South Florida’s Haitians are in a state of painful if not terrifying suspense.
About 150,000 of them have just seen their Temporary Protected Status, or TPS, cancelled — meaning federal immigration agents can now arrest and deport them en masse, at will.
At stake may be the very future of a community that’s part of the social and economic bedrock here — and the forced return of people to the nightmare of violent gang rule in Haiti.
Which is why Evka is struggling with a dread she says feels almost like a serious medical diagnosis.
“It can feel lonely. That loneliness can … can definitely eat away at you.”
Evka (WLRN is not using her last name to protect her identity) was brought from Haiti to the U.S. at age 4 some 25 years ago. She has never lived in Haiti since.
Evka grew up in North Miami; she has a master’s degree in civil engineering from Florida International University. Like so many Haitians here, she received TPS protection from deportation in 2010 after Haiti’s massive earthquake — a safeguard the Trump administration has now ended for some 350,000 Haitian migrants nationwide.
“I have a very strong faith in the Lord that we’ll be able to find a way out," Evka told WLRN, "that there will be some type of alternative solution to this situation.”
Evka does qualify for federal DACA status, or Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals. It too would shield her from being sent back to Haiti. But the Trump administration is not taking new applications for DACA, pending a federal judge’s decision.
In that limbo, Evka — like tens of thousands of Haitian TPS holders in South Florida — could be detained at any moment by immigration authorities and deported. So she rarely goes out in public now.
“I take the proper precautions and everything every day," she said.
READ MORE: Is it a human rights violation to deport Haitian TPS holders to a cauldron of gang violence?
"I’m not working, number one; not driving. I was a prominent leader in the youth ministry at my church — and it saddens me a lot, but it’s a risk that I cannot take at this moment, so I have had to step away.”
Before losing her TPS work permit, Evka was the operations manager at a growing retail firm in downtown Miami — an indication not just of her logistics skills, but of her and Haitian TPS holders' estimated $2.6 billion contribution to the economy.
“I would love to work in transportation," Evka said of her career aspirations, "to improve the way people travel, the services and goods get transported – to help better people’s lives.”
Evka says she can’t understand the Trump administration’s zeal to banish her to a place where, for now anyway, there’s little if any chance she can better anyone’s life.
Haiti is a country she doesn’t know — a place run not by professionals but by criminal gangs who just last week massacred 47 innocent people in the Port-au-Prince suburb of Kenscoff, where they're also holding almost 40 residents hostage and threatening to kill them as well.
“To just take everything away, as if everything we’ve built and established doesn’t have any meaning or importance?" she said.
"And then be pulled away to a place that has no safety or security? ‘Scary’ doesn’t even encompass what goes through my mind right now.”
Evka’s fears are widespread in South Florida Haitian enclaves like Miami's Little Haiti and North Miami, where more than half the population is Haitian — and thousands like her are TPS holders.
They too are now reluctant to venture outside, even to the Sunday worship services they hold dear at congregations like the First Haitian Baptist Church of North Dade, where Rick Eugene is the pastor.
“The Haitian people are very spiritual, and their worship center is part of their identity," said, who was born in New York and raised in South Florida.
"However, with the threat of deportation, many are afraid to even go to what was a safe haven. On some Sundays this summer, the number of people in the pews has fallen to a point where this can feel like a starter church."
Many congregants this summer are instead livestreaming the church's services from home — and, on the first Sundays of the month, asking deacons to bring holy communion to their homes, something usually done only for elderly shut-ins.
Eugene’s late Haitian immigrant father Amos Eugene founded the church in the 1990s. About a fifth of its congregation are TPS holders — and Eugene says that along with Sunday attendance, he’s watching Haitians’ trademark resilience drop as well.
“The Haitian people, no matter what circumstance might come their way, they are very joyful individuals," Eugene said.
"But this is one of the first times in my lifetime where I can honestly tell you that I’m seeing grown men and women go through depression. Grown men crying and hugging me.
"They feel ashamed because they are being dehumanized by this circumstance.”
"The gangs in Haiti have my house; they burned down my 76-year-old mother’s house. The gangs will kill everybody. So, you're asking me to go back to that?”Haitian TPS holder Naomie
That’s especially true, he adds, given the arguably racist language President Donald Trump has used to disparage Haiti and Haitians in the U.S.
And that, he said, only exacerbates the fear that America's Haitian community, now more than a million strong, could be depleted by the looming mass deportations in a way that could take a generation or more to recover.
"I do feel like America is losing a valued culture if they do this," Eugene said, "that the country is going to feel this more than it expects."
