The Little Haiti neighborhood in Brooklyn teemed with excitement. People poured into bars, apartments and barber shops to watch Haiti’s men’s national soccer team play in the World Cup. Despite a loss to Morocco on Wednesday night, the appearance in the tournament felt like a victory. After a 52-year hiatus, Haiti — which had been beset by violence and political turmoil for most of those five decades — had made it to the global stage.
The mood sank the next day as people checked their phones for images from the match. Laced into social media feeds was news about a Supreme Court decision that threatened to shatter the community.
The nation’s highest court had ruled that President Trump could end the Temporary Protected Status program, which had allowed more than 300,000 Haitians to live and work in the United States. The decision cleared a path for the administration to begin their deportations. Mr. Trump had sought to terminate the program, which was created by Congress with bipartisan support in 1990, as part of his expanding efforts to restrict immigration.
Yves Vilus rushed on foot from the offices of the nonprofit organization where he offered paralegal resources, the Erasmus Neighborhood Federation, to a medical clinic nearby. His phone had been ringing since Thursday morning when the Supreme Court issued its decision, with clients and residents asking what they could do to avoid deportation. They wondered if Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents would flood the streets of Brooklyn.
“They know where we are,” said Mr. Vilus, the federation’s executive director. “Will ICE be knocking?”
The Haitian community is on bright display in this swatch of Brooklyn, where restaurants serve traditional dishes: soup joumou, diri djondjon and griot. Vendors sell their wares as they burn sticks of incense, the fragrant smoke mingling with the thump of Caribbean music playing from speakers placed on bustling sidewalks. Shop windows display clothing adorned with the country’s name and flag.
Ken Johnson, a chef who was born in Brooklyn to Haitian parents, was eating oxtail at Kreyol Flavor, a Haitian restaurant, when he found out about the court’s ruling. Mr. Johnson said that the looming Supreme Court ruling on Temporary Protected Status had been a source of anxiety among Haitians in Brooklyn, which is home to at least 65,000 people of Haitian descent, according to Census Reporter data. Many people in the neighborhood could be affected, he said.
“Are they going to send them back?” Mr. Johnson said. “Will they be here illegally now?”
One of those immigrants, Maudeleine Clement, fled Haiti two years ago, when the U.S. government granted her temporary legal status during the Biden administration. She took English classes and studied nursing at LaGuardia Community College, and expected to graduate this summer.
Ms. Clement works at the Haitian-American Community Coalition, which helps Haitian immigrants in New York. The center had received thousands of calls in recent months from clients seeking legal advice about what the Supreme Court decision would mean for their employment status and their ability to live in New York.
While she worked to connect callers with lawyers and case managers, she concentrated on the same urgent question as theirs: What would it mean to lose her legal status?
“Everyone was celebrating our country on an international level, and then this happened,” Ms. Clement said. “It feels like we can’t catch a break.”
Ms. Clement said that when she was living in Haiti, she heard a hail of bullets outside her house one night as a gunfight persisted for three hours. She described it as the worst night of her life.
Her younger sister, who still lives there, said that the neighborhood remains dangerous. Some days, she does not leave the house because she hears gunshots.
In Manhattan, city and state leaders tried to assuage worries about the court decision and vowed to use the legal system to help those affected, including about 6,000 Syrians in the United States who had received temporary legal status.
“You may have come from Haiti, you may — like my wife’s family — have come from Syria,” said Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who wore a sticker of the Haitian flag at a news conference at the headquarters of 1199SEIU United Healthcare Workers East, the largest health care union in the United States. “No matter what this decision brings in the weeks to come, you are not going to face this alone.”
The political leaders predicted that the ruling would have sweeping repercussions, exacting a toll on major U.S. industries. At least 112,000 health care workers in the United States are Haitian nationals, according to Census Bureau data analyzed by the American Immigration Council, a nonprofit advocacy organization for immigrants. Thousands of them work in New York State.
“Who’s going to show up tomorrow to take care of grandma?” Gov. Kathy Hochul said.
Mercedes Narcisse, a city councilwoman who represents parts of Brooklyn and is a Haitian immigrant, cried as she addressed the news cameras. She, like so many others, works in health care.
“They are the hands that hold our parents when they are sick,” said Ms. Narcisse, who is a registered nurse. “They are the people who show up at the bedside when no one else will.”
Haiti is heavily controlled by gangs who are frequently engaged in territorial wars. The U.S. State Department discourages Americans from traveling to the country, which has been under a state of emergency since March 2024. According to a travel advisory from the State Department, violent crime is rampant.
“You can’t send people back there,” Mr. Vilus, the nonprofit director, said as he walked down the street in Brooklyn. “We don’t know what to do, and I don’t know what I’m going to start telling people.”
Luis Ferré-Sadurní contributed reporting.
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