Supreme Court decision revoking TPS status alarms Haitian community, as governor says ruling will 'cripple' healthcare system

The U.S. Supreme Court’s decision Thursday to end legal protections that permitted hundreds of thousands of Haitians and Syrians to live in the United States sent shock waves across Long Island, a hub of Haitian American life.

Nassau County Legis. Carrié Solages, a Democrat from Valley Stream who is Haitian American, said his office started to get phone calls from worried constituents minutes after the court’s decision was announced. "People have been calling my office asking for legal advice," he said. "These are people without information, without hope. ... I am begging the administration to exercise its power in the most discrete way that will have the least negative impact."

More than 40,000 people of Haitian descent and 1,300 of Syrian descent live on Long Island, census figures show. Some were granted temporary protected status, or TPS, after a devastating 2010 earthquake in Haiti and that legal immigration status was later renewed because of political violence, gang wars and human rights abuses in the island nation.

Phillip Connor, a research fellow at Princeton University's Center for Migration and Development, estimated there were 53,000 Haitian TPS holders in the New York City metropolitan area, which includes portions of New Jersey and Connecticut.

Most Haitian TPS holders in New York State live in New York City, Rockland County and Long Island. They are now exposed to potential loss of work authorization and deportation after a 6-3 decision overturned lower court orders, allowing the Department of Homeland Security to terminate TPS without judicial review.

DHS did not answer a question about the department’s next steps. But a department spokesman, James Percival, said in an email that the Supreme Court "vindicates DHS yet again. The T in TPS stands for TEMPORARY, yet many of these designations became de facto amnesty. This is a win for the rule of law and common sense."

Solages called the decision "a victory for the administration but a complete loss for our economy and for Long Island. Many Haitian TPS holders on Long Island work in hospitality and healthcare, industries that already faced worker shortages. "These individuals will be forced to seek employment off the books," he said.

In a Manhattan news conference with immigration advocates, union leaders, Gov. Kathy Hochul and other elected officials, including Murad Awawdeh, president and CEO of New York Immigration Coalition, said New Yorkers with TPS from Haiti and Syria would lose legal status starting in about 30 days.

Mayor Zohran Mamdani, whose wife is Syrian, said his office would be issuing advice to residents at risk of losing TPS. "You are not going to face this alone," he said.

Hochul warned that the decision would "cripple our healthcare system."

Some Haitian Americans on Long Island echoed that Thursday. Marie Sonia Saint Rose-Bienvil, a public health practitioner from Uniondale who is president of Solidarite Haitiano-Americaine de Long Island, a community group, said the decision could have particularly acute impacts for home care aides. "They work with patients, those who are sick or stay at home, who depend on those people to come and care for them."

Bill Van Slyke, a spokesman for Home Care Association of New York State, wrote in an email that the trade group was "concerned that the implications of the ruling specific to TPS status will exacerbate current workforce shortages, especially in the metro New York region. We are hopeful the administration will be judicious in its actions moving forward to ensure that we don't interrupt services for the more than one million New Yorkers who rely on home-based clinical care every day."

In an email, David Dyssegaard Kallick, director of Immigration Research Initiative, a nonpartisan think tank, wrote that Haitian TPS holders add an estimated $800 million in annual economic contributions to the state economy, along with $280 million in federal, state and local taxes.

Mimi Pierre Johnson, a community organizer, said the court decision’s impacts would ripple beyond home care. She said Haitians on Long Island "have businesses. They have children in education. They work in nursing homes, hospitals, restaurants, and now you have made them all illegal. ... Not because of something they did wrong, but because our government did that to them. We are all going to be affected."

She described the plight of a Haitian acquaintance who owned a business there but moved her family to Long Island after being threatened by a gang. The gang later took over the woman’s house, Johnson said. "Do you think she wants to go back? They are going to recognize her. She has nothing to go back to," she said.

The Rev. Onick Bouquet, who leads a mostly Haitian congregation in Hauppauge whose members include TPS recipients, said the decision would accelerate a retreat from public life for some that began last year at the start of the federal immigration crackdown. "They are scared and they cannot go out, even for church," he said. "We try to do online service, but that is not the way it is supposed to be."

Bouquet said some Haitians on Long Island would be "happy" to return to Haiti if conditions there were better. But he said, "The condition of living in Haiti now is very hard. ... We don’t have war, but gangs trying to control some parts of Haiti."

According to the United Nations, at least 26 armed gangs control up to 90% of the capital city of Port-au-Prince and surrounding areas, practicing "summary executions, extortion and kidnappings for ransom and preventing commerce by blocking the free flow of goods." At least 2,300 people have been killed since the start of the year, though a UN-backed Gang Suppression Force has begun patrols.

Alexander Holtzman, director of the Deportation Defense Clinic and assistant clinical professor of law at Maurice A. Deane School of Law at Hofstra University, said DHS would likely "move quickly to effectuate the termination of TPS, and at that point, thousands of Haitian and Syrian TPS holders will then lose their status."

Immigration lawyers will now turn to "damage control, figuring out when TPS expires, when employment authorizations expire and what, if anything, we can do to help." Some clients may be eligible to make applications for asylum in the United States, he said. For the rest, the advice might be more basic: "Know your rights. Don’t open the door to your residence without a judicial warrant. Remain silent. It’s a really challenging time for the immigration community on Long Island."

Assemb. Michaelle Solages (D-Elmont), the sister of the Nassau legislator, said she anticipated "chaos" as a result of the decision, with many Haitians choosing a life "in the shadows" as undocumented workers in the United States over a return to Haiti.

Solages, like her brother, said she’d fielded scores of calls in recent months from constituents worried about the Supreme Court decision. "Not a day goes by that somebody doesn’t tap me in the shoulder and say, ‘I don’t know what I’m going to do.’ ”

She has given cold comfort: "I tell people, ‘Don’t fall for scams.’ There are going to be lawyers and other entities that are going to sell them a dream or give them false hope. ... There are unscrupulous people who are going to take advantage of us, because there is very little hope in our community."

Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, at senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, a nonprofit advocacy organization for immigrants, said it was unclear how the administration might proceed, not least because the Federal Aviation Administration barred flights to Port-Au-Prince last year after a Spirit Airlines flight was shot at while landing. But TPS holders who lose work authorization will have to quit their jobs and will be vulnerable to arrest by ICE, which can place them in removal proceedings, he said.

The case also will have implications for other foreign nationals living in the United States under TPS, who total about 1.3 million from 17 countries, he said, because it frees the government to end designations for those nations with minimal judicial oversight. “The Trump administration has terminated every single TPS that has come up for review so far,” Reichlin-Melnick said.

In a statement, Rep. Laura Gillen, (D-Rockville Centre) said she would push for passage of a bill to reinstate protected status for nearly 350,000 Haitian nationals living in the United States. That legislation passed the House but faces an uncertain future in the Senate and then possible veto by the president. “Haitian TPS recipients are a part of the fabric of our daily lives and pillars of our economy and faith communities. They are a fundamental part of our vibrant identity on Long Island.”

Newsday's Billy House and Tiffany Cusaac-Smith contributed to this story.