Un jour à la fois.
The French words for “one day at a time” echoed in the vestibule of Central Christian Church in Springfield, Ohio, last Sunday morning as the worship leader repeated the hymn’s chorus in a rich baritone. In the pews, Haitian men, women and children nodded and swayed in their suits and sweater dresses as they sang along, not only as people who agreed with the lyrics, but as people living them.
Any day now, a federal judge’s decision could determine whether life in America for many of them will be over.
Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem announced last year that the Trump administration would be revoking the temporary protected status that made it legal for many immigrants from Haiti and several other countries affected by natural disasters or political unrest to remain in the U.S.
The decision has been the subject of court battles ever since Noem’s announcement, the latest of which has left it to U.S. District Court Judge Ana C. Reyes to decide whether to suspend the expiration of the protected status for Haitians. Reyes is expected to issue her decision on Feb. 2.
Haitians in America on temporary protected status argue they are only here to escape political instability and gang violence in their home country. If the judge allows the status to expire, people in this city of 60,000 in western Ohio believe it will be one of the next places that Immigration Customs and Enforcement officials will conduct another round of mass deportations.
The city has been under intense scrutiny before. Both Haitians and Americans living in Springfield admit they were caught off guard during the 2024 presidential campaign, when then-vice presidential candidate JD Vance and former President Donald Trump amplified unfounded rumors of Haitian immigrants eating household pets. It made the city — home to an enclave of 15,000 Haitians — the subject of unwanted national attention.
This time, if ICE comes, they say they’ll be ready.
“We have no other choice,” said James Fleurijean, a board member of the Haitian Community Help & Support Center, a group established in 2023 to help Haitian children and families living in the area. “What’s going to happen is not in our hands, so we do what we can do, and then we wait.”
According to Springfield residents and published reports, Haitian migration to Springfield ramped up during the 2020 Covid pandemic. With low cost of living and opportunities for steady factory work, it was an attractive option for Haitians granted temporary protected status after Haiti’s devastating 2010 earthquake. In 2021, after the assassination of Haitian President Jovenel Moïse, the Biden administration extended temporary protected status to more people. Some of them by then had heard about Springfield through family and friends, and the population continued to grow.
Anti-Haitian sentiment in Springfield spread in 2023, after a Haitian driver, Hermanio Joseph, was arrested and charged in connection with a school bus crash that killed a young boy. When the cats and dogs claims came the next year, the town was under siege. Haitian parents kept their children home from school amid bomb threats. People were afraid to go to work.
Local leaders fought back. Business owners defended their Haitian employees, describing them as honest, diligent workers who buoyed the local economy. The city sued a neo-Nazi group it accused of harassing Haitians and stirring up hatred against them.
These days, fears of hate groups have given way to fears of deportation, and several charities and community groups from Springfield and neighboring towns have banded together to help their Haitian neighbors.
On Saturday, Jan. 10, a day before the church service and a community celebration honoring Haiti’s Independence Day, a group held a noon protest outside the Clark County Heritage Center in downtown Springfield. They picketed against the recent killing of Renee Nicole Good, the Minneapolis woman shot to death by an immigration officer.
After the protest, the group met at the home of a supporter to talk about how to observe ICE activity in case they come to town. Inside, volunteers stuffed pamphlets and green plastic whistles into sandwich bags on a table in a breakfast nook. On the kitchen counter, another hovered over several poster-sized sign up sheets with lists of items to buy to support Haitian families. As of last week, various charitable groups had gathered staples for more than 31,000 meals for Haitians in case they have to hunker down at home to avoid deportation.
Casey Rollins, a grandmother of seven who is the executive director of the local chapter of the Catholic charity St. Vincent de Paul, walked through the kitchen. She’s spent the past few months working with Haitian parents to get passports for their U.S.-born children so they won’t be separated if they are deported.
In the living room, a volunteer gave instructions on how observers should use their whistles. Three short whistles if they spot ICE agents in the area. Three long blasts if they’re detaining someone.
While the protesters met, Fleurijean and Viles Dorsainvil, the Haitian Community Help & Support Center’s executive director, had just arrived at Central Christian Church, where Dorsainvil also serves on the board of elders.
The two men, who both hold college degrees in international relations, recounted how they sat together and had a long conversation one day shortly after Hermanio Joseph’s 2023 arrest. He was ultimately sentenced to nine to 13 years in prison after a jury convicted him of involuntary manslaughter and vehicular homicide for the bus crash that killed 11-year-old Aiden Clark.
Dorsainvil, Fleurijean and others saw the case as a tragic accident. But because it stirred anti-Haitian sentiment among some Springfield residents, Haitians started to become scared to leave their homes. By the end of their talk, the men decided to establish the community center as a way primarily to support the Haitian youth in Springfield, but also to be a place where outsiders could find the voice of the Haitian community.
Since then, Dorsainvil and Fleurijean agree that some Haitians have left the area, many to Canada, but say they get calls almost weekly with more Haitians still hoping to move to Springfield.
To date, the two men have personally housed a couple of dozen Haitian immigrants temporarily until they had enough money to move out on their own. Haitians don’t go homeless in Springfield, the men say. If someone loses work and can’t pay their bills, they said, then another Haitian family takes them in.
