribute billions to the US economy
As of 31 March 2025, the most recent date for which comprehensive data are available, approximately 1.3 million people held TPS in the United States, according to the Penn Wharton Budget Model (PWBM). Five nationalities account for 97 per cent of that total: Venezuela (roughly 600,000, or 47%), Haiti (roughly 330,000, or 25%), El Salvador, Ukraine and Honduras.
Terminations have not proceeded uniformly. Honduras's designation, tied to Hurricane Mitch in 1998, ended in September 2025 and is under appeal. Terminations for Burma, Ethiopia, Somalia and South Sudan remain blocked by ongoing court challenges, affecting a comparatively small number of holders. Yemen's designation ended in May 2026. El Salvador's roughly 170,000 holders await a decision, with the current designation running to 9 September 2026. Venezuela's far larger cohort is not due to lose work authorisation until October 2026.
Haiti is the exception. Its designation, in place since July 2011, expired on 27 July 2026, making Haitians the first population within the group of countries whose terminations had been tied up in litigation to lose protection outright, ahead of Syria, whose roughly 6,000 holders were still awaiting a district court implementing order as of mid-August 2026.
Termination carries consequences beyond the loss of a work permit. Many TPS holders have lived in the United States for over a decade and have US-citizen children, who themselves face no loss of status but risk separation from parents who do. Employers who have relied on TPS workers for years lose them with comparatively little notice once a designation lapses, since holders generally cannot be legally employed once their status and accompanying work authorisation expire.
Advocacy groups have raised similar concerns for each affected nationality, though the scale and visibility of the impact have so far been greatest in communities such as Springfield, Ohio, where TPS holders make up a large share of the local population.
The economic stakes are national. PWBM estimated in November 2025 that TPS workers contributed $35.9 billion to US GDP in 2023, with the largest shares in Florida ($10.7 billion), Texas ($4.3 billion), California ($3.6 billion) and New York ($2.8 billion).
TPS holders are disproportionately employed in cleaning and maintenance, construction and transportation, sectors PWBM identified as most exposed to labour shortages as terminations proceed. Roughly 700,000 TPS holders were already on track to lose status by the end of 2025 under terminations announced earlier that year, including 550,000 who were legally employed.
After years of living and working in the US, Haitians face deportation to a country in turmoil
Haiti's TPS designation dates to 2010, when then-Secretary Janet Napolitano designated the country following an earthquake that killed more than 200,000 people.
Successive administrations repeatedly extended and redesignated it over the following fifteen years, citing conditions that changed in character but not in severity: a cholera epidemic and Hurricane Matthew in the mid-2010s; the assassination of President Jovenel Moïse in July 2021, followed by another earthquake in the country's south the same year; and, from 2022 onward, an escalation in gang control over Port-au-Prince that at various points left the capital's main airport and port intermittently unusable. Each redesignation reset the pool of eligible residence dates and extended work authorisation for existing holders.
The first Trump administration (January 2017 to January 2021) attempted to terminate the designation in 2019; federal court blocked the effort, and the status remained unchanged.
It was extended again under the Biden administration (January 2021 to January 2025), most recently through a July 2021 redesignation, and was briefly reinstated by a district court in September 2025 after an earlier termination attempt, before the Supreme Court's emergency docket paused that order pending the eventual ruling in Mullin v. Doe.
In late 2025, Secretary Kristi Noem announced the termination of TPS for Haiti, stating that she had found no extraordinary or temporary conditions preventing Haitians from returning safely and that continued protection was contrary to the national interest. She also acknowledged 'escalating violence and gang violence' in Port-au-Prince in the same announcement. TPS holders sued in December 2025; a federal judge issued a stay in February 2026, which remained in place until the Supreme Court's June ruling cleared the way for termination to proceed.
Haitian TPS holders in the United States number more than 330,000, according to the American Immigration Council.
Haitians revitalised Springfield, Ohio, and then Trump made an outrageous claim
During his September 2024 debate with Vice President Kamala Harris, Donald Trump, without evidence, claimed that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, were eating residents' dogs and cats. The claim was false, but it made Springfield's name recognisable worldwide and reshaped coverage of the city for the following two years.
Springfield, with a population of approximately 59,000, had experienced decades of post-industrial population decline before Haitian migrants began settling there in significant numbers from around 2021, drawn by affordable housing and jobs in manufacturing, warehousing and logistics. Estimates of the city's Haitian population vary widely, with early accounts ranging from 12,000 to 20,000; more recent reporting, including from America Magazine and NBC4, converges on a range of roughly 12,000 to 15,000. Not all are TPS holders; some hold other immigration statuses.
