On an afternoon in August, in a small, cluttered office in Brooklyn, two women gathered a stack of flyers, printed in English and Creole. “PREPARE. DON’T PANIC,” the pages read. The flyers warned of the coming end of Temporary Protected Status, or T.P.S., for Haitians living in the United States. One of the women, Stephanie Delia, an immigration lawyer who runs a nonprofit called Little Haiti BK, was muttering, “I can’t believe we’re . . .” The other woman, a twenty-seven-year-old publicist and influencer named Anya, who was planning to film Delia as they distributed the flyers across southeast Brooklyn, finished the thought: “. . . here.” Delia nodded. “Yes,” she said.
Haitians have held Temporary Protected Status in the United States since 2010, shielding about three hundred and thirty thousand people from deportation. A series of compounding crises in the country—natural disasters, gang violence, political collapse, and acute food insecurity—have long made it unsafe for residents to return. But Donald Trump’s Administration has argued that conditions in Haiti have improved “enough” for T.P.S. to end. For more than a year, the President has fought to dismantle that layer of protection, leading to multiple court challenges, shifting deadlines, conflicting guidance, and, ultimately, a ruling by the Supreme Court allowing him to proceed. The final step in the long undoing of T.P.S.—an order from a federal judge—was expected any day. Across the country, layoffs of Haitian nursing assistants, health aides, school employees, housekeepers, janitors, security guards, and airport personnel had already begun. “Oh,” Anya said, with a long sigh, “what a country!”
Moments later, Delia went silent, scrolling through an article on her phone. The ruling from the judge had arrived. “Shit!” she said. “It looks like it’s done. That’s the final nail. Damn it. We’re out of time.”
Anya, who had been fussing with a ring light and tripod, stopped what she was doing and stepped away to place a phone call to a friend. People who, as of that morning, had been legally living and working in the United States were now considered illegal immigrants. One of them was a woman whom Anya considered to be her “sister.” They had grown up together in the same neighborhood, in houses a block away from each other. They’d attended the same elementary and middle schools. They had the same group of friends and went out to the same bars and restaurants. Through their childhood and then their mid-twenties, they had shared almost everything in their lives, except for the fact that Anya was a U.S. citizen and her friend was not.
“The judge just passed a ruling,” she said into the phone, speaking quickly. “Mind yourself. Mind your manners. Just be careful. Make sure your stuff is good. Your car, everything. Or just Uber. If you can. Preferably Uber. So you’re not going through checkpoints and stuff like that.” She said that she had a flyer to give her later when she got home from work. “Be safe,” she said. “Love you.”
Anya’s friend, whom I’ll call Emmanuella, had been having a good day until then. “It just sucks the life out of you,” she told me, recently. She hung up the phone, aware that life would be different now. During the call, Anya had also warned her that she had seen a video of doorbell-camera footage from Canarsie, a neighborhood with a large Haitian population. The video showed a man in a tank top, his hands restrained behind his back, as three law-enforcement officers guided him into the back of an unmarked S.U.V. Despite this news, Emmanuella got up, dressed, and set out as usual for her nannying job, looking after an eight-year-old boy, who had another late-summer afternoon to fill and was expecting her. The family Emmanuella worked for was “loving and soft.” The parents encouraged her to celebrate their son’s wins whenever possible. That week, he’d been attending a cooking camp, so after she arrived, she celebrated what he’d made at camp. Then she helped him with an essay about what he’d done that summer—all the trips he’d taken and the people he’d met. She fed his pet fish, made him dinner, ran him a hot bath, then went home. There was no sign of agents or checkpoints. Nothing was different, except the fact of her changed status.
Emmanuella, who is twenty-eight, has round, bright eyes and a playful, wry humor. She likes to spend time with her dogs, watch movies, and go out with her friends—“getting drunk, forgetting about the world.” She considers herself a “protector” among her friends, not all of whom know about her situation. She lives with her mother and three of her four siblings in New York City. In contrast to the parents she works for, her family was more “tough love and loyalty” than soft. Emmanuella was the second-oldest of the kids. She and her older sister were born in Port-au-Prince. In Haiti, her mother worked as a ticket agent at the airport. Her father, who has since passed away, worked in the shipping industry. He had a cargo ship, which made him a target for bad actors of all kinds, including corrupt police officers and the chimès, the gangs that were forming in the early two-thousands. One day, when the family happened to be at church, criminals drove to the house and shot it up. When the family returned home, they fled to Emmanuella’s grandparents’ house to hide and, not long after that, applied for U.S. visas.
