The day the government announced it would end the Temporary Protected Status for Haiti, Sophie barely slept. Her fear reemerged as she thought about her two children, ages eight and four, and her husband, who had finally found some peace in Flatbush, Brooklyn, among NYC’s largest concentration of Haitian immigrants. Out of fear for her safety and her family’s safety, Sophie is using a pseudonym.
“I never thought about coming [to America],” she said. “But I had no choice. My kids were traumatized. They trembled all the time to the point that people told me I needed to find a psychologist for them.”
Before arriving in New York under the humanitarian parole program for Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans and Venezuelans, known as CHNV, Sophie worked as a nurse in Croix-des-Bouquets, a Port-au-Prince neighborhood now under gang control. Her husband dispatched deliveries for an auto parts supplier. Any routine commute could mean crossing several checkpoints held by heavily armed gangs.
The first time she tried to flee with her children was in 2022, after gang warfare erupted in her neighborhood. Armed gang members forced her to turn back and threatened her with retaliation if she tried to leave again. It took months for her to successfully make it out.
In 2023, Sophie, her husband and her two kids boarded a flight to New York City, hoping the U.S. CHNV program would offer a temporary measure of safety.
When the Trump administration terminated the CHNV parole program earlier this year, the couple then applied for Temporary Protected Status (TPS). With TPS, Sophie and her husband were able to gain work authorization and some stability. But now that TPS is also slated to end, that sense of security is evaporating. TPS is a humanitarian program that allows people from certain eligible countries facing dangerous conditions to live and work in the U.S. temporarily. It does not provide a path to citizenship and can be renewed or ended by the government based on conditions in the home country.
“I don’t know where to go,” she said. “My children go to school here. If we have to leave, what am I supposed to do with them?”
A sudden decision affecting thousands of families
On November 28, the Department of Homeland Security announced that it was terminating the TPS designation for Haiti, reversing 15 years of protections that shielded Haitian nationals from deportation while granting them work authorization.
Haiti’s TPS status was first granted in 2010 after a 7.0 magnitude earthquake killed an estimated 300,000 people. In the following years another earthquake, a cholera outbreak and a drought further weakened the country and pushed hundreds of thousands of Haitians to migrate to Latin America and the United States.
At least one generation of Haitians have grown up in the U.S. under TPS while the country’s security crisis spiraled into a fever pitch as local gangs grew in power.
After President Jovenel Moïse was assassinated in 2021, gangs took control of large sections of Port-au-Prince and several provincial cities. Police stations have been torched, major prisons breached and entire neighborhoods emptied. The national airport has not operated for over a year. More than 1.4 million people are internally displaced, living in crowded sites with minimal access to food, sanitation or health care, according to the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.
And yet, gang violence is not an accepted reason to seek asylum. Asylum law in the U.S. recognizes five protected grounds: race, religion, nationality, political opinion, and membership in a particular social group. People like Sophie, who fled gang violence and generalized crime, often do not fit neatly into these categories. For the thousands of families like Sophie, TPS was their lifelife to escape Haiti and stabilize in the U.S.
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The end of TPS for Haiti comes as the Trump administration dismantles several Biden-era immigration measures as part of his campaign promises to stem the flow of migration to the U.S.
The November 28 decision starts a countdown that affects more than 500,000 Haitian TPS holders nationwide.
Immigration attorneys warn that once TPS for Haiti officially ends on February 3, thousands of people will be left in legal limbo. Without work authorization or legal residency, these families must either prepare to return to Haiti or remain in the U.S. without official status. Those who stay risk detention or deportation if they come into contact with ICE.
“There are hundreds of thousands of people who cannot safely return to Haiti at this time because the conditions are unsafe,” said Erik Crew, a staff attorney at the Haitian Bridge Alliance.
“They may need to consider filing asylum claims if they have not already done so.”
The Trump administration has recently implemented a freeze on final decisions for all types of immigration applications, including asylum, for nationals of 19 countries, including Haiti. TPS holders are exploring other legal avenues to stay in the U.S., but options are limited. Early this month, the Trump administration paused all immigration decisions — including granting or denying asylum — for nationals of Haiti among 18 other ‘high risk’ countries, causing further uncertainty.
A community on edge
Since gaining their status in 2010, Haitian TPS holders across the country have grown to be pillars in their local economies.
Katiana, who lives outside Boston, came to the U.S. after the 2010 earthquake. She and her husband bought a small home, opened a family restaurant and invested in a school bus business. Their children are U.S. citizens. The ending of TPS has thrown their lives into disarray.
“We have loans, a business, employees,” she said. “How do we leave all this? How do we uproot children who grew up here?”
In New York’s Haitian community, community organizations report a surge of panicked calls from families unsure about school enrollment, housing benefits, or whether they must prepare for relocation to a country many left over a decade ago.
