In a matter of weeks, everything changed. A trip to the grocery store. Going to Mass. Meeting with recent arrivals from her native Haiti, or asking them to meet her. It all suddenly feels too risky for Farah Larrieux.
Now that Donald Trump has returned to the Oval Office with a compliant Congress and what he sees as a mandate to purge the nation of an untold number of immigrants like herself, Larrieux only goes where she absolutely must. Work, then home. Drive slowly. Mind the speed limit, Larrieux, reminds herself. This is no time to attract any unwanted attention in South Florida.
“I knew in November that there would be trying and exhausting times ahead,” said Larrieux, a 45-year-old Haitian immigrant living in the United States legally under the terms of the Temporary Protected Status [TPS] program. “But this, this is much more than that.”
In the month since Donald Trump became president, Larrieux’s life in South Florida has become smaller. It’s constrained, awkward, and fearful. And although she lives in the United States with a temporary authorization set to expire or be renewed next year, it’s clear to her that things have changed. Just one thing could put her in contact with Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers now operating under a quota imposed by Trump officials. It calls for at least 1,200 immigrant detentions a day.
For the estimated 5.29 million Black migrants living in the United States, the risk of detention and deportation is particularly high because many Black American communities already face intense scrutiny by law enforcement. Also, the Trump administration’s apparent disregard for protected immigrant status designations, something granted to migrants from Haiti and five African countries, puts them at greater risk. Not only that, experts say, but the role of bias and anti-Black bigotry also adds another dimension to the gravity of the current threats and policy changes for even the 3.29 million Black immigrants who have become U.S. citizens.
“The deportations and the detentions, when it comes to Black immigrants, are and have long been disproportionate,” said Christina Greer, an associate professor of political science at Fordham University and author of the book Black Ethnics: Race, Immigration, and the Pursuit of the American Dream.
The numbers tell the tale. In 2019, the most recent year for which detailed estimates of the nation’s immigrant population are available, about 12% of Black immigrants lived in the United States without authorization, compared to about 23% of the total immigrant population, said Valerie Lacarte, a senior policy analyst at the Migration Policy Institute. Yet, researchers have found that Black immigrants are more likely than others to be detained, held in custody without the option of release while awaiting immigration court proceedings, offered release in exchange for higher bonds, and ultimately ordered out of the country.
Immigrants, like most Americans, live in largely segregated communities, Greer said. That means Black immigrants are, like other Black Americans, more likely to live in communities in which they are more often surveilled or subjected to police searches and inquiries. A full 76% of Black immigrants deported from the United States between 2016 and 2021 had some form of contact with police or the criminal justice system, according to a 2022 analysis of public records and calls made to an immigrant help line. The analysis was released by Freedom for Immigrants, an immigrant advocacy organization that opposes immigrant detention. Among the most frequent forms of contact: a traffic stop.
It’s not quite the picture of immigrant enforcement focused on surgically removing violent or dangerous criminals from the United States that many Trump supporters, including some immigrants, anticipated during the election. In fact, three other Black immigrants contacted by Capital B — one of them undocumented — expressed grave concerns about their ability to remain in the United States during the second Trump term, and they fear that speaking with reporters would hasten their removal. This time around, Trump clearly wants him gone, said one Nigerian living in Boston.
“I think at this point we’ve all heard and seen the stories, the immigrants who were not worried or, in my case, had conversations with people, immigrants, who were excited about the possibility that Trump would be reelected,” said Larrieux. “But I can tell you that the Trump so many people seemed to like, to support, wasn’t quite the Trump who served before or the Trump we see in office now.”
The end of “protected status”
During his first term, Trump had described his disgust for an immigration policy proposal that would have, Trump reportedly said, required the U.S. to admit people from “shithole” countries such as Haiti or Nigeria rather than his preference, Norway. Even before that commentary, Trump had ended TPS for Haitians, a move that could have required at least 59,000 people, including Larrieux, to leave the country in 2019.
Larrieux joined a group of TPS holders from Haiti, Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Sudan who sued the first Trump administration when it ended TPS for people from those countries in 2017 and 2018. The Haitian Times, a U.S.-based newspaper, described Larrieux as one of the faces of Haitian TPS, a brave combatant for many others desperate to remain inside the United States.
Larrieux first came to Florida in 2004 when a coup toppled the government of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, and has seemed to leave the nation largely unmoored in the decades since.
In South Florida, Larrieux made friends. She reconnected with others who left the island before her. She set up a marketing company and a Creole-language YouTube channel and began posting the kind of content — information of use to her community — she’d once been known for back home. She found a community of like-minded Haitians and Haitian Americans, many of them operating small businesses of their own. She reconnected with long-time family friends.
After unsuccessfully applying for a green card — an immigration official wrongly believed Larrieux married her now ex-husband in an immigration rouse — Larrieux won temporary protective status as part of a humanitarian effort by the Obama administration to further assist Haitian migrants already in the United States after the island’s devastating 2010 earthquake.
Larrieux said that she views the current push by the Trump administration as yet another challenge to her beloved and beleaguered homeland.
“The United States and much of Europe — particularly France and its audacious demand for a massive payment from Haiti for the permanent emancipation of the slaves — has done everything possible to destabilize Haiti for centuries now,” Larrieux said.
It is difficult to argue with her.
Historians note that Haiti and its people have essentially been punished, economically constrained, and, with varying degrees of success, politically controlled or interfered with ever since the island’s enslaved people overthrew their French colonial slaveholders in the 1790s.
A $60 million franc payment demanded by France (more than $28 billion today) and interest on loans taken to make the payment remained a part of Haiti’s financial reality until 1947. The situation left Haiti with few resources for infrastructure, public education, or other essentials. The island nation needed help from the international community, help that often came with political and economic terms which were not always beneficial to Haiti.