Emmanuella’s parents arrived in the United States first, leaving the kids with other family members. In 2003, when Emmanuella was four, they came back to retrieve her and her sister. The family settled in New York, living on a visa that, as her mother remembers it, they were able to renew until T.P.S. became available. Emmanuella and her sister became T.P.S. holders, but her younger siblings were all born in the U.S., making them citizens. Years later, around the time that Emmanuella turned twenty, her older sister got married, obtaining her green card in the process. Eventually, through her U.S.-citizen children, Emmanuella’s mother was able to get a green card, too. That left Emmanuella. In her immediate family, she was the only T.P.S. holder.
About this she could be dry and darkly funny, or quiet and withdrawn. She told me that she found her status to be lonely—“very lonely, and I don’t thrive in lonesome.” Her mother, a religious woman, told her daughter not to worry, because God would find a way to fix the situation. In response, Emmanuella rolled her eyes and said, “No one wants to hear God right now, girl! There’s Trump in the building.” Emmanuella was religious, too, but her faith was shaking. “In this climate, when the pressure is this intense, you can’t talk to me about God.” She tracked reports of Immigration and Customs Enforcement activity online, and watched Instagram reels of Haitians being outfitted with ankle monitors in Ohio, forwarding the videos to her family. But they didn’t feel the danger the way she did. “No one else has that gun to their head,” she said, grimly. “Everybody’s O.K. Everybody’s sanctioned: my mom, my older sister, my youngest sister, and my two little brothers. It’s just me.”
This meant that if ICE came to her family’s house tomorrow—a scenario she had imagined innumerable times—everybody would stay but her. It meant that while her older sister had returned to Haiti once, via a cruise through the Caribbean islands, Emmanuella couldn’t even leave the U.S. if she wanted to come back. More recently, she had stopped signing up for shifts at her other job, working with special-needs children, because she knew her T.P.S.-provided work permit would soon expire. Instead of telling her supervisor what was going on, she quietly removed herself. “Disappeared,” she said. While Emmanuella’s friends continued to live their lives, hers was becoming more and more hidden. On the day of Anya’s phone call, it occurred to her that the end of T.P.S. was, at least, more clarifying than the months of dread that had preceded it. “I’ve been on some ‘it is what it is’ now,” she said. “Now it’s less anxiety and more just fear. Now I’m not worried about, ‘Are we gonna get T.P.S. figured out, and, Oh, my God, what’s gonna happen?’ Now I know what’s going to happen. I’m just scared of when it’s coming.”
About a week earlier, the Department of Homeland Security had issued its initial guidance saying that Haiti “no longer met the conditions” for T.P.S. That evening, Emmanuella texted her family to let them know. “Hey guys!” she wrote. “In case anybody was wondering, TPS for Haitians is officially canceled and I am now a wanted alien 🙏🏾.”
Her younger sister responded, “Smh . . . So where do we go from here.”
“To hell with trump,” her sister added. Someone else in the family chat reacted to the message with exclamation marks, but no one else said anything. Emmanuella tapped out another message: “Well they’re offering a $2,600 stipend and free plane tickets to any Haitian who leaves willingly.”
Her sister replied again:
T.P.S., established in 1990, is a humanitarian program for countries where ongoing conflicts or environmental disasters have made it impossible for its residents to safely return home. President Barack Obama extended Temporary Protected Status to Haitians living in the U.S. in 2010, days after a 7.0-magnitude earthquake left Port-au-Prince in ruin, killing more than two hundred thousand people and displacing 1.5 million from their homes. In the years since, Haiti has descended into gang rule. As of this spring, more than a million people remain internally displaced, owing to widespread violence and instability. The country has not held a Presidential election since 2016. Its last President, Jovenel Moïse, whose tenure set off years of anti-corruption protests, was assassinated, in 2021. Armed groups now control much of the capital, exacting highway tolls and conducting kidnappings for ransom. The United Nations has reported a “wanton, intentional infliction of incredible pain” on random civilians, including through the rape of women and girls, as “a form of punishment” between rival gangs. More than half of the country faces food insecurity. Hundreds of schools are closed. Hospital services have been disrupted. Moving about daily life is dangerous.
Since retaking office, Trump has ended or moved to end T.P.S. for thirteen countries, including Afghanistan, Honduras, South Sudan, Syria, and Venezuela. Four remaining countries—El Salvador, Lebanon, Sudan, and Ukraine—retain Temporary Protected Status, though their designations could end by the end of 2026. Administration officials have derided T.P.S. as a “de-facto amnesty” program, and Trump, in his pursuit to end the program, has deprived about a million people of legal status, including many who, like Emmanuella, have lived in the U.S. for the entirety of their adult lives.
