Airports, nursing homes and schools brace for disruption without Haitian workers

The Department of Homeland Security alerted employers this week that it had officially ended humanitarian protections for 350,000 Haitian immigrants, triggering mass layoffs that threaten to disrupt summer travel and destabilize an array of essential institutions and industries up and down the East Coast and across the Midwest.

Nursing homes terminated hundreds of workers, including nursing assistants, dietary aides and housekeepers, industry and union leaders said. At airports including those in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, and Boston, contractors terminated scores of Haitian workers, including janitors, cabin cleaners and wheelchair attendants, according to union leaders at Service Employees International Union 32BJ.

At Florida schools, landscapers, bus drivers and other staff were fired. And in New York City, dozens of security guards were terminated only to be rehired because of confusion around their eligibility to continue working, union officials said.

The tumult comes about a month after the U.S. Supreme Court granted the Trump administration permission to cancel the humanitarian program, known as temporary protected status (TPS), potentially stripping permission to live and work in the United States from as many as 1.3 million immigrants from Haiti, Syria and a dozen other countries.

The high court said the program for Haitians, one of the largest groups affected, could end on Monday. But attorneys for Haitian TPS holders said the protections should remain in effect until a lower court that had blocked the Trump administration from ending the program formally recognizes the Supreme Court decision.

In response to a question about the status of TPS for Haitians, a DHS spokesperson said in a statement that “activist lower court judges are openly defying the Supreme Court on this, but the end result will be the same. Haitians with TPS cannot and will not be able to stay.”

Earlier this week, DHS informed employers that it considered the “Haiti TPS designation … terminated, effective” immediately, and businesses have been laying workers off ever since.

The DHS spokesperson added that “Temporary Protected Status is exactly that -temporary.” “For too long, TPS has been allowed to function as a de facto amnesty program despite Congress never intending it to be permanent,” the spokesperson said.

Geoffrey Pipoly, who represented the Haitians at the Supreme Court, accused the administration of sowing confusion instead of winding down TPS provisions in an orderly way.

“What we’ve seen from [the administration’s] behavior in the past month … is that they are trying to create conditions that are just not worth it for employers to keep people employed,” Pipoly said.

Food service, retail, warehousing, health care and long-term elder care are expected to be pummeled in some cities where many Haitian TPS holders have lived legally for more than a decade. The Obama administration first granted TPS to Haitians in 2010, after a major earthquake destabilized the country, killing hundreds of thousands of people.

“We do think the Supreme Court decision is going to decimate industries that people really count on because they’re largely serviced by immigrants. That’s true of airports,” said Roxana Rivera, assistant to the president at SEIU 32BJ, which represents cleaners, security guards and airport personnel on the East Coast. “It’s going to be much more difficult to fill these essential jobs.”

As the firings rippled through cities such as Miami and New York and smaller cities such as Columbus, Ohio and Allentown, Pennsylvania, newly unemployed Haitians frantically lined up care for their children, downsized into single-room rentals and sheltered in place, fearing a new wave of immigration enforcement focused on their community, advocates said.

On Monday evening, Haitian workers at Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood Airport burst into tears as they were asked to turn in their badges. Marlene, 47, a single mother who has worked as an airport janitor for 12 years, said she has been sick to her stomach.

“I am panicking. I can’t eat. I can’t sleep,” said Marlene, who spoke on the condition that she be identified by first name only. “My kid is wondering if he goes to school, will I be there when he comes home?”

The Broward County Aviation Department, which operates the airport, did not respond to questions about the status of impacted employees. But the department said 132 Haitian TPS holders worked there as of Monday, and that contractors who employ them have “‘uninterrupted service’ clauses to ensure continuity of operations.”

Helene O’Brien, the Florida director of SEIU 32BJ, said the union has lost at least 140 other workers, mostly janitors, due to previous Trump immigration policies.

