On a recent Sunday morning, the Haitian congregation at the Notre Dame d'Haiti Catholic Church in Miami's Little Haiti, sang the lyrics “Glory to our God in heaven.”
Presiding over the flock of followers was a familiar face: Father Reginald Jean-Mary, well known as Father Reggie, a prominent local Haitian-American Catholic priest.
These days Father Reggie is especially worried. He notes that on this particular Sunday that hundreds of fewer parishioners are seated for a second service. And he's sure he knows why the church pews are empty: Many immigrant families are hiding in fear of President Donald Trump's aggressive deportation plan.
“ If you look at the mass today, it's a mass that we have over like 1,400 people,” Father Reggie said. “We did not have even 1,000 people at that mass. That means people are in hiding, running away.”
The daycare center also saw a drop in attendance, as many Haitian immigrant parents who arrived with their children after a stay in Brazil and Chile are now in hiding. “I don't even know what those parents are doing with the children,” Father Reggie added.
"It's very painful to see," says Father Reggie, who has been part of this Miami Catholic church in the heart of city's large Haitian-American community for about 25 years.
"You find yourself in a position where you are powerless, especially now with what's going on," Father Reggie tells WLRN. "Without legal [residency] documents to work, we're in hiding, we're crying, we're suffering. Our brothers and sisters are suffering."
Many in South Florida's Haitian community, like others in the region's numerous immigrant communities, are in fear of being deported at any moment in the wake of Trump and the federal government targeting immigrants nationwide.
It has caused immigrants to flee into hiding out of anxiety and concern even in places of worship, where the Trump administration this month announced it would allow federal immigration agencies to make arrests at schools, churches and hospitals, ending a policy that had been in effect since 2011. So far, there are no reports of such raids happening in South Florida.
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Father Reggie tells WLRN that the church has always been a spiritual space, a school and community center, offering legal services and other support since the early 1980s, especially as the Trump administration escalates its deportation plan.
Anti-immigrant rhetoric impacting community services
Father Reggie wants Trump, Gov. Ron DeSantis, and local elected leaders to tone down the “demeaning” rhetoric that the believes is aimed at working-class legal and undocumented immigrants.
He said it's impacting how organizations provide services and is shifting what safety and security looks like in the Haitian community.
Even the mere presence of police, especially unmarked cars, can feel intimidating to worshippers.
“The other day there was a car I saw in the parking lot. It's believed that [they] have some agents. I said, 'Listen, guys, you cannot be here because you're going to intimidate people from coming to church and to schools.’ And they were very respectful and they said, ‘Father, we are not here for that, but we're going to leave,'” Father Reggie said.
'A dictatorship of indifference'
Archdiocese of Miami Archbishop Thomas Wenski, a longtime champion of immigrant rights and advocacy, made a special appearance that Sunday at Notre Dame d'Haiti, delivering a sermon not only for the annual Catholic tradition, Feast of the Light, which celebrates the light of Jesus on February 2nd, but to honor immigrant families under distress.
“Our Archbishop championed the cause of the migrants,” Father Reggie said.
The leaders are part of a group composed of priests from various ethnic groups who share the “same feeling, same sentiments to fight for the cause of the migrants,” but Father Reggie said he recognizes the limitations that some community leaders may fear, arguing that they are “discouraged because the indifference is so overwhelming.”
Father Reggie’s main concerns, which are often shared by members of the Haitian community, aren’t just limited to ever-changing immigration policy. He’s forcefully calling out “dehumanizing” language, which, he said, seems to have ramped up under the Trump administration compared to previous presidencies.
During his first term, Trump referred to Haiti as a “shithole country," and during his presidential campaign last year, he and the now Vice-President JD Vance repeated a baseless claim that Haitian migrants in Ohio were eating pets — Father Reggie said these kinds of false remarks do lasting harm to a community.
“ You have a community, a country that is living under the dictatorship of indifference because the rhetoric give birth to a culture of indifference, where people feel, when they meet you, it's not a human being,” Father Reggie said. “You are nothing.”
Father Reggie said the community was already accustomed to high rates of deportations under the Biden and Obama administrations — but that they were often, at least in appearance, “compassionate in several ways, where they grant TPS (Temporary Protected Status) to some people, especially after the [2010] earthquake."
Now, working-class immigrants fear being in limbo again. After a few extensions, TPS is set to expire for Haitians in February 2026.
Trump has also directed the Department of Homeland Security to end Biden's humanitarian parole program, which provided legal pathways to the United States for up to hundreds of thousands people from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela, with many living in South Florida.
Dehumanizing language and not providing working-class immigrants with path to citizenship is “very inhuman, unethical,” said Father Reggie, who laments the harsh and negative tone American politicians and American people have taken toward immigrants.
"When you look at the tendency now in America, you wonder, wow, I did not know there were so many mean people. I did not know that migrants, immigrants were so hated."
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