The effects were, and remain, dual-sided. Employers in manufacturing, logistics and agriculture filled long-standing vacancies with legal workers, enabling some local companies to remain competitive and expand their operations. Haitian-owned businesses opened. The population decline, which had persisted for decades, reversed, and the new arrivals added an estimated hundreds of millions of dollars in rent, groceries and retail spending to the local economy over several years.
At the same time, the city's population rose by an estimated 20 per cent in a short period, a pace that its housing supply, schools, healthcare providers and roads had little time to absorb. Rents rose sharply, straining lower-income and native-born residents competing for the same stock. Local clinics and emergency departments reported longer wait times and additional strain due to language translation needs. Springfield's public schools expanded English Language Learner programmes and hired bilingual staff to accommodate hundreds of new students.
A fatal school bus crash in August 2023, involving a driver later found to be operating without a valid US licence, became a local flashpoint over the pace of change, though city officials have consistently disputed claims that the broader rise in traffic incidents was disproportionately linked to the new arrivals.
The September 2024 debate transformed a local story into a national one. Springfield closed schools, City Hall and other municipal buildings after a wave of bomb threats; Wittenberg University cancelled activities following a shooting threat targeting the Haitian community. Ohio's attorney general and local officials publicly stated that the specific claims about pets were baseless.
The Supreme Court ruling threatens to split a community that was growing together
Since 2021, local organisations have worked to ease initial tension between locals and newcomers. Springfield Neighbors United and Springfield G92, a coalition of local churches, have coordinated housing assistance, legal referrals and community-safety support for Haitian residents.
Catholic charities, including the local chapter of the St Vincent de Paul Society, have helped families secure legal representation and passports for US-born children.
The Springfield chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) organised a solidarity meeting that explicitly linked support for the city's Haitian and Hispanic communities. Its president, Denise Williams, said the city would 'stand up with everybody, together as one community'.
Individual residents have also taken visible roles: Colin Barclay, a longtime white Springfield resident, helped de-escalate a confrontation outside a Haitian community centre in 2024. He later described a local information environment in which factual correction often failed to change minds already set on a narrative.
That local accommodation is now being tested again. Since Haiti's TPS expired on 27 July, community leaders have reported Haitian families leaving the city out of fear of deportation, raising a new concern among civic leaders about a wave of vacant housing, mirroring the same properties that were in short supply three years ago.
Some local employers have reported workforce shortages, declining manufacturing output and lost business bids since the loss of legal workers began, reversing the labour-market gains the city had recorded since 2021.
Immigration enforcement activity in the area has increased; The Haitian Times reported multiple Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detentions of Springfield residents in mid-August, describing a rapidly developing operation in which officers stopped and detained family members.
Ohio Governor Mike DeWine, a Republican, has publicly described the termination of TPS as harmful to the state's employers and economy, a rare instance of a Republican state official breaking with the administration's position on a specific TPS termination.
Sources and methodology
This article draws on: the Supreme Court's opinion in Mullin v. Doe, No. 25-1083 (25 June 2026); a Congressional Research Service Legal Sidebar on the ruling (LSB11446); the American Immigration Council's TPS overview fact sheet (updated 24 June 2026) and its reporting on post-ruling confusion (July 2026); the Penn Wharton Budget Model's "550,000 Workers Lose Status by End of 2025" analysis (19 November 2025); the National Immigration Forum's TPS fact sheet (updated August 2026); KFF's brief on TPS changes and health care access (1 May 2026); and USCIS's TPS programme page. Local reporting on Springfield drew on Spectrum News 1, ABC6/WSYX, The Haitian Times, America Magazine, Cincinnati Magazine, NBC4 WCMH, WYSO and Salon, covering the period from September 2024 to August 2026. Figures for Haiti's TPS population range from approximately 300,000 to 350,000, depending on the source and date; this article uses "more than 330,000" as a mid-range figure consistent with the most recent available data.
A note on terminology
Temporary Protected Status (TPS) holders are not undocumented or irregular migrants. TPS is an explicit, temporary legal status granted by the US government, providing work authorisation and protection from removal for as long as a designation remains in force. This article refers to them as "TPS holders" or "beneficiaries" throughout, and does not use "illegal immigrant" to describe anyone in that protected category, including during the period before a designation's formal termination takes effect.
Further reading from The Immigrant Times: Separation of children under Trump || Foreign doctors in the US || US cities and mayors confront Trump || Immigrant detention in the US || White House claims immigration will destroy Europe || Undocumented immigrants contribute billions to US economy ||
COMMENTS
FOLLOW