SPRINGFIELD, Ohio — Requesting meetings with local law enforcement officials. Chatting up state legislators at the supermarket about restrictive immigration measures. Coming up with a list of questions for the local jail about capacity and transportation to other facilities.
For months now, faith-based and secular groups in Springfield have marshalled thousands of volunteers in an attempt to mitigate the worst local impacts of a potential mass deportation event that could result in hundreds of thousands of family separations across the country.
Now, the volunteers’ efforts are entering a new phase as they brace for the overlapping impacts of looming a U.S. Supreme Court decision and a suite of Republican-sponsored, state-level anti-immigration measures that have the potential to once again upend day-to-day life in this city of 60,000, where as many as one in six residents is Haitian.
Ahead of oral arguments at the Supreme Court on Wednesday, some two dozen residents of Springfield and nearby communities recently gathered at a local church to start sketching the next phase of their plan to protect their immigrant neighbors. “I wouldn’t necessarily call this downtime,” said Kristin Monroe, who helped organize the session and is a leader with the local faith-based coalition G92, but “a good time to get people proactively working toward pushing back against legislation that will make everything worse.”
The case before the nation’s highest court asks the justices to decide whether the Trump administration had the right to let Temporary Protected Status, or TPS, for Haiti expire. TPS is a country-specific designation for immigrants who cannot safely return to their home countries due to natural disaster, civil war or political unrest; some 350,000 Haitians are legally living and working in the United States under this designation. (The brother of a prominent Haitian pastor in Springfield is one of the plaintiffs in the case.)
Federal courts rebuffed President Donald Trump’s efforts to end the program early. Now the justices will decide whether the administration had the right to let TPS expire at all, given that conditions in Haiti have only deteriorated since the country first received the designation after a devastating earthquake there in 2010.
A favorable ruling from the Supreme Court is Haitians’ best hope of remaining in the country legally during Trump’s presidency. There is a bill gaining traction in the U.S. House to extend TPS for Haiti, but it is unlikely to become law. In the Ohio legislature, Republican lawmakers, like those in many states, have introduced restrictive immigration bills that would create new categories of legal offenses for immigrants without legal status and make it more difficult for others to assist them.
For nearly two years now, Springfield has been on edge, waiting to find out the fates of the thousands of Haitian immigrants who now call the area home. The city was thrust into the national spotlight during the 2024 presidential election campaign, when Trump and now-Vice President JD Vance, who was then representing Ohio in the U.S. Senate and grew up just an hour away, amplified misinformation that Haitians in Springfield were eating their neighbors’ pets. Neo-Nazi and white supremacist groups marched in the city’s streets and bomb threats temporarily shuttered area schools. The city sued one such group, Blood Tribe, over threats directed at local officials.
After Trump was elected, hundreds of Springfield residents began to mobilize to blunt what they anticipated could be the gravest impact on their immigrant neighbors: being separated from their children.
Springfield Neighbors United, which describes itself as an ad-hoc group of volunteers with “love thy neighbor” values, filed a friend-of-the-court brief in the Supreme Court case, noting that in recent years, approximately 1,500 children have been born to Haitian parents in the Springfield area. These children are U.S. citizens but often do not have the necessary passports and documentation to accompany their parents outside the country. If a family separation is triggered by immigration officials picking up a parent, or these children are intentionally left behind in the United States for safety reasons, they will not have the legal arrangements in place for family members or friends to make basic caregiving decisions for them.
“The termination of the Haiti TPS designation threatens to separate over a thousand U.S.-born children of Haitian parents if ICE’s [Immigrations and Custom Enforcement] threats of mass deportation efforts come to pass,” the friend-of-the-court brief states. “ICE’s threats of mass immigration arrests will ensure the separation of those children from their parents if the parents lose lawful status. An influx of hundreds of children into Ohio foster care would exacerbate a system that is already overwhelmed as a result of the opioid crisis. Further, DHS [Department of Homeland Security] poses no alternative solution or plan to assist Haitian families with obtaining U.S. passports so the children can reunite with parents.”
Volunteers in Springfield have helped hundreds of Haitian immigrant parents secure passports for their U.S.-born children — but it is still only a fraction of the paperwork that would need to be done to make sure all area citizen children are able to leave the country. Fewer Haitian parents have set up the legal arrangements necessary to have friends or family step in if their citizen children remain in the United States after they leave, according to local organizations involved in the effort.
Community organizations are also trying to keep up with an increased need among Haitian families for assistance with making rent and mortgage payments. Many Haitian workers have lost jobs or had their hours cut since the TPS designation lapsed in early February. Though a federal judge indefinitely delayed the program’s end, prompting the Trump administration’s appeal to the Supreme Court, employers became wary about relying on workers who could, at a moment’s notice, lose their legal ability to work. Pastor Carl Ruby, whose Central Christian Church has long supported area Haitian immigrants and holds services in Haitian Creole, told The 19th that since February, his congregation has put together at least $8,000 in housing assistance.
Ruby was at the recent training, shuttling back and forth from his own church to update participants about the recent bipartisan effort on the bill to extend TPS for Haitians in Congress. He explained that even if the legislation passed the House, it would need to overcome the 60-vote filibuster in the Senate.
“Then it has to have President Trump’s signature, which it’s never going to get. So this is a symbolic act — it’s not an act that provides any real hope for Haitian people,” Ruby told participants as he stood at the front of the nave.
“The long-term solution is electing a different president,” he added.
Ruby explained that the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement strategy seemed to be shifting from a show of force, as the country saw in Minneapolis, to implementing policy changes that make it more difficult for even legal immigrants to stay here. One of these changes is prohibiting TPS and asylum seekers from holding commercial driver’s licenses. The administration’s strategy shift will likely require increased coordination between federal, state and local law enforcement agencies and governments.
The quartet of bills in the Ohio legislature that attendees were at the training to discuss would, among other things, block non-cooperation policies between local and federal law enforcement, create a new state-level felony for unlawful presence in Ohio, require hospitals to allow immigration-enforcement activity and make obstructing a federal immigration arrest or detention a third-degree felony.
“I want to know if thousands of people at the flip of a switch become felons in the state of Ohio, what does that mean for enforcement? How do they plan to enforce that? How will that stretch the limits of our legal system as it exists right now? And how do they plan to identify and come after those individuals?” one participant asked.
Designated notetakers wrote down these questions and those asked by other attendees. Then, the group identified the leaders they wanted to speak to in the community and who might have access to them. “I run into him at the grocery store,” a woman offered about a local state representative.
“The ‘hurry up and wait’ that we’ve been experiencing at least since last August — I don’t want it to distract us from the fact that there’s a lot of legislation being proposed in Ohio that we cannot just quietly get passed,” Monroe said.
“This is our opportunity, while things are a little bit quieter,” she added.