‘There Are No People’: Springfield Counts The Cost After Haitians Lose Protected Status

The Washington Post’s front-page report from Springfield, Ohio, is about absence. Haitian residents who worked in the city’s warehouses and factories and shopped in its stores are, in the Post’s account, staying home or leaving — and the city is feeling it in both directions at once: employers losing workers, businesses losing customers. “There are no people,” the Post’s headline quotes.

The legal road here is short to state. Temporary Protected Status for Haiti covered an estimated 350,000 people nationally. On June 25, the Supreme Court ruled 6–3 that the administration could end the designation; it formally expired on July 27, and federal guidance then told employers that work permits issued under TPS were no longer valid. The administration’s position throughout: Haiti no longer meets the statutory conditions for the program, and TPS was never meant to be a permanent residence.

In Springfield, the enforcement has been visible since the summer. ICE has arrested Haitians in the city, some of them traveling to or from work; a Homeland Security official, Markwayne Mullin, put the Springfield arrests at 380 as of early September. The Post has been reporting the story in the city for weeks — including the funeral, on October 4, of Pierre Damas Bel, a 20-year-old Haitian student at Wright State who died after losing his protected status, which was attended by Gov. Mike DeWine and Mayor Robert Rue.

What the Post documents now is the arithmetic of a workforce leaving a city that had rebuilt around it — shifts unfilled, registers quieter, and a community deciding, household by household, whether to wait indoors or go.

Sources: The Washington Post; Washington Examiner.