“This is not just a policy change,” said Porez Luxama, president of Life of Hope, a Brooklyn nonprofit that assists Haitian immigrants. “It is an earthquake in people’s lives.”
“Where will we go?”
Back in Flatbush, Sophie has spent nights weighing options she cannot bring herself to say aloud. Returning to Croix-des-Bouquets is impossible. The gang that once threatened her family still controls the area. The U.S. government has posted a $1 million reward for information leading to the arrest of the gang leader.
“I left because I had no choice,” Sophie said. “And now I am being told I must go back to the same danger.”
Her children are thriving in their NYC schools. Her husband works long hours to keep their household stable. Although TPS was, by definition, a temporary immigration program, they had hoped that it might continue until conditions in Haiti improved.
Instead, they are facing a deadline.
你知道吗？非公民办理驾照时的这个错误可能会导致选民欺诈
“I just want my children to grow [up] safely,” she said. “Is that too much to ask?”
TPS history for Haiti (2010–present)
| Date & Type of TPS action | TPS validity period* | U.S. president at time |
| Jan. 21, 2010 Initial designation of Haiti for TPS after the Jan. 12, 2010 earthquake | 18 months – Effective Jan. 21, 2010, through July 22, 2011 | Barack Obama |
| May 19, 2011 – Extension and redesignation expanded eligibility and extended prior designation) | 18 months – Haiti’s designation extended and redesignated effective July 23, 2011, through Jan. 22, 2013 | Barack Obama |
| Oct. 1, 2012 – Extension of existing designation | 18 months – Extended Haiti’s TPS from Jan. 23, 2013, through July 22, 2014 | Barack Obama |
| March 3, 2014 – Extension of existing designation | 18 months – Extended Haiti’s TPS from July 23, 2014, through Jan. 22, 2016 | Barack Obama |
| Aug. 25, 2015 – Extension of existing designation | 18 months – Extended Haiti’s TPS from Jan. 23, 2016, through July 22, 2017 | Barack Obama |
| May 24, 2017 – Extension of existing designation | 6 months – Extended Haiti’s TPS from July 23, 2017, through Jan. 22, 2018 | Donald Trump |
| Jan. 18, 2018 – Formal termination of 2011 TPS designation, with an 18-month wind-down | 18-month transition (wind-down) – Announced termination effective July 22, 2019. During the transition, TPS for Haiti continued from Jan. 23, 2018, through July 22, 2019 | Donald Trump |
| Litigation period 2019–2022 – Court-ordered continuation of existing TPS and related documents for Haiti (Ramos, Saget, Bhattarai | Multiple automatic extensions – TPS and TPS-related documents for Haiti repeatedly automatically extended (for example, to Oct. 4, 2021, and later to June 30, 2024) for beneficiaries of the 2011 Haiti designation, while injunctions blocked implementation of termination | Donald Trump (2019–20), Joe Biden (2021–22) |
| Aug. 3, 2021 – New designation of Haiti for TPS (separate from 2011 designation, which continued for some beneficiaries via court orders) | 18 months – New TPS designation effective Aug. 3, 2021, through Feb. 3, 2023 | Joe Biden |
| Jan. 26, 2023 – Extension and redesignation of Haiti for TPS | 18 months – Extended existing TPS and redesignated Haiti for an additional period from Feb. 4, 2023, through Aug. 3, 2024 | Joe Biden |
| July 1, 2024 – Extension and redesignation of Haiti for TPS based on continued extraordinary and temporary conditions | 18 months (later reduced by 2025 vacatur) – Extended and redesignated Haiti for TPS from Aug. 4, 2024, through Feb. 3, 2026 (as originally announced) | Joe Biden |
| Feb. 24, 2025 – Partial vacatur of the June 2024 decision; narrowed the 2024 extension/redesignation | 12-month extension (replacing earlier 18-month period) – Revised the 2024 extension so that TPS from the 2024 action would run from Aug. 4, 2024, only through Aug. 3, 2025 (12 months instead of 18) | Donald Trump |
| July 1, 2025 – First 2025 termination notice under the new administration | Transition period – Announced termination of Haiti’s TPS designation effective Sept. 2, 2025; this decision was subsequently cancelled by litigation and later DHS action | Donald Trump |
| Nov. 28, 2025 – Termination of Haiti’s TPS designation with revised timeline | Confirms that Haiti’s TPS designation will terminate at 11:59 p.m. on Feb. 3, 2026; until then, TPS for Haiti remains in effect (subject to individual eligibility) | Donald Trump |
* “TPS validity period” refers to the period during which TPS status for Haiti is in effect under that particular action, as stated in the Federal Register notice. Effective dates can differ from the publication date.
