Haitians in New Bedford relieved as judge extends protections

Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...

Haitians in Massachusetts, including New Bedford, are feeling some relief after a federal judge temporarily halted the Trump administration’s effort to end Temporary Protected Status for them. The humanitarian program has allowed more than 350,000 Haitians to live and work in the United States, including over 45,000 in Massachusetts, during a years-long crisis in Haiti.

Isabelle Gilles, a New Bedford nurse, has spent the last few days refreshing news sites and blogs. When she saw the ruling, she felt relieved because she finally had an answer, she said. But the feeling was bittersweet.

“The judge bought us some time, and it’s a significant win,” she said Tuesday. “At the same time, it feels like a small win because [TPS is] still being targeted.”

Giselle Rodriguez, an immigration attorney in Boston, predicted that the Trump administration will appeal the judge’s decision and that the question of TPS for Haitians will go to the U.S. Supreme Court.

In the weeks leading up to the ruling, Rodriguez said many Haitians were terrified at the prospect of returning to Haiti, where unsafe conditions persist. “In nearly every consultation we are having, people are sharing painful and often traumatic stories: both of what they personally experienced in Haiti and what their family members are currently enduring there.”

Because TPS does not provide a path to citizenship, many families who have lived and worked in the U.S. for years have no alternative immigration status. For them, TPS is the only document allowing them to remain in the country legally. 

TPS is meant to be temporary, but the secretary of Homeland Security can extend it in 18-month increments when conditions remain unsafe. In practice, those renewals have allowed TPS to continue for many years. Haitians have had TPS status since 2010.

In his second term, President Donald Trump has moved away from longstanding TPS extensions, rolling back protections for more than one million people from eight countries in 2025. TPS has already ended for people from Venezuela, Afghanistan, and Cameroon.

What is TPS and why Haiti was granted one

Gilles recalls Jan. 12, 2010, as if no time has passed.

She was 15 then, living in Port-au-Prince, Haiti’s capital, and just home from volleyball practice, chatting with her mother as she slipped out of her school uniform and into her house clothes.

Then came the boom — louder than anything she had ever heard. A split second of complete silence. “And that’s when everything started shaking,” she said. Walls around her crumbled.

A 7.0-magnitude earthquake tore through Haiti, killing more than 220,000 people and displacing some 1.5 million others. The disaster flattened hospitals, schools, and public infrastructure.

For three nights, Gilles remembers sleeping in the open in a neighbor’s backyard, watching gas stations blow up in the distance. Her mother refused to move them; she was afraid Gilles and her brother would see the piles of bodies along the road.

“My mom tried to protect us as much as she could to not see too much,” Gilles says. “But after the third day, we started smelling everything, so we knew where the bodies were.”

Days after images of the destruction spread around the world, the Obama administration granted Haitians TPS. In 2010, Gilles, her mother, her brother, and her stepfather came to the U.S., where they have been living since. 

TPS, created by Congress in 1990, allows foreign nationals to live and work legally in the U.S. when war, natural disaster, or other extraordinary conditions make return unsafe.

Haiti faced serious challenges long before the earthquake, but the disaster pushed an already fragile situation into a humanitarian crisis. 

Since then, TPS had been extended seven times after federal reviews concluded Haiti remained too unstable for people to return safely — first due to the long-term impacts of the earthquake, including a housing shortage, a cholera outbreak, and a weakened public-health system. 

In 2017, the government issued the first termination notice, arguing that the earthquake-related conditions justifying TPS were no longer met, a move that triggered multiple lawsuits. Haiti was redesignated in 2021 as the country was “grappling with a deteriorating political crisis, violence, and a staggering increase in human rights abuses,” along with malnutrition, COVID-19, and ongoing political instability.

In the years that followed, Haitians have continued to face severe threats to their safety and basic rights, including gang-related attacks, gender-based violence, exploitation and trafficking.

The Congressional Research Service described the situation in Haiti in a recent report: “Between January and March 2025, 1,617 people were killed after 5,600 deaths were recorded in 2024, most attributed to gang-related violence.”

A long journey to a dead end

Taina, who is using a nickname because she fears being identified, is from Haiti, as is her family. They arrived in the U.S. and settled in New Bedford in 2022 under TPS. 

Over the past week, Taina has been terrified to leave her home. The calendar in her living room emptied in January, square by square. First she cut her regular hair appointments, then the after-school activities of her two children — a 12-year-old boy and a 9-year-old girl. Their days have been school and straight home, nothing in between.

