Hundreds of people gathered in the church of St. John Missionary Baptist Church in Springfield to call for an extension of Temporary Protected Status for Haitians on February 2, 2026. (Photo by Megan Henry, Ohio Capital Journal).
About 45,000 Haitians in Ohio are nervously waiting for the U.S. Supreme Court to weigh in on the Trump administration’s decision to force them to return to their homeland. A recent assessment shows that conditions in Haiti are as bad as anywhere in the world.
About 30,000 Haitians with transient status live in central Ohio and the British Isles an estimated 12,000 to 15,000 Haitians call home in Springfield, Ohio using a combination of transient protected status, citizenship, and other legal statuses.
Since the devastating 2010 earthquake, approximately 350,000 Haitians have been in the United States with Temporary Protected Status. Since then, their status has been renewed many times.
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Claiming that the stays were only transient, former Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem announced in November that the administration would end that status for Haitians and about 6,000 Syrians.
Lawyers for the Haitians filed a lawsuit arguing that Noem failed to comply with a 1990 law establishing transient protected status. It requires the government to conduct a mandatory review of conditions in a group’s home country to certify it is protected to return before forcing them to leave.
Instead of doing this, Trump and Noem simply decided to kick the Haitians out of the EU “racial antipathy towards non-white immigrants and, in particular, overt antipathy towards Haitians,” their lawyer Geoffrey Pipoly told the Supreme Court during oral arguments last week, according to SCOTUBlog.
Influential court observers said it was unclear after arguments whether a majority of the court would allow the claims of the Haitians and Syrians to be granted or whether they would prevail if they did.
However, the organization, which counts Albert Einstein among its founders, reports that if Haitians with protected status are forced to return to their Caribbean nation, they will face “one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises“
The predecessor organization to the International Rescue Committee was created by Einstein and a group of humanitarians in 1933. It now operates in 40 crisis-affected countries under the leadership of David Milliband, a former British foreign secretary.
IN rate published last week, the organization said conditions in Haiti have only worsened since then President Jovenel Moïse was murdered in July 2021
“Conditions threaten to deteriorate further as the indefinite postponement of elections increases political instability and UN-backed gang suppression forces begin to deploy, leading to more clashes between gangs and security forces, which could result in even greater levels of displacement and food insecurity,” the International Rescue Committee assessment said.
The assessment shows that in the absence of an effective government, gangs control 90% of the capital Port-au-Prince.
Added:
- 73% of families said they felt unsafe where they slept. Only 5.5% said they lived in their own homes, with displaced families “sheltering in precarious and overcrowded conditions.”
- Nearly 25% of households said they had unaccompanied children in their communities who had been separated from their caregivers.
- Almost 60% of children do not attend school. And the recruitment of children by gangs increased by 200% in 2005, so that they now constitute half of all gang members.
- 75% of households cannot afford medical care, increasing the number of preventable deaths.
- 36% of households have untreated drinking water, increasing the incidence of diseases such as cholera, typhoid fever and other water-borne diseases.
“Millions of people in Haiti continue to face a worsening crisis of food insecurity, forced displacement, epidemics of deadly diseases and increasing violence,” Alice Ribes, director of the International Rescue Committee in Haiti, said in a written statement.
“Public services in many areas have collapsed under gang rule, leaving people with little or no access to clean drinking water, food, health care and education.”
While conditions in the majority-Black country are dire, critics accuse Trump and his administration of racist motivations for trying to force Haitians in the United States to return.
Both in the 2024 presidential campaign Trump and current Vice President JD Vance repeated a racist lie that Haitians in Springfield, Ohio, were stealing animals from their neighbors and eating them.
– wrote Governor Mike DeWine, also a Republican column in the New York Times. refuting the claims.
In blocking the attempt to revoke Haitians’ protected status, a federal judge cited Noem’s social media post in which he said evidence of racial motivation.
“I recommend a total travel ban to every damn country that is flooding our nation with killers, leeches and drug addicts” – Noem, then Secretary of Homeland Security, published on X December 1st.
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