The Trump administration plans to end protected immigration status for citizens of Haiti in February, more than 15 years after the Obama administration granted it following a devastating earthquake in 2010.
The program, called Temporary Protected Status, or TPS, allows nationals of designated countries who are already in the United States to live and work in this country for a set period, if returning to their home country would be unsafe.
Most of the hundreds of thousands of Haitians scheduled to lose TPS on Feb. 3 will be considered undocumented immigrants, said Leo Yu, an assistant professor at UMass Law School whose research includes civil and immigrants’ rights.
“If a person is under TPS and the TPS status is stripped [by] the administration or expires, then that person's immigration status will be reverted back to the last one, the previous one, that they were under,” he said. “And for TPS holders, that usually means undocumented.”
If a person had another form of legal status, such as a visa, they wouldn’t need TPS. Without it, the person can be detained.
“Undocumented immigrants these days are immediately subject to removals,” Yu said.
On Cape Cod, where the cost of living and other factors sometimes make workers hard to find, a loss of Haitian residents could create a noticeable drop in the labor supply this winter, especially in some health care professions, according to the Cape Cod Chamber of Commerce.
“We could start to see some impacts on the labor supply, especially the year-round labor supply, and potentially in healthcare,” Chamber CEO Paul Niedzwiecki said.
For many of the jobs that will be left vacant because of immigration issues, “there's not a labor supply waiting to be employed,” he said.
Trump’s first administration announced in 2017 that it would end TPS for Haiti, but the termination was tied up in court through the rest of the administration.
This time around, Yu said Haitians have a good legal case against termination of their TPS.
“Haiti's situation is bad,” he said. “It is a combination of natural disasters, two earthquakes, and also very well documented political unrest and corruption and gang violence.”
But in a document published in the Federal Register July 1, Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem said Haiti does not meet the criteria for TPS, due in part to concerns for national security and public safety.
A lack of government control is Haiti “has not only destabilized Haiti internally but has also had direct consequences for U.S. public safety,” she said.