Last week she called her doctor to cancel an appointment to check on her diabetes. “I can’t come,” she told him. 

Taina left Haiti in 2017.

“The country forced us to leave,” said Taina in French. Even outside the city, she said, daily life had become unlivable. “If you want a job, you either have to take part in corruption, or, if you’re a woman, submit to sexual favors.”

Movement across the island, she added, is increasingly dangerous, with gangs operating checkpoints throughout the streets. “There are neighborhoods where people simply walked out of their homes, leaving everything behind and fled.”

Nothing has improved in Haiti since the earthquake, Taina said. “I can’t even call it poverty anymore,” she added. “It’s just misery.”

From 2017 to 2021, Taina and her now-husband, Marcos (also a nickname), lived in Chile, where Taina worked as an intercultural facilitator in the public health system, translating Spanish and French to help doctors better understand and treat Haitian patients.

In 2021, they set out with their two children on a journey that would take them across 11 countries, mostly by bus and on foot, to reach the United States. Their trek north took more than a year, including a months-long stop in Costa Rica to earn money after a dangerous crossing of the Darién Gap — the roadless stretch of jungle between Colombia and Panama that has become one of the world’s most perilous migration routes. When she reached Tijuana, Mexico, in 2022, she filed for TPS with the help of a local nonprofit.

Taina researched where her family might find the most stability and work, and settled on Massachusetts.

“We love our autonomy. We want to work. We want to move forward with our families,” she said. “We didn’t want to depend on someone else for rent, food, anything.” 

In New Bedford, that future initially seemed possible: she arrived eight months pregnant and soon gave birth to a boy; the family found an apartment that fit them; the older children adapted quickly in school; Marcos began training to become a school bus driver; and Taina applied for certified nursing assistant jobs.

Then, last year, progress stopped abruptly. Days before Marcos was scheduled to take his practice test, he was told that because his TPS could not be renewed, he could no longer continue his training. Soon after, an employer rescinded Taina’s job offer. “Because of the papers,” she said, “they told me no.”

When the Department of Homeland Security announced last year that it would end TPS for Haitians, work permits technically remained valid — but many employers, often unintentionally, began to see TPS workers as a liability.

Some employers fired long-time workers. “Uncertainty likely led some employers to rescind job offers or halt employment opportunities and such,” Rodriguez said, “even though the individuals were still authorized to work at the time.”

Taina and Marcos are doing what they can to stay afloat. A week ago, Marcos began delivering food. With that money, Taina said, they can at least afford food and trips to the laundromat. “This way we can wash our children’s clothes so they have clean ones for school,” she said.

But with TPS’ future uncertain, the anxiety is constant. “Every time my kids go out to take the bus to go to school, it’s like this,” she said, placing a hand on her chest to mimic her heart pounding. Recently, she sat them down for a serious talk.

“I told my son and my daughter: ‘If we go in our car, all the family together, and you see that the police or immigration asks us to stop, and if you see that they take dad or me, just know I am not going to leave you,’” she said. “And then I told them, ‘Please remember to be quiet, to not cry, and to speak English.’”

The legal fight over ending TPS protections

To end a country’s Temporary Protected Status, the Homeland Security secretary must decide, after consulting with other agencies, whether the country still faces conditions such as armed conflict, environmental disaster, or other temporary crises.

On June 7, 2025, DHS announced in a press release that Haiti’s TPS would be terminated, both because country conditions had improved and because allowing Haitians to remain temporarily in the U.S. was against the national interest. However, on July 1, 2025, when the decision to terminate was published in the Federal Register, no mention was made of improved conditions.

Monday, Judge Ana C. Reyes of the U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., rejected the administration’s motion to dismiss a lawsuit brought by five Haitians challenging the Department of Homeland Security’s plan to end TPS. Reyes’ ruling allows the protections to remain in place while the case proceeds.

In her ruling, Reyes said Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem did not have the legal authority to end the program and found flaws in her claim that continuing TPS for Haitians was not in the national interest.

Reyes wrote that Noem did not consult other agencies at all.

Reyes noted that on Dec. 15, she had ordered the government to list every agency Noem consulted before making her decision. The government’s Jan. 2 response conceded that Noem did not consult with the U.S. Ambassador to Haiti, the U.S. Embassy in Haiti, State Department regional offices or the Haiti desk, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, or Congress.

