A special thanks to Donald Trump, Congressional allies for abandoning your loved ones needing special care. More than 350,000 immigrants’ legal status is set to expire today
The Supreme Court’s June 25 ruling allowing the Trump administration to terminate TPS for Haiti and Syria is set to upend the lives of hundreds of thousands of our immigrant neighbors – and the many sick and elderly Americans who depend on them to survive.
Experts say that stripping legal work status from hundreds of thousands of healthcare workers and “deporting Haitian TPS recipients will have a catastrophic impact on the nationwide healthcare workforce crisis — a workforce that is hugely dependent on immigrant labor,” as NPR noted following the court’s unjust decision. Approximately 103,000 Haitian immigrants in particular work as health and home care workers across the country, and emergency rooms, senior care facilities, and patients will be left facing a crisis when work authorization for these skilled and dedicated essential workers expires today, July 27.
The fallout from this healthcare disaster was completely avoidable. The Trump administration could have chosen a different path but instead created a self-inflicted crisis that will be particularly felt in Florida. Half of the nation’s 350,000 Haitian TPS holders live in the state, and roughly 35,000 of these community members, such as Nina, work as nurses or home health aides, Mother Jones reports.
‘JEOPARDIZE ACCESS TO CARE’ ACROSS THE COUNTRY
The certified nursing assistant, who has lived in the U.S. since an earthquake devastated Haiti in 2010, recalled that during the worst of the pandemic, “when visits from family and friends were cancelled, she held the hands of patients on their deathbeds,” the report said. “Sometimes you get people who don’t have family or friends,” Nina said. “We are their family.”
FHCA, Florida’s largest nursing home association representing nearly 700 facilities, noted in a letter to the administration that the loss of these essential workers has the “potential to destabilize an already fragile long term care workforce and jeopardize access to care for countless nursing home and assisted living residents,” both in Florida and across the U.S. The letter urges officials to consider eldercare shortages and “allow affected individuals to pursue available lawful immigration pathways without abrupt interruption of employment.”
Unfortunately, immigrants with legal status and their employers have already been experiencing an interruption of employment due to administration policy. In California, Channing House has already lost DACA-protected workers due to intentional processing delays. Now the facility is also facing the loss of workers who hold TPS, The New York Times reports.
TOTAL DISBELIEF; ILLOGICAL ACTION
“Many residents expressed disbelief and outrage at the possibility that their caregivers, immigrants who have lived in the United States for the better part of their lives, could soon be forced to leave,” the report said. Lou Thompson, who lives at Channing House with his wife, Alice, is one of them. “What can be done, and who are we going to ask to do it?” he asked.
There’s simply no logic in rounding up and deporting a dedicated worker like Gloria Castellanos, a TPS holder who serves as director of dining at Channing House. With two decades of experience at the senior living facility under her belt, she knows every resident’s dietary requirements off the top of her head. That kind of knowledge and compassion simply can’t be replaced tomorrow.
“I just want the opportunity to keep working,” she told The New York Times. “If one of these days you don’t see me, you’ll know what happened.”
Her fears are not unfounded. ICE is reportedly set to ramp up abductions in areas including Springfield, Ohio, and U.S. officials have already told the Haitian government to expect multiple deportation flights carrying hundreds of delegalized Haitian contributors every single week once their protections have been fully revoked, The Haitian Times reports.
“The U.S. Embassy informed us that there will be weekly deportation flights carrying a total of 250 or more Haitian migrants back to the country,” Jean Négot Bonheur Delva, director general of Haiti’s National Office of Migration, told the outlet. “At that pace, he said, Haiti could receive roughly 1,000 deportees every month from the U.S.,” the report noted.
Many of those who risk being sent to certain violence by the U.S. could be its own citizens – 50,000 American citizen children have at least one parent who is a Haitian TPS holder. We know from our recent history that not even American children stricken with cancer have been safe from being deported from their own country.
Other Haitian contributors, including a nurse in Kentucky, “are making preparations to leave their children, who are U.S. citizens, behind if they are sent away,” Spectrum News reports. The nurse “said she’s trying to focus on her work taking care of disabled people. But it’s hard to not think of the worst-case scenario, imagining being separated from her children, who are ages 13, 12, 8, and 2, and being sent to her home country that she left more than two decades ago. She reads in the news that there are gang wars, kidnappings, killings.”
CONGRESSIONAL HYPOCRITES HAVE TO ANSWER FOR THEIR ACTIONS
Healthcare workers will be at heightened risk in areas like Miami, which in recent months has seen more ICE abductions than any other area of the country. “Here at home in South Florida, Haitian TPS holders are part of the backbone of our workforce, especially in critical sectors like healthcare,” said Republican Rep. María Elvira Salazar, who represents a part of the area in Congress. “This is not theoretical for us. When people cannot safely return, Congress has a responsibility to act.”
But that call to her colleagues falls empty when looking at the record. This past summer, Salazar voted to hand Donald Trump and Stephen Miller’s mass deportation agenda another $70 billion in funding, with no strings attached. TPS holders were already being unjustly detained. Should they lose this status entirely, they will be entirely vulnerable under a mass deportation agenda reinvigorated thanks to a critical vote from Salazar.
Hundreds of thousands of long-settled immigrants – and the Americans who depend on them – will now be paying the price of that vote.
“People who run nursing homes, chronic care hospitals and home care agencies, they are all saying this is a crisis,” Dr. Steffie Woolhandler, a distinguished professor of public health at City University of New York’s Hunter College, told The 19th. “There has long been a shortage of folks who are willing to do direct care work as nursing aides, and there’s still a shortage now, so of course if the U.S. deports them all it’s just going to make it worse.”
