When Haiti scored at the World Cup for the first time in more than 50 years, it was about so much more than goals in a soccer game. It was a chance for Haitian Americans to express their pride in a country that has been through hard times.

Sergo Bellefleur drove 6½ hours from Orlando, Florida, to Atlanta just to attend the watch party and be in the same city as the Haitian team.

“I love Haiti, I love who I am, and I love being Haitian. [The World Cup] is another way to represent our culture, heritage, and show off the vibe we bring,” he said.

For Bellefleur and the thousands of Haitian Americans in metro Atlanta, the tournament has provided a reprieve from the concerns of life — in an America that is increasingly hostile toward immigrants, and in Haiti where political violence and social instability are part of daily life.

Unfortunately, the jubilant feelings about the tournament didn’t last long.

On July 25, the U.S. Supreme Court gave the Trump administration permission to end Temporary Protected Status for Haitians and Syrians in the country. 

TPS is an immigration protection from deportation for people coming from designated countries and allows them to work legally. It is granted to people who are from countries experiencing civil unrest, a natural disaster, or some other devastation that makes it unsafe for them to return. 

Nationwide, there are more than 350,000 Haitians and 6,000 Syrians with TPS. Now, their presence in the U.S. could be at risk.

“The ruling was really devastating for all of us, those who hold TPS, and those who are U.S. citizens and green card holders,” the Rev. Jean Billy Beaufils, president of the Georgia Haitian Leadership Coalition said.

He and other members of the Haitian Evangelical Clergy of Georgia have been organizing around TPS since 2017, when President Donald Trump first took office and said he wanted to cancel the program for Haitians.

“We’re not just talking about having legal status, we’re talking about the entire livelihood of these folks. From work, their homes, to their children being able to thrive,” Beaufils said.

Even before the Supreme Court’s decision, he said, a lot of people have been staying inside, afraid to leave their homes for fear of detention or deportation.

“Now with this decision, it’s doubling the stress level and the anxiety,” Beaufils said.

Through the Haitian clergy organization and other immigration groups, advocates are able to support community members with food, clothing, beds and even healthcare for those in need. Beaufils provides mental health counseling, and volunteer nurse practitioners help with other care.

While cities like New York, Miami, and Boston are widely known for their large Haitian communities in recent decades, Atlanta’s Haitian community has steadily grown. Now, the metro Atlanta area is home to the fifth-largest Haitian population in the country.

“There are people who have been here for the last 16 years, who’ve built families here, who’ve built lives here, who work, pay taxes and all of the above, who are now in an uncertain space,” said Cassandra Charles, a Haitian American civil rights attorney based in Atlanta.

The struggle to endure

Dachka Fidele, a first-generation American born to Haitian parents, said that while the end of TPS is upsetting, Haiti has had to endure a lot over the years.

Haiti was first designated for TPS in 2010 after a magnitude 7.0 earthquake killed more than 200,000 people and left millions of others homeless or displaced.

Since 2010, Haiti has been redesignated under TPS multiple times because of civil unrest emerging from the earthquake’s devastation. Then, in 2021, Haiti’s president, Jovenel Moïse, was assassinated.

In the years that followed, Haiti has been engulfed by political violence, as the gangs who were once confined to the capital, Port-au-Prince, have expanded their reach into other parts of the country.

“Haiti, right now, is being run by gangs who do not have any regard for human life, and it’s not safe for many people to return,” Charles said.

In spite of that danger, thousands of Haitians who had been able to work and live with a sense of normalcy in the U.S. for the past decade and a half are now at risk of detention and deportation by federal immigration officials.

For years, Haitian workers have mitigated the caregiver crisis in communities across the U.S., where the growth of the aging population has outpaced the available eldercare.

“[Haitians] take a lot of jobs in the medical field, jobs that people don’t necessarily want to do,” Fidele said. Ending Haitians’ TPS status is “going to [cause] a big hit to the economy, especially in the healthcare industry.” 

According to U.S. Rep. Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts, co-chair of the House Haiti Caucus, 1 in 5 healthcare workers and 1 in 4 long-term healthcare workers are Haitian.

A federal judge in February blocked the Trump administration’s attempt to revoke TPS for Haitians, saying that the plan was influenced by then-Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem’s “hostility to nonwhite immigrants.”

Last week, the Supreme Court denied that assertion in the majority opinion authored by Justice Samuel Alito.

“They made that very clear in the decision that they agree with the government that there is no anti-Haitian sentiment, and the decision to terminate the program is not based on race or any racial animus,” Charles said.

Since the current administration took office, Georgia has become a hotspot for immigration enforcement. That has placed thousands of Haitians immigrants and the families they’ve built in the U.S. since 2010 at risk of separation.

But Beaufils is not giving up.

“We’re networking with a bunch of other organizations to motivate Haitian Americans and other American friends to call their representatives to pressure the White House not to execute the plans to deport these folks,” he said.

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Staff writer Brandon Tensley contributed to this report.

Madeline Thigpen is Capital B Atlanta's criminal justice reporter.