World Cup Joy Gave Way to Deportation Fears for Haitian Families

For one night this past Wednesday, Miami’s Little Haiti forgot to be afraid. 

Haiti was on the field — its first World Cup appearance in more than half a century — and the neighborhood came alive in the way it used to: loud and together, Ruth Jeannoel recalled.

Then Thursday arrived.

The U.S. Supreme Court allowed the Trump administration to end legal protections for migrants fleeing violence and natural disaster in Haiti and Syria — a move that now exposes hundreds of thousands of people to potential deportation. The 6-3 decision overturns lower court orders and permits the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to swiftly end temporary protected status (TPS), which protects roughly 1.3 million people from 17 countries.

The court’s decision will have major implications for Haitian communities across the country, particularly in cities with large Haitian populations, including Miami, Atlanta, New York City, Boston, and Springfield, Ohio.

All Thursday morning, Jeannoel, a Haitian American activist in Miami, was fielding calls, not those of celebration, but of fear. 

“It’s devastating,” Jeannoel, who founded a mutual aid nonprofit whose name means “midwife” in Haitian Creole, told Capital B. “We went from something so celebratory to this.”

What the court’s decision means in practice is still unfolding. Some families Jeannoel works with have already left over the past few months. Others are making impossible choices about what to do with children who are U.S. citizens. Some are staying, for now.

“It’s a case-by-case basis,” she said. In the meantime, her organization is focused on making sure that people have credible lawyers, know their legal rights, and have family care plans in place so that if a parent is detained, there’s someone to call.

Her organization held a summit in Little Haiti two weeks ago — with more than 250 Haitian TPS beneficiaries in attendance. People were connected to lawyers and began drawing up family care plans with the help of advocates.

But Jeannoel is careful about how this story gets framed. This is not, she said, only a Haitian story, or even a migrant story: “It is a Black issue. There’s going to be heightened racial profiling,” she said.

She recounted a colleague calling her Thursday morning, asking whether she herself was a citizen — “as if citizenship were the threshold for who gets to care.” 

“I am a citizen, but this is a community I’m a part of regardless. They deserve our care,” Jeannoel said of TPS beneficiaries.

What does the decision mean for Haitians in the U.S.?

Following the Supreme Court’s decision on Thursday, disruptions in Haitian communities will likely only deepen. The court’s conservative justices have made an already unstable social and political landscape even more volatile, advocates say.

“The Supreme Court’s ruling today slammed the courthouse door on judicial review for most TPS terminations, but it did not erase the truth. That fight moves forward,” Guerline Jozef, the executive director of the Haitian Bridge Alliance, told Capital B. “And make no mistake, this ruling lands at a moment that cannot be ignored. The Supreme Court decided the fate of birthright citizenship at the period of time we mark the 14th anniversary of DACA.”

Jozef was referring to Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, a policy designed to protect from deportation eligible undocumented migrants who came to the U.S. as children.

In the majority opinion, which Justice Samuel Alito wrote, the court denied the plaintiffs’ assertion that the secretary of homeland security’s decision to terminate Haiti’s TPS status was motivated by race.

Justice Elena Kagan challenged that stance in a dissenting opinion joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson. She wrote that it’s “plain to see” that race was a factor when you take into account that the Haitian TPS beneficiaries submitted evidence that “includes statements by the President so repellent and racially inflected that the majority declines to put them in print.”

TPS is a benefit granted to people whose home countries are experiencing devastation as a result of a natural disaster or political disorder. Haiti was initially designated under TPS in 2010 after a magnitude 7.0 earthquake killed more than 200,000 people and left millions of others homeless or displaced.

For the past decade and a half, it’s allowed Haitians into the U.S. to build families and communities, an opportunity many other migrant groups didn’t have.

To Haitian American civil rights attorney Cassandra Charles, the court’s decision effectively gives the Trump administration permission to terminate the TPS program entirely. 

“There are people who have been here for the last 16 years — who’ve built families here, who’ve built lives here, who work, pay taxes, and all of the above — who are now in an uncertain space,” she told Capital B.

Since 2010, the country has been redesignated with TPS multiple times for civil unrest stemming from the catastrophe. Then, in 2021, Haiti’s president, Jovenel Moïse, was assassinated.

In the years that followed, Haiti has been engulfed by more political violence, as the gangs who were once confined to the capital, Port-au-Prince, have expanded their reach into other parts of the country.

