Many Haitians who fled to New Jersey fear being deported by the Trump administration, after working here for years under special legal protection.
The U.S. granted thousands of humanitarian parole and temporary protected status permits to people from Haiti, after disaster and gang violence devastated the island nation. Haiti has since spiraled into a humanitarian crisis. Haitians who work in New Jersey health care, retail and warehouse jobs say they can’t go back.
The Trump administration recently revoked the legal status of more than a half-million migrants, including Cubans, Venezuelans and Nicaraguans, urging them to self-deport.
“I’m feeling hopeless. I can’t eat. I can’t sleep. I’m thinking about what can happen, what’s going to happen to me?” said a tearful Haitian who, fearful of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, wants to remain anonymous. “Because I can’t go back to my country that easily. It’s not livable right now.”
“Twenty-seven thousand Haitians came to New Jersey, and the vast majority of those were working-age people who came through these programs. So you start deporting folks, we’re talking about a self-inflicted labor shortage, and it’s going to come quickly,” said Rev. Seth Kaper-Dale. He heads I-RISE, a nonprofit that has helped 2,000 clients from Cuba, Haiti, Venezuela and Nicaragua find homes and jobs in New Jersey.
I-RISE’s 750 Haitian clients work mostly in health care. Almost 8% of health care workers in the Northeast are noncitizens, according to a recent study in the JAMA that warns, “Deportations could especially compromise long-term care, where immigrants play a large role.”
“There’s 3.4 million immigrants working in American health care, and punishing them means punishing the American people who need to get access to care,” said Dr. Steffie Woolhandler, a co-author of the study and professor at the City University of New York’s Graduate Center.
“Nursing home management — the folks who manage home care agencies — have no idea how they’re going to provide that direct hands-on care without access to Haitian workers,” Woolhandler says.
A spokesman for the lobby that represents New Jersey nursing homes said he didn’t know whether deportations would have a “major impact, or just a minor impact” without more data.
A federal judge in Massachusetts said Thursday she would issue a temporary stay on orders for humanitarian parolees to self-deport by April 24.
