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With the Trump administration recently announcing the end of Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for tens of thousands of Haitians currently living here, “the prospect of leaving the U.S. is ‘traumatic,’” according to the president of the Chicago-based Haitian American Lawyers Association of Illinois. The administration has given 50,000 Haitians until July 2019 to sort out their legal status or leave, but there are few options to gain permanent residency, or they would have done it already. Among this community, “the state of panic is real”:
One young Haitian woman with protected status who spoke to the Tribune said she came to Chicago at age 12 with her younger sister, two months after the earthquake made her family home uninhabitable. The young woman, now 20, who asked that her name not be used, said she is worried about her future and doesn’t want to go back.
“I’ve been going to school here for almost half my life. It’s like my new home now,” said the woman, who said she is working to put herself through college, where she is studying psychology. Going back to Haiti “would basically be like I’m starting over again,” she said.
The woman said she knows she won’t finish her psychology degree by July 2019 and hopes the government will extend protected status for her and her sister, who is in high school. She said she’ll need to find a job once she arrives in Haiti, which is not an easy task in the country.
The program was implemented decades ago for people whose home countries have been affected by “environmental disasters, ongoing armed conflicts or other circumstances have made it too dangerous for them to return home.” When it comes to Haiti, advocates have said that conditions have not improved enough yet to merit the repatriation of tens of thousands of people, but the administration refused to listen. “There is no work in their country,” said Ludovic Comeau Jr., an associate professor at DePaul University. “So then, if you bring back (those living under protected status in America), it’s a disaster."
Numerous legislators have introduced bipartisan legislation to address not just Haitian TPS recipients, but the estimated 300,000 TPS recipients overall who face uncertain futures in the United States. “This is not the time to send all these people back to Haiti,” said Farah Larrieux, an activist who has lived in the U.S. for 13 years now. “We know that situation is not getting better.” Larrieux urged outraged Americans to use this as “an opportunity to put pressure on Congress to find a pathway to citizenship. They have to act now.”