'A deserted area'
Either way, Eugene points out the situation is affecting financial as well as spiritual life in North Miami.
“The community is usually out in the restaurants and all around the place," he said.
"But now it looks like a ... a deserted area.”
Traditional North Miami gathering spots like laundromats — where gossip, news, jokes and business deals come alive day and night in a mix of Haitian Creole and English — do indeed feel empty this summer.
At one sparsely occupied 24-hour laundromat on West Dixie Highway last week, a Haitian TPS holder named Naomie (WLRN is not using her last name) said she didn’t want to go here but had no choice but to get her family’s clothes washed.
“I come here to just do the laundry quickly and go back home — close my door," she told WLRN as she changed bills for washing machine quarters while casting wary glances outside.
"If someone knock on my door I’m not going to open it, ‘cause I’m scared.”
Naomie said she came to the U.S. seven years ago on a tourist visa after gang members back in her Port-au-Prince district of Delmas threatened to kill her if she didn’t give up her house to them — and after they burned down the nearby home of her 76-year-old mother.
Naomie received TPS when it was expanded for Haitians in 2021, due to that gang horror back in Haiti. Until this month, before losing her TPS work authorization, she said she’d been a certified therapist here for children with disabilities.
“Now, every day, if I have to bring my kids to school, I have to pray; every time I have to pick up my kids at school, I have to pray," she said, "because I don’t know if ICE is going to take me.”
ICE means federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, who can now arrest Haitians who have lost their TPS shield from deportation.
Naomie said she and her husband, who is also a Haitian TPS recipient, are scrambling to find informal work to pay their rent and groceries. But she insists the pressures they're living under here now still would not be remotely as frightening as having to return to Haiti.
“The gangs, they ... they have my house; my mom’s house is already burned," she said, holding back tears.
"The gangs will kill everybody. So, you're asking me to go back to that?”
Naomie said she has U.S.-born children here as well, including a 2-year-old — and since she said she would "never condemn them to growing up in Haiti today" — she is having to figure out how to have them cared for here if she and her husband are in fact deported.
The Trump administration insists Haitians like Naomie forget that Temporary Protected Status means just that: temporary. Last week Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said that for too long TPS has been used as “a de facto amnesty program” for undocumented migrants.
White House border czar Tom Homan told CNN Sunday that "Temporary Protected Status is supposed to be temporary" in defending the administration's policy.
But, says Naomie: “I understand “T” is temporary, like they said — but the “P” in TPS is protection.”
READ MORE: Haitians get a TPS reprieve — but the Trump administration remains set on deporting them
Immigration experts say that’s the key point in the argument for continuing TPS for Haitians.
While the administration claims it’s just enforcing the “temporary” facet of TPS, its critics claim it’s violating the law’s “protection” facet by sending beneficiaries back to Haiti.
And that, they insist violates international law codes such as non refoulement, which prohibits sending refugees back to places where they are likely to be harmed or killed.
Haiti's gangs, they point out, now control the capital, Port-au-Prince, and are on pace to kill more than 6,000 people in the country this year, and kidnap and rape hundreds more. About 1.5 million Haitians have been displaced by gang violence, most living in squalid, makeshift refugee camps.
"The fact that even as the threat of ICE raids and home invasions has people living in fear here — the fact that they're hiding in effective home detention, and yet we're still not seeing any of them voluntarily return to Haiti," said Haitian-American immigration attorney Frandley Julien of North Miami, "that just helps proves the situation back in Haiti is exactly what we've been saying it is."
As a result, said Julien, the idea of casting 350,000 into that deadly dystopia, especially when Haiti's interim government has neither a plan nor the capacity to receive and re-integrate them, “violates every principle of morality and international law.
"It’s also a huge self-inflicted wound," he added, echoing Pastor Eugene. "It would be a huge loss for American society as well," given how much certain industries in Florida, like home healthcare, have come to depend on the Haitian TPS workforce.
The Trump administration has said it now plans to send at least two deportation flights carrying about 125 people each to Haiti each week. Since Haitian TPS officially ended at the start of this month, at least two deportation flights from the U.S. have landed in Haiti, but's it's unclear how many deportees had been TPS holders.
Julien and other immigration attorneys said they fear one reason all-out mass arrests and deportations of Haitian TPS holders haven't occurred on the streets yet is that the Trump administration wants to shore up available detention capacity in the U.S. to handle the volume.
And in the end, any moral reality is trumped by the legal reality: the U.S. Supreme Court this summer ruled that the TPS statute gives the executive branch sole discretion to decide when to end the protection for any national group — and whether it’s acceptable to send people back to their home country.
Even today’s Haiti.
