Human rights activists protest outside a San Francisco US Immigration court, calling for an extension to the TPS program (February 2, 2026) | Phil Pasquini / Shutterstock
In August, The Wall Street Journal reported that in South Florida several home health care agencies were closing, “nursing homes are scrambling to fill vacant positions and restaurants are scaling back operating hours. Hotels, retailers, airport contractors and small businesses are also grappling with new staffing shortages.” Meanwhile, in neighborhoods such as New York’s Flatbush, small businesses reported an alarming decrease in customers, as well as imperiled daily operations owing to the absence of essential staff. As the 2026 school year began, school districts in states such as New York, Minnesota, Florida, California, and Ohio reported reduced enrollments and “disappearing” students.
These disruptions to daily life are all the results of the Trump administration’s crusade to turn over a million people,including factory workers, students, home health care aides, doctors, and nurses, into “illegals” overnight with the cancellation of their Temporary Protected Status. Meanwhile, government officials have continued to justify their daily capturing of migrant workers and their families as protecting public safety, arguing that they are removing “the worst of the worst.” However, the termination of most TPS protected statuses, with its disruption of both urban and rural communities has made it dramatically apparent that Trump’s migration policies benefit the detention-deportation industry and almost no one else. This round-up has also made it clear how inadequate TPS has been at providing people who desperately needed to resettle in safety with a pathway to citizenship, rather than a continuously precarious existence.
By providing time-limited humanitarian relief, Temporary Protected Status (TPS) allowed eligible foreign nationals from countries deemed unsafe due to armed conflicts, environmental disasters, or other extraordinary conditions, to live and work in the US. However, in January 2025, the Trump administration announced that all TPS programs would be ended by October 2026. Despite a number of court challenges, the administration proceeded to implement its goal except, so far, for the Salvadorians, de facto criminalizing all other TPS holders by removing their legal status. The 12 nationalities who have been living, working, and building lives in the US and who have now lost this legal status include: Afghanis, Nepalese, Cameroonians, Nicaraguans, Syrians, Lebanese, Sudanese, Ukrainians, Yeminis, Hondurans, South Sudanese, Burmese, Somalians, Ethiopians, and Haitians. They had become critical parts of the US workforce, which needed a range of frontline workers from health care to construction to small businesses in underserved communities. Notably TPS holders were an important component of the essential workers who risked their lives and were celebrated for supporting communities amid the Covid epidemic lockdown of 2020–2021. In addition, according to immigration advocates and researchers, TPS holders have contributed an estimated $29 billion to the US economy annually, while paying around $7.8 billion in taxes.
An estimated 50,000 TPS holders had been working in the health care sector, a vital part of the US economy already short of workers. Many of these workers had become central to local hospital systems at all levels and to elders, who were able to age at home with the assistance of aides. Before the termination of the program, Amina Dubuisson, who as a vice-president of Ventura Services Florida, oversees nine nursing homes across Miami, said at least 20 to 30 percent of their workers were TPS holders. These men, women, and children who fled countries enmeshed in ongoing wars, civil unrests, and gang violence are now subject to detention and deportation.
Faced with the loss of their legal status, families, who have been living in the United States for years with jobs, homes, and businesses are going into hiding and keeping their children home from school, fearing for their safety. More than 230,000 US born citizen children are facing the loss of at least one parent. The US government is telling former TPS holders to leave immediately, but around the world many countries in the Global North have already closed their borders to new immigrants and asylum seekers, while the homelands of TPS holders, the majority of which are located in the Global South, continue to be places of violence and repression.
So what will happen to over a million people holding TPS when, through no fault of their own, they have unexpectedly lost their right to work, been denied the rights to drive, to have access to the health insurance they have purchased or to the unemployment and social security benefits to which they have contributed? What will happen to the homes they had purchased? What will the banks do about their mortgages? How many of these houses will the banks have to short sell, causing the immigrants and the banks to lose their investments? What will happen to their children, extended transnational families, to their employers, to their cities or towns, and to our whole society?
The 350,000 Haitians who had TPS
The impact of the end of TPS on both migrants and on the cities and towns across the country where they live has become starkly visible with the withdrawal of status from 350,000 Haitians on July 23, 2026. The Haitian example elucidates both the viciousness of TPS cancellations and the widespread damage they have caused. After the termination of Haitian TPS, Rebecca Shi, executive director of the American Business Immigration Coalition reported that its members “were particularly hard hit. A resort hotel in Florida lost more than 150 workers, and a senior center in Massachusetts lost more than 50 employees.”
Haitian TPS holders generated an estimated $5.9 billion each year to the US economy. In addition, annually, they paid $805 million in federal and payroll taxes and $755 million in federal, state, and local taxes. An estimated 50,000 US citizen children have at least one parent who is a Haitian TPS holder; those children now face poverty and emotional harm because a parent has lost their work authorization and lives in fear of detention and deportation. Four days before ICE began hunting and mass-detaining Haitians, the US State Department re-issued its highest level of warning, advising US citizens not to travel to Haiti due to “the immediate risks of crime, kidnapping, terrorism, unrest, and limited health care.” The Haitian domestic situation is so dire that the US State Department has advised travelers to prepare a will if they must travel there.
