Many Haitians who fled to New Jersey fear being deported by the Trump administration after working here for years under special legal protection.
The United States has given Haitian people thousands of humanitarian parole and temporary protected status permissions after disasters and gang violence devastated the island nation. Haiti was then caught up in a humanitarian crisis. Haitians who work in New Jersey healthcare, retail and warehouse jobs say they can't return.
The Trump administration recently revoked the legal status of more than half a million immigrants, including Cubans, Venezuelans and Nicaraguans, and urged them to self-report.
“I'm hopeless. I can't eat. I can't sleep. I'm thinking about what will happen and what will happen,” said the tearful Haitian, hoping to remain anonymous, fearing immigrants and forced customs agents. “Because I can't easily return to my country. It's not difficult to live here right now.”
“Twenty-twenty-thousand-thousand Haitians came to New Jersey and the majority of them were working-age people who passed these programs. So you start deporting people and we're talking about self-harmed labor shortages, and that's going to come soon,” Pastor Seth Caper Dale said. He heads I-Rise, a nonprofit organization that has supported 2,000 clients in Cuba, Haiti, Venezuela and Nicaragua.
I-Rise's 750 Haitian clients work primarily in healthcare. Almost 8% of health workers in the northeast are non-citizens, according to a recent Jamaa survey that warns that “deportation could particularly compromise long-term care, where immigrants play a major role.”
“They're doing this,” said Dr. Steffy Woolhandler, a co-author and professor of research at the Graduate Center at New York University.
“Nursing home managers – those who manage home care institutions don't know how to provide their direct, practical care without access to Haitian workers,” says Woolhandler.
A spokesman for the lobby, representing New Jersey nursing homes, said he didn't know if the deportation had “a big impact, or just a small impact.”
A federal judge in Massachusetts said Thursday that he would issue a temporary stay on the order of a self-swagged humanitarian parolee by April 24th.
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