Maryland’s Haitian community faces loss after immigrant protection expires

It wasn’t lost on Cole Mercier that against the backdrop of Sunday’s Haitian Caribbean Festival hung a moment of deep worry for the community. A key protection to allow Haitian immigrants to stay in the country temporarily had expired just days earlier, putting more than 350,000 of them at risk of deportation.

In the shade of their tent in Baltimore’s Patterson Park, Mercier and his wife Rose, a Haitian American couple from the city who started their Haitian-centered clothing business, showed off stitched skirts, blue-and-red flags and gray T-shirts, while hundreds filled the grassy hill where the sounds of music in Creole and English entertained the crowd.

Mercier said it feels like the Haitian people are being targeted by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents.

“It’s not the time for us to step back but to actually push forward,” he said, as the scent of jerk chicken and griot, a traditional fried pork dish, filled the air. “Despite what is going on, we’re going to come out and show out.”

The decision to rescind Temporary Protected Status, often shortened to TPS, has prompted fear among community members. Many immigrants who have benefited from the status said going back to an unstable Haiti could be extremely dangerous, if not fatal. And as they move into the shadows to avoid deportation, their neighbors fear not only for the safety of immigrants here but also for the future of a local economy that depends on them.

In Maryland, it’s particularly palpable on the Eastern Shore, where poultry companies like Perdue and Tyson Foods rely on a strong presence of Haitian TPS holders to fill jobs. Local advocates said that as the prospect of TPS expiring grew, some poultry plants and farms began laying off Haitian workers.

Congress created TPS for certain individuals already present in the U.S. who couldn’t return to their countries because of natural disasters or armed conflicts. It was opened to Haitians in the United States in 2010 following the devastating 7.0 magnitude earthquakes that displaced millions of people on the Caribbean island.

Those who qualified for TPS could receive work authorization for 18 months, and roughly 50,000 Haitians first benefited across the U.S. But the designation was repeatedly extended as Haiti faced political turmoil and escalating gang violence, with another estimated 300,000 receiving the status within the past five years. After a legal battle, the U.S. Supreme Court cleared the way for the protections to expire Aug. 5.

It’s part of a series of cuts to federal programs that once protected vulnerable immigrants. In March, President Donald Trump revoked the legal status of more than 200,000 Haitians who had entered the U.S. under a program called humanitarian parole to seek asylum or reunite with family. Some who entered under the program went on to receive TPS, but others were suddenly facing the possibility of deportation.

And with the cancellation of TPS, the number of Haitian immigrants facing that possibility is even greater.

Ashley Duverneau, another Haitian American vendor at Sunday’s festival, was running her Creole-named business, Krém au Krèm. Her community, she said, has “always had our backs against the wall.”

“We’re a very resilient culture,” said Duverneau. “Hopefully with prayer and community, we can get out of this situation.”

Eastern Shore stronghold

The Rev. Roosevelt Toussaint, executive director of the Haitian Development Center of Delmarva, said it’s been a bleak year for his community. Haitians make up 10% of Salisbury’s population and have held jobs all over the Eastern Shore and in Delaware. They packed sidewalks, grocery stores and churches around the rural region.

But now, some — fearful of being picked up by immigration agents — are too scared to leave their houses.

“I’ve been in this country since 1983. I have never seen anything like that,” Toussaint said.

One Haitian store owner in the area, who asked for their name to be withheld out of fear for their safety, told The Banner that the store has started accepting online payments and delivering customers’ purchases to keep the business afloat. The owner said customers are afraid to leave their homes and expressed concern about what will happen to the community when people no longer have money to spend there.

In an unsigned statement in response to The Banner’s questions about immigration enforcement on the Eastern Shore, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security wrote that its officials do not discuss ongoing or future operations. The statement also criticized TPS more broadly as a de facto amnesty program that was never intended to be permanent.

Besides Haitians, people from other countries that were experiencing widespread violence were designated for TPS, including those from Syria, Lebanon, El Salvador, Myanmar, South Sudan and others. U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services is making efforts to end the designation for many of those still covered by it.

After ending TPS for Haitians this month, the Trump administration has offered them $2,600 to leave voluntarily or face deportation. But Haiti is still unsafe. The U.S. State Department lists Haiti at its highest travel advisory level, advising Americans not to travel there.