In her ruling, Judge Reyes wrote that statements from government agencies are riddled with misleading claims, such as a U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services statement asserting that “[w]hile country conditions in Haiti may still be challenging . . . there have been improvements.”

“That sounds promising,” Judge Reyes wrote. “It would be, if one ignored that the cited source is a [United Nations Security Council] warning that Haiti ‘is a country in full-blown conflict,’ and that ‘any effort by the Haitian Government will not be enough to significantly reduce the intensity and violence of criminal groups.’”

Reyes also wrote that Noem’s “national interest” analysis “focuses on Haitians outside the United States or here illegally, ignoring that Haitian TPS holders already live here, and legally so.” 

Also, in the termination notice, the department said that even if conditions existed that prevented Haitians from returning safely, allowing them to remain would be contrary to the national interest: “DHS records indicate that there are Haitian nationals who are Temporary Protected Status recipients who have been the subject of administrative investigations for fraud, public safety, and national security.”

Reyes wrote: “The Government asserts that termination serves the public interest by advancing national security. But they offer no evidence that Haitian TPS holders pose any threat to the United States. In fact, Haitian immigrants are overwhelmingly law-abiding, with incarceration rates lower than those of native-born Americans.”

Advocates agree with Reyes’ decision and share frustration over what they describe as discriminatory treatment.

“The government is required to follow certain steps before terminating the program,” said Jose Palma, coordinator of the National TPS Alliance and co-founder of the Massachusetts TPS Committee. “We believe those steps are not being followed by the Trump administration and that they are acting in a discriminatory way, without taking into consideration the country’s conditions.”

Palma acknowledged that the ruling is a legal victory providing protections for Haitians, but said it is temporary.

“It’s unclear how long this will remain in place, depending on whether the Supreme Court allows the government to move forward with the termination.”

A dream only a few can achieve

TPS offers protection from deportation, work authorization, and a Social Security number. But it is not a path to permanent residency or citizenship. When TPS ends, the legal ground beneath TPS holders simply disappears — even after decades in the United States.

For many with TPS, there simply isn’t another option. Palma himself has held TPS from El Salvador for 20 years, and it is scheduled to end in September.  

“Applying for citizenship is a dream. It’s a privilege many don’t understand because they were born with it.”

Some TPS holders have managed to adjust their status through political asylum, through an adult U.S.-born child filing a family petition, or through marriage to a U.S. citizen. 

But even that path offers no guarantees — something Gilles learned this year. After marrying a U.S. citizen of Haitian descent, she began the process to adjust her status. She had built a life here: finished school, became a nurse, and had two young children. But at her green card appointment on Jan. 6, she was told her application had been paused.

“It’s been the longest month of my life,” she said days before the ruling. “I cannot sleep. I cannot concentrate. I have two children, and I’m still on the schedule at work.”

Even when she went to the Social Security office to take her husband’s last name, the clerk told her she couldn’t. Her Social Security number is tied to TPS, and until her status is unfrozen, so is her name.

“Basically it feels like I’m not even a real person,” Gilles said. “But then I pay real taxes.”

The ruling gave her some hope.

“In my case, if the block is lifted, then my [Social Security] case should be getting ready to be reviewed again,” said Gilles. “So that’s what we’re hoping for.”

Lawmakers response 

Following Judge Reyes’ ruling on Monday, U.S. Sen. Ed Markey expressed relief for the Haitian community in a news release.

“Today’s ruling is a victory for the roughly 350,000 Haitian TPS holders whose status was set to expire tomorrow,” said Markey. “By providing safe haven to those who cannot return home safely, TPS embodies the American promise as a land of freedom and refuge. Haitian TPS holders are deeply rooted in our Massachusetts communities — from Mattapan to Brockton. They are our friends, our family members, our neighbors, our colleagues. I will keep fighting to protect the Haitian community.”

On Jan. 20, Markey and Reps. Ayanna Pressley and Seth Moulton convened a hearing in Boston to address the looming expiration of TPS for Haitian immigrants. They sharply criticized the administration’s plan to let the program lapse, warning it would put thousands of Massachusetts residents at risk of deportation.

Gilles says conditions in Haiti justify continuing TPS protection.

“We just have to keep up the good fight, educate people, and really shine a light, because it’s not OK what they’re doing.”

Email Eleonora Bianchi at ebianchi@newbedfordlight.org.

---

More by Eleonora Bianchi

---