‘It’s just so wrong’: Haitians in Ohio reel from supreme court TPS ruling

After outrageous insults from Donald Trump, Haitians have helped to revive Springfield – now their future is uncertain

The embattled Haitian community of Springfield, Ohio is among many groups reeling after this week’s ruling from the supreme court that strips the legal immigration status from hundreds of thousands of Haitians living and working in the US – and could be a threat to more than a million.

The Springfield community in particular had worked hard to remain resilient beyond the outrageous besmirching by Donald Trump during the 2024 election campaign and further insults about Haiti delivered after he became the US president again.

Now it has been rocked to its foundation and is in existential fear because of court rulings on Thursday favoring the Trump administration that critics denounced as “advancing a white supremacist agenda”.

Just two weeks ago, many Haitians living in the small city between Dayton and Columbus were in buoyant mood and filled with hope, lifted by national sporting ambitions.

About 35 people had packed inside the small Keket restaurant to watch their national soccer team take on Scotland in the country’s first World Cup game for more than five decades. Two small TVs attached to speakers were set up on one side of the room.

There were children and several women, but a majority were young men. People exchanged greetings in Haitian creole. Beyond the counter, another half a dozen restaurant workers served food and huddled around a tiny screen watching the game.

Despite losing 1-0, the mood at Keket was jubilant. Haiti was on the world stage alongside all of the planet’s top soccer nations. It was a rare night of hope and joy.

All that changed within moments of the ruling on Thursday morning that means around 350,000 Haitians, and several thousands Syrians, in the US on Temporary Protected Status (TPS) could immediately find themselves targeted by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and deported.

“All of these people are going to have to run away or go somewhere, which I’m pretty sure is going to start tonight,” said Franky Pierre, from Jérémie in south-west Haiti, who came to the US on a boat with his family as far back as 1992, fleeing the aftermath of a military coup that saw the overthrow of president Jean-Bertrand Aristide.

He said that in conversations on his group chats, his Haitian friends with TPS status are planning on leaving.

“For Springfield, it’s going to hurt. When I came here, this area was dead. In this plaza, there are [now] seven Haitian businesses,” he said.

“I would say most of the owners are on TPS.”

The supreme court voted 6-3 to pause prior rulings by courts in New York and Washington DC that had temporarily stopped the Trump administration from ending TPS for Haitian and Syrian nationals in the US. Haitians were first eligible for TPS in 2010 following a major earthquake that killed up to 160,000 people and displaced several million more. Since then, it had been repeatedly extended as Haiti fell into the grip of violent gangs that now control much of the country.

As the wife of Springfield’s former mayor, Warren Copeland, Clara Copeland has seen first-hand how the national spotlight has upended life in her town.

During a vigil in front of Springfield city hall on Thursday evening, she was sitting on a step clinging to a small Haitian flag.

“It’s really emotional. There’s one [Haitian] family at my church; we’ve been so close. It’s just so wrong,” she said, fighting back tears.

“The Haitians came needing this place, they have jobs. This is going to hurt the schools, the boys’ soccer team at the high school [has a number of Haitian-born players].”

“It’s hateful, it’s wrong,” she said of the supreme court ruling. Of more recent arrivals to Springfield who were adapting to American life, she said: “They learned our language, they’re learning our customs, and now we’re telling them that they need to leave.”

Immigration advocates fear that the Trump administration wants to end TPS designations for most or all of the remaining countries on the shrinking list, now down to 17, regardless of how much danger there would be in people being forced to return to their native nation.

A comprehensive abolition of TPS would affect up to 1.3 million people currently staying legally in the US, which would amount to the largest de-documentation mission in US history.

The arrival of a large number of Haitians to Springfield, beginning in 2018 over a relatively short time, angered some residents. A crash outside the city in 2023 involving a legal Haitian immigrant who did not have a US driving license, that killed an 11-year-old boy, fueled online anger, from the far right in particular. Twelve months later, Trump falsely claimed immigrants in Springfield were eating residents’ pets, which drew bomb threats and white-supremacist marches to the city.

As a speaker talked in support of the local Haitian community outside city hall, a group of four people held 1776 ‘we the people’ American flags aloft at the back of the gathering. One woman in the group shouted out a claim that Haitians had falsified insurance cards.

Ohio’s Republican governor, Mike DeWine, meanwhile, called the court’s decision a “mistake”.

“The situation in Haiti could hardly be much worse. The violent gangs run most of the country. The government barely functions,” he said via a statement on Thursday. “And the economy is in shambles.”

DeWine and his wife run a school in Haiti that has closed intermittently due to the violence there.

While Springfield’s Clark county has thrived as Haitians moved in, since Trump won the 2024 election, local municipal tax intakes, property sales and manufacturing production have all declined. Some have linked this to thousands of Haitians, who worked in manufacturing and other blue-collar jobs, leaving the city. TPS was designated until 3 February last; now, in the long legal fight, Haitians have lost and can no longer be legally employed.

Amy Coney Barrett, one of the six justices who sided with the Trump administration, has a daughter she adopted from Haiti at the age of 14 months in the early 2000s, and a son she adopted in 2010 at the age of three, both from an orphanage in a suburb of Port-au-Prince, Haiti’s capital.

For Gene Barnett, who has lived in Springfield for most of his life and was handing out literature in support of Haitians at the vigil on Thursday night, Coney Barrett’s decision is devastating.

“She’s sending them all back to their deaths in Haiti,” he said.

“She should think of her children and all the children [now] going back to Haiti, how they’re going to be robbed and raped and killed. How is that empathy and compassion?”

Having come to Springfield in 2022 to work as a driver for Haitian workers who didn’t have a way of getting to and from work, Pierre, a permanent US resident, said he talks to friends and family in Haiti, where one in 10 people are homeless, every day.

“Whenever the gang members decide to do something, they just do it,” he said.

This month, an ill six-year-old US citizen and her parents were kidnapped in Port-au-Prince. More than 1.5 million people have been displaced in unrest in Haiti.

Pierre had planned to open a Caribbean store in Springfield, but now he’s canceled that idea. He says that whether Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) comes to Springfield or not, Haitians in the area are likely to leave en masse.

“If they are just cleared out like [Trump] is saying he is going to do, Springfield’s gone,” he says.

“There won’t be nobody here to come in.”