In Springfield, Ohio, Haitian Catholics gathered on July 12 for a Creole Mass at St. Raphael’s, a tall Gothic church east of downtown with a bell tower over 130 feet high. St. Raphael is the oldest Catholic parish in Springfield. It was at this parish in 1886 that a Black American man who had been born into slavery, Daniel Rudd, founded the first-ever Black Catholic newspaper, the American Catholic Tribune.
There are currently no Haitian priests in Springfield, but Father Fritzner Valcin had driven in from nearby Columbus. A Haitian immigrant himself and now a naturalized citizen, Father Valcin spoke in fluent Creole, the everyday language of Haiti, as a choir with eight singers, a drummer and a keyboardist filled the cavernous church with rhythm and beauty.
The day’s Gospel reading was the Parable of the Sower. “My parents were farmers; that’s how I understand the parable of the sower,” Father Valcin said. “Jesus invites us, in good times and bad times.”
A little boy among the members of the Haitian community celebrating Mass was also celebrating his birthday. As Mass concluded, Father Valcin called him up to the altar.
“How old are you? Seven?” he asked.
“Eight!”
“Are you happy?”
“Yes,” the boy said.
Father Valcin asked God to look after this child on his birthday. His parents face deportation back to Haiti; they may have to decide if their U.S.-born son should accompany them.
Countdown to T.P.S. termination
Many members of the Haitian community of 12,000 to 15,000 people in Springfield—like others around the country—are living on borrowed time, threatened by a Supreme Court decision in June that allows the Trump administration to follow through on its decision to terminate Temporary Protected Status for Haitians and other immigrant residents. T.P.S. is a legal provision created by Congress in 1990 that has allowed almost 331,000 Haitian immigrants to live and work in the United States since 2010.
Recent violent confrontations with Immigration and Customs Enforcement and reports that the F.B.I. will no longer investigate fatal encounters with federal officers are raising the specter of intensified deportations before the summer ends. Now Catholic organizations across the country are helping Haitian immigrant communities prepare for what many fear will be a national campaign of arrest and deportation.
Springfield’s Haitian community became prominent in 2024 after it surfaced during the presidential campaign as representative of America’s immigration challenges and became the subject of often shocking online vitriol.
After a series of extensions, the date for the expiration of T.P.S. for Haitian immigrants has been set for July 24, leaving immigrants and their supporters scrambling to decide how to respond. “It does sometimes feel hopeless, but we’re always thinking: ‘What’s next?’” said Casey Rollins, the executive director of the Springfield chapter of the St. Vincent de Paul Society, speaking from the national charity’s local office on July 13.
Ms. Rollins, a lifelong resident of Springfield, and other local Catholic leaders are helping Haitian neighbors find lawyers to call if they get detained, obtain passports for children born on U.S. soil or make decisions about what to do if they have to leave. Some within Springfield’s Haitian community have already decided to accept the self-deportation back to Haiti encouraged by the Department of Homeland Security. Others are seeking more promising alternatives. Father Valcin reported that he was aware of at least four Springfield Haitians who moved to Canada in mid-July as the T.P.S. deadline drew closer.
Before the Supreme Court ruling, Catholic groups here had been focusing on addressing some of the long-term issues faced by the Haitian immigrants in Springfield, assisting with English lessons, job training and driving instruction. Ms. Rollins explained that some Haitian immigrants have struggled to adapt to American roads and driving rules.
In the early 2020s, after a wave of Haitian immigrants settled in town, some Springfield residents complained about municipal social services being stretched thin. In 2023, a Haitian man slammed into a school bus, killing 11-year-old Aiden Clark and injuring 23 others. That accident set the far-right internet alight. In August 2024, members of a white nationalist group marched in the streets of Springfield, demanding that Haitian residents be expelled.
President Donald Trump and his running mate JD Vance soon added fuel to the fire, spreading an online conspiracy that Haitian immigrants in Ohio had been eating neighborhood dogs and cats. Dozens of bomb threats that year caused officials to shut down city hall and led to evacuations at hospitals, schools and businesses.
“They’re eating the dogs, the people that came in, they’re eating the cats,” Mr. Trump said during a televised debate with Democratic nominee Kamala Harris. “They’re eating the pets of the people that live there, and this is what’s happening in our country, and it’s a shame.”
The vice presidential candidate then doubled down on the president’s falsehoods about Haitians in Springfield, arguing they were worth repeating because they were in service of a greater cause. “If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do,” Mr. Vance said on CNN.
Not good for the country, not good for Ohio
To be sure, not all Republicans agree with that approach or that assessment of the contributions of the nation’s Haitian immigrants. Ohio’s Gov. Mike DeWine, a Republican and a practicing Catholic, has called for Haitians to be allowed to stay in his state and criticized last month’s Supreme Court decision.