Some TPS holders from Haiti are seeking new protections, including under asylum law, while others are holding out hope for litigation or legislation that could change the fate of the program — though experts say that is unlikely.

White House Homeland Security Adviser Stephen Miller has said that Haitians who lose status should be deported: “It’d be crazy for us to say that Haitians couldn’t live in Haiti. It’s their country,” he told reporters last month.

Opponents of the terminations say Haiti is not safe and warn that the expulsion of 200,000 working Haitian TPS holders from the labor force will lead to declines in economic activity and tax revenue in local economies.

Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine (R) told CBS News this week that Haitians helped revive the city of Springfield, where Trump falsely accused Haitian immigrants of eating cats and dogs during the 2024 presidential campaign. DeWine called the decision to end TPS a “mistake.”

“These are people who have helped Springfield really come back,” DeWine said. “The Haitians … came there because there were jobs that were not being filled by other people.”

In the days leading up to the cancellation, powerful business groups pushed the administration to delay implementation of the Supreme Court ruling and establish a pathway for workers to regain legal status. The National Restaurant Association and the Florida Health Care Association were among several trade groups that sent letters to DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin warning of looming operational disruptions.

“Many affected employees are long-serving, legally authorized workers who are central to restaurant operations,” the National Restaurant Association said in a letter to Mullin. “Their departure could remove a substantial share of the local hospitality workforce overnight.”

This month, Sen. Ed Markey (D-Massachusetts) introduced legislation to restore TPS for Haitians, warning the nation would otherwise face “a health care disaster.”

Some nursing homes have cut ties with scores of employees in recent days, while others have downsized. One facility in Staten Island, New York, raised its sign-on bonus from $2,000 to $6,000 to attract workers, while others shut down building wings and took beds offline. Still others explored recruiting replacement workers from high schools, said Katie Sloan, president of LeadingAge, an association of nonprofit aging service providers.

“To lose that many employees in one fell swoop is incredibly disruptive,” Sloan said. “And it’s destructive to the residents who have been close to these caregivers for years.”

Augustine, 30, is among those who stand to lose protective status. She and her mother fled Port-au-Prince after the 2010 earthquake destroyed their home.

Now Augustine — who spoke on the condition that she be identified only by first name — is a caregiver at Cabrini of Westchester, a 304-bed nursing home overlooking the Hudson River in Dobbs Ferry, New York. Most mornings, she is the first person to greet nine residents, waking them, bathing them, brushing their teeth and helping some eat breakfast and use the bathroom. Most of their families don’t visit regularly, she said; one calls her “my daughter.”

When she contemplates leaving her job, Augustine — whose shifts were canceled this week in anticipation of her work permit expiring — worries about these residents. But she said she would rather leave on her own terms than have immigration agents knocking on her door, so she and her mother have decided to begin packing as soon as the loss of her work permit is clear.

Asked if she had any parting words, Augustine said: “Thank you, America.”

In Florida, where nearly half of Haitian TPS holders reside, the Palm Beach County School District laid off nearly 20 Haitian workers, including bus drivers, janitors and cafeteria workers, school district and union officials said. “All School District employees must be legally authorized to work in the United States,” Steven King, a Palm Beach County School District spokesperson, said in a statement.

Afifa Khaliq, president of the SEIU Florida Public Services Union, which represents those workers, said she has been having conversations “that you would never want to have with a parent,” telling them to “make a plan so that your children can at least stay in safe environments while you may have to go back to Haiti."

One 58-year-old Haitian woman with TPS in West Palm Beach, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because she fears being targeted by ICE, was fired from two full-time jobs this week. A single mother, she worked as both as a certified nursing assistant in a senior living facility and at a separate job in medical records, to pay for her two kids’ college tuition.

“I can’t plan ahead for this news. We live paycheck-to-paycheck,” said the woman, who has been in the United States since the 2010 earthquake.

“There is nowhere to go in Haiti,” she said, adding: “There are gangs living in my house in Port-au-Prince.”