Over the years, Emmanuella had come to think of T.P.S. as a “tiny box” in which she had been forced to maneuver. The status offers people the ability to live and work legally in the United States. T.P.S. holders pay taxes, own homes, and keep up with fees associated with being in the program. But, unlike other forms of deportation relief, such as asylum, it offers no pathway to citizenship. In fact, Emmanuella knew of only one surefire way to become a citizen, and that was marriage.
She remembered first learning this from her family’s immigration lawyer, before she had turned eighteen. He told her that she could either get married, or join the military. At the time, a now discontinued program allowed certain immigrants to become naturalized citizens upon completion of their basic training. She thought about it, but her mother told her, “God wouldn’t like that.” Emmanuella was interested in the medical field. She attended a large, competitive high school, one of the best in the city, taking as many science and premedical courses as she could. She applied to her dream school, Howard University, and was accepted. While Anya and her other friends completed their FAFSA applications, for financial aid, Emmanuella discovered that T.P.S. holders weren’t eligible. “Man, that was the worst. The worst,” she said. Howard wasn’t an option. She started part time at a public university instead, but, even with a job, she couldn’t keep up with the payments. When the pandemic hit, she dropped out.
A few years later, Trump was campaigning for another term, explicitly promising to eliminate protections for Haitians. “Absolutely, I’d revoke it,” he said, in 2024. “I’d bring them back to their country.” At a debate that fall, he repeated false claims that Haitians living in Springfield, Ohio, were eating cats and dogs. The statement drew bomb threats to the city and sent Haitian families into hiding. Trump had tried to end T.P.S. for Haitians during his first term, but his attempts were blocked by federal courts. Once he took office again, Emmanuella said, “I knew it was over for me. My clock was ticking.” The mother she nannied for offered to adopt her, but she was well past the age required to qualify for adoption-based immigration benefits.
Left with no other options, Emmanuella decided to make 2025 the “Year of Dating.” She downloaded two dating apps, Hinge and BLK, an app for Black singles, and started swiping on men, looking for “husband material,” she said. “Not just any old guy. A husband.”
She started talking to a different guy every week, mostly chatting through the apps, trying to pick up on whether they warranted a serious conversation. Typically, she found herself drawn to people who were immigrants themselves. But these men couldn’t help her. She had two qualifications now: they had to be kind, and they had to be citizens. The matches started rolling in. She told herself that, in order to find a serious relationship, she would have to be honest with the men about her situation. But this was easier said than done. “It’s hard for me to say those words out loud,” she said. “So I just be quiet. Then, eventually, they think, ‘O.K., she’s not into it anymore.’ ”
By February, 2026, she had one good prospect. It was a man she’d known for years. He had always liked her, but she’d never been interested in him before. “He’d be down,” a mutual friend told her one day. The man said that he wanted to be with her; anything she needed, he would do. “I was desperate,” she said. “I was, like, O.K., let’s do it.” She told her mother that the relationship was proceeding. He was serious, and so was she. Her mother said, “Don’t do it. Just leave it up to God.” Emmanuella said, “You don’t understand. I’m under pressure. My back is against the wall.” They dated for about a month, before she couldn’t do it anymore. Emmanuella found that she didn’t want to kiss him or even hold his hand. “I was, like, yeah, no, this is selling my soul,” she said, adding with a flourish, “Unhand me!” This wasn’t the kind of marriage she wanted. “Let them come find me. It’s not worth it.”
That spring, she stayed up most nights, thoughts racing, trying to come up with a new plan. When she did sleep, she dreamed about T.P.S. During the day, she gamed out the scenarios available to her: going to Europe or to Canada, going to another part of the country, staying in New York City. She didn’t want to get out of bed. Anya couldn’t get her out of the house. “I couldn’t function,” Emmanuella said. It felt like her brain was “crashing,” a period she now refers to as “my little break in character.” “ ‘What am I gonna do, what am I gonna do, what am I gonna do.’ Then, I realize, there’s nothing I can do.” She found a psychiatrist and received a diagnosis for anxiety and depression, along with a prescription for multiple medications. She filled the prescription but never took the pills. “I’m quite stubborn,” she explained.
She soon gave up on the plan of marrying. She suspected that green-card marriages would be subject to high levels of scrutiny, anyway. Instead, she set about making sure all her paperwork was up to date—her driver’s license, her insurance. She went to work and came straight home. Her mother gave her a curfew of 11 P.M., and she followed it. Trump would be President for about two more years. Her only plan was to wait.