“As a result of today’s ruling,” Mr. DeWine said in a statement released to the press, “the over 10,000 Haitians who have been living in Ohio (mostly in the Springfield area) legally through TPS will now be here illegally and will be subject to immediate deportation.”
“This also means that while these Haitians were working and contributing to our community and economy yesterday, today it is now illegal to employ them.”
“The situation in Haiti could hardly be much worse,” the governor continued. “The violent gangs run most of the country. The government barely functions. And the economy is in shambles.”
Haitian immigrants in the United States first received T.P.S. designation after an earthquake in 2010 devastated the island nation. The designation has been extended because of the political instability and insecurity that has plagued Haiti since.
Terminating T.P.S., Mr. DeWine concluded, “is not in the best interest of the United States nor Ohio.”
Springfield is a Rust Belt town of around 60,000 residents located between Dayton and Columbus. There are almost 100 Springfields across the United States, so Ohio’s Springfield cannot claim to be the inspiration for the hometown on “The Simpsons,” but there is no denying that the city represents something quintessentially American.
When I visited last week, I found a sprawling suburban checkerboard of wide open spaces and family homes. The 4-H agricultural youth program was founded here. The city boasts a Frank Lloyd Wright house.
The first big factory here made farm equipment, earning Springfield the nickname “Champion City” after its local manufacturer. Champion Farm Equipment eventually became International Harvester. The company made mowers, trucks, trailers and other farm equipment for a growing nation.
Like many other places in the United States, racial intolerance left an unhappy legacy in Springfield. In the first decades of the 20th century, the community experienced lynchings and race riots. White mobs burned down Black neighborhoods. Despite that history, Springfield elected a Black mayor in the late 1960s.
In the concluding decades of the 20th century, deindustrialization crushed the community. Factories closed. Its population shrank from more than 80,000 to less than 60,000. In 1986, International Harvester left, and just a few years later a drug epidemic that continues to this day began. Suicides, drunk-driving deaths and other so-called deaths of despair rose. The most ambitious people left town.
In the early 2010s, a desperate municipal government developed a plan to restore the city by encouraging immigrants to give their city a shot. Haitian individuals and families began to internally migrate to Springfield from other communities around the country.
A recovery interrupted?
The plan worked. Haitians built a life in Springfield, propping up the local economy by taking jobs in area factories, slaughterhouses and at an Amazon sorting center. Haitian teenagers star on local high school soccer teams.
One of my favorite things to do in any American town is visit a great immigrant restaurant at a down-and-out strip mall. At Keket Bon Gout, I enjoyed the best fried goat of my life along with plantains and rice and beans. There is at least one other Haitian restaurant in Springfield, and others opened in surrounding communities, that are adding new flavors, jobs and economic vitality to the metro area.
Most business and civic leaders here see the arrival of the Haitian population as a godsend. The “notion of migrants taking American jobs is hogwash,” Jamie McGregor, the chief executive of McGregor Metal, a local manufacturer, told NPR in 2024. “That’s spoken like a true person that has never made a payroll or tried to…run a business.”
But not everybody has seen it that way. Trump administration officials have been crowing about the Supreme Court ruling that threatens to dislodge the entire community.
“The T in TPS stands for TEMPORARY, yet many of these designations became de facto amnesty,” James Percival, the general counsel of the Department of Homeland Security, wrote in a statement. “This is a win for the rule of law and common sense.”
Springfield is not the only community where immigrant residents worry about ICE encounters. There are more than 858,650 Haitian-born people living across the United States and roughly the same number of Jamaican-born residents. Nearly two million immigrants resident in the United States were born in Cuba.
Around the country, especially in places with large Haitian populations like Brooklyn, Miami, Houston and Springfield, Catholic groups are helping to prepare for whatever happens next.
“We advise people to remain calm and seek legal representation,” said Sandra Dieudonne, an immigration attorney for Catholic Charities of New York, who has been leading family preparedness clinics. “We don’t want to put them in a worse situation.”
She described the long history of Haitian migration to the United States, which in its early waves represented a substantial brain drain for the Caribbean nation. “There are a lot of Haitians in New York and Florida who are doctors and lawyers,” she said.
In recent years, Haitian immigrants have been more blue-collar people seeking better education and opportunities for their children. Catholic Charities USA has joined other national immigrant advocates and service groups lobbying Congress to extend T.P.S. so Haitians can stay.
One project that has special urgency for activists is obtaining passports for children born to Haitian immigrants. Another Supreme Court decision in June affirmed U.S. citizenship for anyone born on U.S. soil.
Now “it’s important to get [U.S.-born children] passports, so they can travel with their parents if they have to,” Ms. Rollins, the St. Vincent de Paul director, said. There are around 1,300 children born to recent Haitian immigrants in Springfield, according to county health officials.
Another project her agency sponsors is helping Haitians become safer drivers. The school bus crash in 2023 was not the only accident involving Haitian immigrants in the area. Around the same time, a Haitian man learning to drive crashed into a church.