In 2021, Jovenel Moïse, the island’s president, was assassinated, and the situation in Haiti has only worsened. Heavily armed gangs — many with weapons smuggled from the United States — dominate the country. The U.S. State Department has put Haiti on its “do not travel” list, “due to kidnapping, crime, civil unrest, and limited health care.”
Sporadic violence in the country has grown so intense that in January, The New York Times reported that 300,000 children are unable to attend school. And, a CIA World Factbook analysis of the country updated this month put Haiti’s 2023 inflation rate at nearly 37%. Haiti is a place where nearly 5 million of the nation’s 11.7 million residents face severe food insecurity, and money sent from people living abroad made up nearly 20% of the nation’s GDP.
“The decision to come here wasn’t easy,” Larrieux said. “But the life I’ve made is a good one, and Haiti has only become more chaotic, a word I do not really like to use. But, there is no returning. My life is here. The only safety available to me is here.”
And that’s very much informed how she and so many others live.
About 42% of Black immigrants live in the South, somewhere between Texas and the Virginias, Kentucky, and Florida, with many concentrated in major cities such as Atlanta, New Orleans, Houston, and Dallas, a 2019 Pew Research Center analysis found. Another 36% live in the Northeast with large concentrations in New York, Boston, and Washington. About 11% lived in the Midwest, while about 10% live in the West between Arizona and Alaska, California, and Montana.
Trump voters also targeted
Larrieux finds it especially galling that many of the voters who propelled Trump to victory in November were themselves immigrants — a sentiment shared by others who advocate for immigration reform.
“I think it’s fair to say that people heard the dog whistles they wanted and dismissed the rest,” said Solomon Ayalew, Washington, D.C., Maryland, and Virginia chapter director of African Communities United, a civil rights nonprofit with operations in multiple cities across the United States. “There are immigrants who heard what they wanted to hear.”
While exit polling data on Black voters is not detailed enough to describe the share of naturalized Black citizens who are legal immigrants and voted for Donald Trump or even Black ethnic subgroup voting patterns, immigrant advocates in other parts of the country also told Capital B that Trump supporters were not rare among their clients and communities, before the election.
Jamaica, Haiti, Nigeria, Ethiopia, the Dominican Republic, Ghana, Trinidad and Tobago, Kenya, Guyana, and Somalia were the 10 most frequent birthplaces of Black and Afro Latino immigrants living in the United States in 2019, according to the Pew Research Center. More recent but less detailed census estimates found that in 2023, nearly 43% of Black immigrants hailed from Africa.
Many Black immigrants come from conservative countries where gender roles are strict and religious ideas embedded in public policy, Ayalew said. And many come from countries where engaging in politics is itself dangerous. Many also work long hours for low wages, a combination that tends to depress voter participation and faith in lawmakers across the world. But Black immigrants also tend to arrive with more education and English language skills than others, making them the most educated of the migrant groups — conditions often associated with steady political participation in the United States.
For Tessa Petit, executive director of the Florida Immigrant Coalition, the weeks after the November election felt something like watching a pot of water fill with bubbles at the bottom of the pan, but never quite reach a rolling boil. Florida is home to the nation’s largest population of TPS holders, roughly 295,000 people.
Most hail from countries in Latin America and the Caribbean experiencing tremendous social, political, and economic upheaval. Before the election, the coalition had been involved in voter education work, aimed at immigrants who have become U.S. citizens.
“I wanted to remind folks that during the first Trump administration he did everything possible not just to strengthen borders, as his supporters like to put it,” Petit said.”
Another concern, Petit said, is that the administration may selectively enforce its deportation guidelines in line with biases against immigrants from certain countries.
Beginning on day one of Trump’s second term, officials have expanded the list of reasons for which an immigrant can be detained and those who can be deported the same day. They said they plan to increase the number of naturalized citizens who are stripped of their American status each year, and passed a law giving police more authority to enforce immigration law and states the ability to reject some legal immigrants outright.
And even before the election, Trump and his vice president, JD Vance, infamously repeated racist and false claims that Haitian immigrants were eating one Ohio community’s pets. Since the inauguration, Trump has said that an all-white group of South Africans refugees are welcome in the United States.
“We have a situation, whether we acknowledge it or not, where decisions seem likely to be made based on which people we as a country think we can use and who and what Americans openly value,” Petit said. “And that in and of itself is not only dehumanizing, but divisive.”
By Feb. 21, the Department of Homeland Security, ICE’s parent agency, reported that 37,660 people have been deported since Jan. 21 when Trump took office. The racial makeup of this group and their countries of origin may not become public until federal data on removals is made available later this year.
In the interim, immigrant advocates around the country have adopted Signal and other difficult to infiltrate communication apps to receive, confirm, and send alerts about ICE sightings. Know Your Rights workshops are filling up now. And that’s had an effect. The acting director of ICE, Caleb Vitello, told reporters that one of the challenges his agents faced was that immigrants seem to know their rights. In late February, Vitello was reassigned due to a, “failure to meet expectations,” Reuters reported. Deportation numbers were, in the Trump administration’s view, too low.
“It’s a scary, scary time. Again,” Larrieux said, with a sigh. For more than a month after Trump took office, she was even afraid to attend Mass. By March, she was helping to organize information sessions for immigrants at a parish building.
“But, I am a fighter. I will adjust, but I will not break. I have, however, reached the point where I would not dare ask another Haitian to meet. I mean, who would want to live with the guilt of being the person who brought another person somewhere, caused them to be somewhere, and ICE arrives?”