On August 20th, a deportation flight to Haiti carrying a hundred and sixty-one passengers departed Alexandria, Louisiana, and landed in Cap-Haïtien, the country’s second-largest city. It was the first such flight since the end of T.P.S. In the subsequent weeks, hundreds more Haitians have arrived in Cap-Haïtien, many with little memory or experience of how to navigate gang-controlled roads. It is too dangerous to fly into Port-au-Prince, where, at one point this spring, gang-related gunfire reached the airport’s perimeter. Deportees have arrived in government-issued white sweatpants and T-shirts, some having reportedly lost their phones, documents, and other valuables during the trip. “Send us home! But treat us like human beings,” one deportee, a former nurse’s aide, told a Times journalist in Cap-Haïtien. Another said, “I lost everything.”
In the United States, fear and despair have taken hold. In early August, a Haitian man emerged from an ICE facility in Blue Ash, Ohio, with a G.P.S. monitor on his ankle, before his knees appeared to give out from under him. He collapsed on the ground, sobbing, his head in his hands. In South Florida, a Haitian emergency-room doctor in her first year of residency told CBS Miami that she hadn’t left her house in three weeks. “A doctor who can’t work is useless,” she said. In Springfield, Ohio, a twenty-year-old Haitian man named Pierre Damas Bel was starting his first year of college, and planning to study neuroscience, when ICE began calling Haitians to immigration check-ins. He had been an honor-roll student and a cadet in his high school’s J.R.O.T.C. program. When he went to his check-in, he was outfitted with an ankle monitor. “I came to this country to pursue my education. I didn’t come here to commit a crime or hurt anyone,” Bel wrote after the visit in an Instagram post, alongside a photo of his ankle monitor, secured above a polished wing-tip oxford shoe. Wearing such a thing, he wrote, brought him “a feeling of shame and humiliation that I never imagined I would experience.” Not long after that, he stepped into traffic and was killed by an oncoming tractor-trailer, in what his family has described as a suicide.
The accumulation of these stories has revealed the particular pain, and the arbitrary nature, of Trump’s mass delegalization effort. Families have, overnight, gone to ground. Neighborhoods that had been safe have become places to navigate covertly. Jobs performed by hardworking people are now vacant. The protections that had been offered through T.P.S., an always tenuous piece of a patchwork immigration system, have been stripped away, with no care for, or interest in, the lives people have lived here, or the lives to which they might return.
Unlike Emmanuella, Anya has some recent memories of Haiti. Until the earthquake, she spent most of her summer vacations there. She told me that she returned to Port-au-Prince just once after that, in 2014. Parts of the city were still “in rubble” she said. Buildings remained destroyed. Roads and bridges were under construction. But the country was as green as ever and “so beautiful.” She remembers going to Guilou Beach, west of Port-au-Prince, where she ate fresh conch and crab, grilled on the beach and served to her as she waded through the water.
Emmanuella’s memories of Haiti came in impressionistic flashes: a big house in Port-au-Prince, a courtyard, servants, kids playing out front, animals roving among the houses. She thought her house was at least two stories, because she could remember racing up and down the stairs with her sister. Growing up, she would sometimes wonder if her family should have stayed. “But we would have probably been persecuted, killed, hunted down—whatever the case is,” she said. She could still read and write Creole, but she spoke with a heavy tongue and an American accent. She had no family in Haiti anymore. Everyone had left. “What am I going to go back to?” she asked. “Where am I gonna set up? I don’t even know the roads. I don’t know anything.”
On a Wednesday in August, we were discussing her situation outside of a coffee shop before she left to spend another afternoon with the eight-year-old, who was about to start school. Emmanuella looked across the street and pointed at a row of red-brick apartment buildings. “In Haiti, the houses are not brick,” she said. “I want to say they’re, like, stone-ish.”
She stared for a moment longer, then picked up her phone and dialled her mom, who was saved in her contacts as “Birth Giver 😑.”
“Hey, Mom,” she said. “You remember our house back in Haiti? What was it made of? What did it look like?”
“Concrete,” her mother said.
“It was two stories, right? Because I remember going upstairs.”
“Yes,” her mother said. “Two stories.”
“And how was life back then?” Emmanuella asked. “You can tell me if I’m wrong, but in my head, I always said I had a great, great life back there.”
“It was,” her mother said. “When life was good in Haiti, oh, my God, that was good.”
“You want to go back?”
“Not to live,” her mom said. “But I would like to go back. Everybody wants that: have your houses there, spend a few months enjoying the country, then you come back.”
“Yeah, you wish,” Emmanuella said.
“We know what it was when it was good. But, hopefully, God will do something for the country. God will find some people and use them to build back that country.”
Emmanuella looked at me, dryly. “Yep,” she said. “It just needs to get fixed.” Once it was safe, she told her mother, the family—all of “us”—could take a vacation to see the country again. Emmanuella paused. “Well, by us, I mean you,” she said, ruefully. “I’m staying here.” ♦