Almost 1.5 million people have been displaced because of gang violence in Haiti, where more than half of the country’s nearly 12 million inhabitants need humanitarian aid. In 2025, the United Nations verified “2,088 grave violations affecting 1,661 children, including the recruitment and use of 892 children [by armed gangs], as well as killings and maiming, sexual violence, abductions, attacks on schools and hospitals, and denial of humanitarian access.” As TPS holder Harriett Cecilia Joseph put it, “It’s not that we don’t want to go back to Haiti. It’s just the situation doesn’t allow us to.”
This situation is, in part, a result of direct US involvement in Haiti, which spans two centuries characterized by diplomatic isolation, economic interference, military occupation, and political interventions including undermining democratic grassroots movements. Haitians have long served as disenfranchised and exploited labor in both the US and Haiti, whether as temporary farm labor, workers with TPS, or factory workers in Haitian export-processing zones where the majority of goods are destined for the United States. In such zones, workers work for less-than-living wages and without any form of worker protection or benefits. In addition, the presence of guns and drugs that make it unsafe to travel or live in Haiti can be traced to transnational crime with US connections; Haiti produces neither guns nor drugs. The current unelected leadership of Haiti is in office with US support, and the US is also heavily involved in organizing Haiti’s first general elections in a decade, slated for December, despite the impossibility of holding secure, safe and fair balloting under current conditions. And by eliminating immigrants’ ability to send money to families and communities, the termination of work authorization for Haitian TPS holders will deepen the poverty in Haiti, causing further destabilization. In 2022, remittances sent from abroad accounted for more that 22 percent of Haiti’s GDP; 70 percent of those funds came from the US.
Springfield Ohio and its lessons for US politics
Springfield, Ohio has been a microcosm of both the brutal destructiveness of Trump’s migration policies and the ways local citizens are opposing these policies. Located in south-eastern Ohio, Springfield is a small city of about 60,000. Since the 1970s, the city has faced increasing deindustrialization and depopulation. But following the devastating 7.5 magnitude earthquake that devastated Haiti’s capital, Port-au-Prince, and its surroundings in 2010, thousands of Haitians emigrated to the US, with over 10,000 moving to Ohio. According to The New York Times, “The newcomers staffed auto plants, packed ready-to-eats salads at Dole and sorted packages at Amazon. They filled church pews, enrolled their children in schools, and began to buy homes.” Carl Ruby, pastor of the Central Christian Church in Springfield said, “I’ve seen the city go from a seemingly unstoppable economic and population decline to a thriving locale fully on the upswing. That miracle turnaround was thanks in part to the thousands of Haitians seeking safety, many of them recipients of a little-known legal protection called Temporary Protected Status.”
Standing against the narrative of the Trump Administration, Republican elected leaders including the mayor of Springfield, Rob Rue, and the Republican governor of Ohio, Michael DeVine, called for the continuation of TPS. “It’s Haitians who, many times, are taking care of your mom or your dad who has Alzheimer’s, taking care of family members who might be in a nursing home,” said DeVine. “And to say we’re going to pull all those [people] out, it’s just not in our own self-interest.” While many right-wing extremists have voiced their support for the Haitians’ mass deportation, hundreds of Springfield citizens have attended meetings and demonstrations in support of their Haitian neighbors while developing plans to help them hide, or care for Haitian children if their parents are abducted by ICE.
Outside Ohio, politicians from both sides of the aisle are pushing to see TPS authorizations reinstated, with precisely such self-interest in mind. Republican congressman Mike Lawler, who represents New York’s lower Hudson Valley, has consistently supported extending TPS for Haitian nationals. In July, Lawler publicly urged Senate leadership to take up a bill which would extend TPS until 2029, citing ongoing violence in Haiti and the critical role Haitian workers play in US health care and local communities. Democratic members of Congress such as Laura Gillen of New York have also joined mayors like Daniella Levine Cava of Miami-Dade County, Eileen Higgins of the City of Miami, and Haitian American Mayor Alix Desulme of North Miami in disavowing the end of TPS for Haitian immigrants.
While the official grounds for TPS extensions have always been ongoing danger in TPS holders’ home countries, it has long been tacitly understood that the US government uses TPS workers to meet the labor exigencies of the US economy while bypassing the urgent need to reform the US immigration system to address the socioeconomic needs of the country. These temporary protections also fail to fulfill US treaty obligations to grant asylum to those fleeing repressive regimes. TPS holders could work and pay taxes, but they had no pathway to permanent residence and citizenship.
The termination of TPS has begun to make clear to communities across the US that the brutal warrantless abductions, detentions, electronic shackling, and deportations are highly profitable businesses, with billions of taxpayer dollars transferred to a handful of corporations owned by Trump’s donor class. Everyone else, meanwhile, will suffer; across the country increasing numbers of people are beginning to understand the threat. In August and September, hundreds of local citizens in Oklahoma and Ohio counties that had voted for Trump protested local detention centers, while a thousand people marched in Indiana against a pro-deportation black-tie dinner. Citizens are beginning to understand that the brutal dehumanization of vulnerable migrants is an attack on all US citizens.