“We love Haitians, but because they come from a country that doesn’t enforce many traffic laws,” they’re not always good drivers, she said, as she showed off two state-of-the-art driving simulators that look like arcade car-racing games. Father Valcin agreed there have been some challenges. “But after they’ve been here for a few years, I think there are fewer concerns,” he added.
“I’m not going to hide”
Ms. Rollins let me spend a morning observing volunteers at St. Vincent de Paul seeking to help Haitian residents. I talked to Abraham, 35, who arrived at the center with his U.S.-born 2-year-old daughter. Abraham, who asked only to be identified by his first name, has been working the tough midnight-to-7-a.m. shift cleaning and sanitizing industrial equipment at a local slaughterhouse—the kind of job immigrants have been willing to accept for decades in the United States.
On his visit to St. Vincent de Paul, he needed help changing the address on his driver’s license. Abraham does not want to leave the United States.
“I lived seven years in Chile, and things are better here in America,” he said. “I can buy a car.”
He has been protected from removal by T.P.S., and he has made an asylum claim that is under review. But he is gravely worried about what could happen to him while he awaits a decision from the immigration court. “They don’t always need a reason anymore to detain people and send them back,” he said. St. Vincent de Paul has introduced him to a lawyer he can call if he does get picked up by ICE or Border Patrol agents.
The person assisting Abraham was another Haitian immigrant named Patrick Joseph. He works during the day at St. Vincent de Paul and some nights at an auto parts manufacturing plant.
The 51-year-old has lived in Springfield for almost five years. Before that, he worked in customer service on cruise ships for a decade before the 2021 assassination of Haitian president Jovenel Moïse caused a crisis that crippled government services. The country was locked down. Mr. Joseph was unable to renew his maritime visa.
A friend suggested he leave Haiti and join him in Florida while he tried to formalize legal status in the United States. Mr. Joseph eventually made his way to Springfield, where he moved into a friend’s house where 15 Haitian immigrants shared two bedrooms.
“Terrible,” Mr. Joseph said. “I called my wife and said, ‘This is the situation; I don’t think I’m going to make it.’”
“She said: ‘You’re the only one working, so you need to be patient. God knows, you are leaving us to find a better life.’”
“One house and 15 people,” he repeated. Mr. Joseph had no bed himself, just an inflatable mattress. “Every day you need to blow it up, so you can lie down.” He stayed in those circumstances for six months while he waited for the T.P.S. designation that would allow him to work legally.
One day when he visited St. Vincent de Paul, “there were a lot of people from Haiti trying to buy stuff, but there was no communication,” he said. “I stood there at the desk, and this is how God found a place for me.”
Joseph speaks English; he was invited to volunteer, and after St. Vincent de Paul managed the necessary paperwork, he was hired on.
At the center, he hears from visitors who report that friends have been picked up by ICE while on their way to work. He worries that may be his fate if T.P.S. ends as currently scheduled.
Mr. Joseph has two children in Haiti. “I don’t want to go back to Haiti at this moment,” he said. “It’s not safe.”
In Springfield, the fear of being returned to gang-controlled Haiti is increasingly widespread.
“There is now the possibility that ICE can show up,” said the Rev. Viles Dorsainvil, the co-founder and executive director of The Haitian Support Center. He collaborates frequently with leaders at St. Vincent de Paul.
He was not completely surprised by the Supreme Court decision. “But I was disappointed because I had a true hope they would rule in our favor,” he said.
Lawyers for the plaintiffs had argued that the Trump administration’s many hurtful and untruthful comments about Haitian immigrants represented a racial animus that should have nullified its decision to terminate T.P.S.
Mr. Trump “called our country a ‘shithole,’” and members of his administration “said racist stuff; they said we were eating cats and dogs,” Rev. Dorsainvil, a pastor at a Protestant church in Springfield, remembered.
Rev. Dorsainvil has been protected from removal himself because of T.P.S. Now he is preparing for the worst. “But I haven’t done anything wrong,” he said. “So I’m not going to hide.”
Back at St. Raphael, closing out his homily, Father Valcin told the community that even as they struggle with a new burden of uncertainty, “it is your responsibility to spread the word of God throughout the city.”
Speaking after the service, Father Valcin told me, “Things may happen which make it uncomfortable to stay here.”
“I am from Haiti as well,” he said, “and I know these stories.” The country, he said, is infested with gangs. “The [U.S.] government wants them to go back, but they don’t have a place to go.”
A Haitian man approached to speak with Father Valcin and Ms. Rollins. His driver’s license had expired, and as T.P.S. neared its expiration as well, he wanted to move closer to his job so he would be less likely to be picked up by ICE while commuting to work. Ms. Rollins said she would help.
“Will you be O.K. with rent?” she asked. “We can help with that, too.”
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