Miami’s Haitian Community Braces for Deportations

The first documented arrival of Haitian refugees in South Florida was in 1972, when a wooden sailboat, the Saint Sauveur, ran aground off the coast of Pompano Beach, carrying sixty-five asylum seekers fleeing the ruthless dictatorship of Jean-Claude Duvalier. Many Haitian families settled in Lemon City, one of Miami’s oldest settlements, developed in the late 1800s and, at the time, largely populated by Bahamian lemon workers. As more Haitians arrived in the region in the 1970s and 1980s, they opened businesses, churches, markets and cultural centers. Viter Juste, a businessman and activist often called the father of Miami’s Haitian community, coined the neighborhood’s name in the early 1980s, and it stuck.

Today in Little Haiti, a seven-foot bronze statue of Toussaint Louverture, one of the leaders of the Haitian Revolution, stands in a small square known as the City of Miami Freedom Garden. The square sits across the street from a gas station and bakery, surrounded by rows of modest homes, some purchased decades ago by newly arrived Haitian immigrants, before gentrification began to reshape the neighborhood. Since the statue’s installation in 2005, three years after I moved to Miami, and a little over a year after the bicentennial of Haitian independence, the place has become a neighborhood gathering place. On January 1, Haiti’s Independence Day, people stop to take photos while neighborhood churches and neighbors share bowls of joumou soup“freedom soup”, consumed to commemorate this day. Some afternoons, elders sit on the green benches surrounding the statue to talk or look at the neighborhood, as they once might have done from their porches in Haiti. Every now and then a group of tourists passes by, led by a tour guide dressed in traditional blue denim. Karabela shirt and straw hat, stopping to look at the Haitian and American flags perched on high flagpoles, before reading the English translation of Louverture’s most famous statement, at the foot of the statue: “By overthrowing me, you have cut the trunk of the tree of freedom for blacks in Santo Domingo. It will grow back from its roots because there are many of them and they go deep into the ground.”

On January 12, at the base of the statue, a group of elected officials and community members gathered to commemorate the 7.0 magnitude earthquake that struck Haiti in 2010, killing more than two hundred thousand people and displacing 1.5 million. The event has been held annually for fifteen years, but this year the proceedings were more somber, which the overcast sky seemed to reflect. On February 3, the Trump administration is preparing to end the Temporary Protected Status (TPS) of Haitians in the United States, thereby exposing some three hundred and thirty thousand men, women and children to the risk of deportation. TPS, granted to certain immigrant populations when conditions in their home countries make safe return impossible, does not provide a path to citizenship but gives recipients the crucial opportunity to work legally in the United States and, in many states, obtain a driver’s license. After the 2010 earthquake, Haitian community leaders successfully appealed to the Obama administration for TPS, and it has since been extended. Under Donald Trump, however, several countries with TPS status, including Venezuela and Somalia, have recently had their designations terminated, and Haiti’s status is in limbo as a crucial lawsuit in U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., challenges the Trump administration’s decision to revoke it. During hearings in early January, presiding Judge Ana C. Reyes questioned the government’s assertion that it would be safe to return to Haiti, pointing to the fact that the FAA has restricted civilian flights over the capital Port-au-Prince and that the State Department has warned against travel to Haiti. Reyes’ decision is expected on February 2, a day before the TPS designation for Haitians expires.

According to the UN, Haiti is facing one of the worst humanitarian crises in the world. Since the assassination of President Jovenel Moïse in 2021, armed groups have taken control of large parts of the capital and its surroundings, terrorizing civilians and causing the displacement of 1.4 million people, including seven hundred and forty-one thousand children. My friends and family members moved from neighborhood to neighborhood to escape the violence. Some had to abandon their homes, with all their belongings still inside, only to later discover that those homes had been burned to the ground. Displaced families often spend weeks, sometimes months, in makeshift housing, including in public squares and deserted government buildings, while children lose months or even years of education as schools close or become inaccessible due to gang activity. Sexual violence against women and girls is on the rise as a tool of control by gangs. Five million seven hundred thousand Haitians, almost half the population, now face high levels of food insecurity. Since the assassination of Moïse, Haiti no longer has any elected officials. The country’s interim governing body, the Presidential Transitional Council, is mired in infighting and allegations of corruption, and although its mandate expires on February 7, it has yet to reach a consensus on who will lead the country or what form the next government will take.