“What satisfaction can you get from sending people to a hellish place, to a place you know that there’s no way they’re going to be alive, no way they’re going to have peace, no way things are going to be better for them?” said Toussaint. “For you to decide to send them in a place where there is no hope for them to be alive, that’s what’s really, really breaking my heart.”

Those who have lost the status may soon be called to immigration court. Unless they applied for asylum within one year of entering the country, it’s unlikely they’ll qualify, and their only option may be obtaining a narrower form of humanitarian protection from a judge that would let them work but not become citizens.

Etzer Alexis, a Haitian man living in Hagerstown, said that the possibility of going back home scares him. Gang members killed his father, he said, and his other family members hear daily gunfire around their neighborhood.

Last week, dressed in a gray three-piece suit and accompanied by his partner and young daughter, he asked a Baltimore immigration judge for some time to find an attorney. He’s due back in court at the end of October.

Neighbors in limbo

Though the Eastern Shore has more Trump administration supporters than many other parts of the state, several local leaders said that the unease about the plight of its immigrant neighbors often cuts across party lines.

Jake Day, the former Democratic mayor of Salisbury until 2022, who also grew up there, said that Haitians transformed the city and rural region of Maryland, as many Haitians not only found jobs there but joined community groups, nonprofit efforts and local leadership.

“Any threat to their presence and connection and involvement and visibility is highly concerning,” said Day, adding that many people he knows in Salisbury are troubled by the recent end of TPS.

That includes Bill Chambers, the head of the Salisbury Area Chamber of Commerce.

The Haitian community has become “the fabric on the communities they reside in,” Chambers said in a statement. Many Haitians living in Salisbury have started their own small businesses or work in key industries like healthcare and agriculture, he said.

“The loss of TPS has instilled fear into this community, impacted public school attendance, church participation and in the end, will impact Eastern Shore businesses that have employed Haitians,” Chambers said. “It has and will become, if unchanged, an economic drag on the Eastern Shore and Maryland as a whole.”

Due to its labor force, Maryland’s Eastern Shore has long drawn the attention of federal immigration enforcement agents. ICE’s only Maryland outpost outside Baltimore is a processing and holding facility in Salisbury.

But enforcement has ramped up since last year, local advocates said. ICE has been doing more traffic stops on major roads, often appearing to stop people based on the color of their skin, said Paola Subervi, a local tax preparer and advocate for the region’s immigrant communities.

“They walk around like they own us,” said Subervi, a naturalized U.S. citizen who came to the country from Chile when she was 14. She said that she and her family now go around town carrying their U.S. passports.

Of the more than 5,000 people whom ICE arrested in Maryland in 2025, roughly 20% were first processed at the Salisbury holding facility, according to a Banner analysis of ICE data.

Alongside Haitians are many Latin American immigrants who fill jobs across the shore that employers struggle to find U.S.-born workers to take, like picking crabs or farming, Subervi said.

Of Subervi’s roughly 500 clients, she said, more than half are undocumented immigrants filing taxes with Individual Taxpayer Identification Numbers, or ITINs, which people who cannot get a Social Security number use to file. They own homes and do their shopping locally, she said, and she worries about the ripple effects that the ICE crackdown will have on the local economy.

Her roofer, plumber and a contractor she recently hired to cut down a dead tree on her property have all been deported, she said.

“How much is chicken going to [cost] now? Because nobody is working,” she said.

Still, signs of immigrants on the Eastern Shore can be found everywhere, even as many hide from the public view.

At the building that houses the Haitian Development Center of Delmarva just outside Salisbury, a handful of the Caribbean nation’s blue-and-red flags cover the beige walls. Streamers left over from Haitian Flag Day hang from the roof and wave in the wind.

Despite the high anxiety among Haitian people in the area, the celebration of Flag Day in May brought out 2,000 people, Toussaint said.

“They said to themselves, ‘Nobody going to stop me from enjoying my culture. Nobody going to stop me from dancing. Nobody going to stop me from rejoicing,’” Toussaint said, adding that Flag Day is an important day to celebrate the liberation of Haiti from French rule. “We said to ourselves, ‘We’re not going to let nothing stop us.’”

In Baltimore, Garry Bien-Aime, president of Komite Ayiti, the group that organized the Haitian cultural festival, hopes the turnout in Patterson Park on Sunday sends a message to Trump and others by his side: “You’re not going to hold us back. We are going to celebrate.”

Banner data journalist Sahana Jayaraman contributed to this story.