“Haiti, right now, is being run by gangs who do not have any regard for human life, and it’s not safe for many people to return,” Charles said.

Usually, the first reaction would be to file a lawsuit to combat any ruling that violates the Constitution. But Hedder Pierre Joseph, the president of the Democratic Haitian Caucus of Florida, said that the courts added in a fine print she hasn’t seen many media outlets point out: The decision blocked future attempts for the lower courts to submit claims or file lawsuits.

“This Trump administration is breaking every rule, every law,” Pierre Joseph said. “I was like, how do you even prevent someone from filing a lawsuit? I don’t think people are getting the story correct.” 

Pierre Joseph, who arrived in the country as an undocumented migrant by watercraft in 1994, said that the decision is unconstitutional because it discriminates against a person’s nationality, skipping the traditional pathway of determining if a migrant’s country is actually unsafe after the temporary protection order, using an unbiased criterion. 

In Florida, she can feel that the fear has heightened. Surrounding communities have heard the horror stories about detention centers — from undocumented migrants and from U.S. citizens who have been wrongfully detained.

“This Trump administration is breaking every rule, every law. I was like, how do you even prevent someone from filing a lawsuit?”

Hedder Pierre Joseph, Democratic Haitian Caucus of Florida president

With the option to sue off the table, the Democratic Haitian Caucus plans to encourage the Haitian community to take their frustrations to the polls this fall, urging eligible voters to vote blue. 

“Both parties have failed [Haitian migrants],” Pierre Joseph said. “I’m telling them, ‘OK, but which party is better?’ and so our conversation will be how do we galvanize to vote Democratic up and down the ballot.”

What have Haitian migrants in the U.S. been facing?

Thursday’s decision lands as the latest blow over years filled with political targeting, legal uncertainty, and daily fear.

In 2018, during his first term, President Donald Trump made clear his disgust for migrants of certain origins when he referred to Haiti, Nigeria, and other countries as “shithole” countries.

Even before he made those remarks, Trump in 2017 tried to end TPS for Haitians and force at least 59,000 people to leave the country. However, that effort was blocked by the courts.

“The deportations and the detentions, when it comes to Black immigrants, are and have long been disproportionate,” Christina Greer, an associate professor of political science at Fordham University, previously told Capital B.

Like most Americans, migrants live in largely segregated communities, said Greer, the author of the 2013 book Black Ethnics: Race, Immigration, and the Pursuit of the American Dream. That means that Black migrants are more likely to live in communities where they’re over-policed.

More than 75% of Black migrants deported from the U.S. between 2016 and 2021 had some form of contact with the police or the criminal legal system, according to a 2022 analysis of public records and calls made to a migrant help line.

In Springfield, Ohio, the verbal attacks and intimidation made during the 2024 political season were emotionally difficult and forced some Haitian families to restrict their activities — some even considered leaving.

After Trump and then-running mate JD Vance repeated conspiracy theories that Haitian migrants were eating household pets, Springfield received 33 bomb threats, which strained the city’s services. Haitian residents there and elsewhere complained to local support groups and authorities about verbal and physical intimidation and break-ins. 

For Haitian migrants in Miami, the present-day threat is arriving from two directions at once. Federal immigration enforcement is colliding with a city in the grip of runaway gentrification. 

Miami is one of the fastest gentrifying areas in the U.S., and the displacement is concentrated in the city’s Little Haiti neighborhood. Since 2017, home values and rents have nearly tripled. 

The combined pressure is scattering a community that spent decades building roots in Miami’s historically Black neighborhoods. People are being pushed into other parts of Florida, across the South, and into the Midwest. They’re moving away from the neighbors and networks that kept them safe.

“It takes away people’s ability to understand how to live in a healthy way,” Jeannoel said, “how to live in a way that’s safe.”

On a recent Sunday morning in Little Haiti, the buses that once carried older women in church hats toward Haitian services ran on schedule, but many seats were empty. 

Jeannoel said that this kind of absence has become a marker of how deeply the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown has altered daily life.

“Some people don’t even go to church,” she said. “And that’s like the thing that Haitian people love to do.” 

Read More: 

• Atlanta Haitians Connected and Celebrated Historic World Cup Run
• For Black Immigrants, a Second Trump Term Hits Different
• Black Undocumented Migrants Face Far Higher Deportation Rates
• U.S. House Votes to Extend Protected Status for Haitians, but Concerns Remain

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