Despite their gratitude for the support from Americans in Springfield, a key goal of their group is for Haitians to support Haitians. At a recent holiday food giveaway, they put the Haitian teens and young adults from their youth program to work as volunteer servers, politely declining offers of help from American charities.
Haitians in Springfield rarely ever get in trouble. But when they do, people like Dorsainvil and Fleurijean are there to help.
A few months ago, their phones rang with news that two young Haitian women had been arrested after they walked out of a local department store into the adjoining mall holding several clothing items. It turned out they had intended to buy the clothes. But it was the first time they had been to an American mall, and they thought they had to walk to the end of the mall to pay all at once for whatever items they wanted from the various stores.
Dorsainvil and Fleurijean stepped in to help the women resolve the case, though for a time they lost their work permits.
At the church on Saturday, Dorsainvil laughed with a group of young Haitian men playing basketball in the church’s rec center. It’s also where board members have previously brought in therapists to help the young people cope with the anxieties associated with deportation fears and the negative perceptions of Haitians. Then he checked on a group of young women, who were rehearsing a dance number for the next day’s Independence Day celebration.
Recently, someone came to the church and taped up a sign saying that if they didn’t “get the Haitians off our roads,” someone else would be hurt or killed, leaving blood on the hands of the church’s pastor, Carl Ruby, and other supporters of the Haitian community.
“People do sometimes ask why we look so calm,” Dorsainvil said. “And for a lot of us, we have been through so much back home, and been through so much just to get here, that this is nothing compared to that.”
Even so, the pressure is mounting.
Reports have surfaced over the past several weeks that U.S. government officials have canceled the swearing-in ceremonies for Haitians and others who have gone through all the necessary processes and passed tests to become naturalized U.S.citizens. And the Trump administration is moving to revoke temporarily protected status for immigrants from Somalia, Ethiopia and other nations.
If the judge extends the status for Haitians, some will still have to scramble to find new jobs. New requirements prohibiting nonpermanent residents from getting or renewing commercial driver’s licenses, for example, will mean that many truck drivers currently in the country under the status in states like Ohio will no longer be able to do that kind of work.
This week, Dorsainvil traveled with Ruby to speak at an evangelical church forum in Orlando about their plans to support the Haitian community in case the protected status expires. Before he became the pastor of the church 13 years ago, Ruby worked with a faith-based advocacy group for immigrants, not knowing his church would later become a sanctuary for Haitians.
Now, his church has become a hub of friendship among Haitians and Americans. Over the weekend’s festivities, Haitian and American parents held each other’s babies. In a free English class for native Creole speakers, a Haitian father laughed with one of the teachers, a local middle school teacher who had taught both of his children, about how his Americanized son just waves hello when he comes home from school instead of coming up to hug him and shake his hand as is customary in traditional Haitian households.
Several miles away, at a Haitian restaurant in town, Marjory Wentworth clasped a hand over her heart as she talked about Jacques Adler, who in less than a year has become a close friend. Wentworth moved to Springfield in 2023 after 17 years as South Carolina’s poet laureate. In the 1980s, she worked as a refugee resettlement worker and, among other assignments, became the legal liaison for families of Haitian refugees at the Brooklyn Navy Yard’s detention center. She and her husband, Peter, had no idea there were Haitians in Springfield until they moved here and heard people speaking Creole in the grocery stores and laundromats.
Wentworth and Adler, a fellow poet and former journalist from Haiti, met through mutual friends on a text thread and started working as collaborators. Once, when they were supposed to meet to work on a poem, Adler canceled at the last minute. His wife, afraid of anti-Haitian sentiment, didn’t want him to leave the house.
“Every time I call Jacques and I don’t hear back from him, I think something has happened to him,” Wentworth said. “That’s how all of us [with Haitian friends] feel right now.”
At the Independence Day celebration at the church the next day, the two of them teamed up to recite French and English versions of Adler’s poem, “The Former Island.”
The event also included songs and two solos from Harriet Joseph, a Haitian Springfield resident who, on the night before her performance, was one of a couple hundred people who crammed into the indoor soccer field at the town’s Shamrock Recreation Center.
There, a team of young Haitian men were capping an undefeated season in a local soccer league with a championship game. With five minutes left in the second half, the Haitian team was down 3-2.
Their coach, Dominique Plesume, could see the frustration in his players’ eyes as they looked at him. A former soccer coach in his hometown of Jacmel, Haiti, Plesume began coming to the games in Springfield as a spectator. He stepped in as coach after giving the guys a few pointers.
The Haitian team scored another goal, tying the game. Then, with just 23 seconds left, one of the players kicked a shot that caught the other team’s goalie off guard and won the game. The fans in the rec center, including Dorsainvil, jumped to their feet and cheered.
At that moment, Haitians in Springfield soaked in a small victory with hope of more to come when the judge renders her decision.
“Whooo, I was worried,” Harriet Joseph said as she stood just outside the plexiglass-encased field. “I don’t know what I would have done if we lost. But we won. We won, and that’s what matters.”