US-based Haitians are buoyed but wary after a judge stops Trump from ending their protections

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SPRINGFIELD, Ohio (AP) — Roudechel Charpentier moved to Springfield in 2023 to escape the violence in his native Haiti, enrolled in college and got a part-time job at a fast-food restaurant.

He's been losing sleep over the Trump administration's push to end the temporary protected status, or TPS, that allows him and roughly 350,000 other Haitians to live and work in the U.S.

Although a judge intervened Monday to keep the protection in place while a lawsuit challenging the administration's order plays out, Charpentier's driver's license was set to expire Tuesday, and he's worried he still might be forced to leave before he can graduate in May.

“Everybody is happy right now,” said Charpentier, an agriculture technology major at Clark State College. “Everything is not done yet because we don’t have the final decision on TPS. But the situation is much better than last week.”

The Monday ruling by U.S. District Judge Ana Reyes came a day before the scheduled ending of TPS status for Haitians. The Homeland Security secretary may grant the designation if conditions in home countries are deemed unsafe for return due to a natural disaster, political instability or other dangers. TPS recipients are allowed to live and work in the U.S., but the status doesn’t provide a legal pathway to citizenship. The U.S. initially gave it to Haitians following the catastrophic 2010 earthquake that rocked their Caribbean island homeland, and extended it several times since.

It's been 16 years since Haitians became eligible for temporary protective status, and many have grown up in the U.S. and worry about what their futures might hold.

Hansmie Pierre, 22, hasn't been back to Haiti since moving to Florida in 2007 at age 4. She said the uncertainty over TPS forced her to confront the idea that she might not get to see her new nephew in Jacksonville grow up.

“I didn’t want to go to a country where I wouldn’t be able to come back and see my family,” she said.

In addition to Haitians, President Donald Trump has aggressively sought to strip of TPS protections from other nationalities as part of his administration’s wider, mass deportation effort. They include about 600,000 Venezuelans, 60,000 people from Honduras, Nicaragua and Nepal, more than 160,000 Ukrainians and thousands of people from Afghanistan and Cameroon. Some have pending lawsuits in federal courts.

Pierre said the TPS program's impacts permeate so many lives.

“A lot more people are dealing with this than people realize,” Pierre said. “These are your co-workers. These are your friends. Sometimes people stay quiet because it could put them at risk. But it’s very real, and it’s often much closer than people think.”

In her written opinion, Reyes said the plaintiffs’ lawsuit was likely to prevail on its merits and that she found it “substantially likely” that Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem preordained her decision to end Haitians' TPS status because of “hostility to nonwhite immigrants.”

Department of Homeland Security spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin denounced the ruling as “lawless activism.”

“Haiti’s TPS was granted following an earthquake that took place over 15 years ago,” she said in a statement. “It was never intended to be a de facto amnesty program, yet that’s how previous administrations have used it for decades.”

The administration could appeal or try to address the judge’s concerns in an attempt to overcome legal hurdles. During Trump’s first term, the president made three attempts at a travel ban before drafting one that passed legal muster in the Supreme Court in 2018. Trump initially proposed an all-encompassing Muslim travel ban but made adjustments as he faced court injunctions along the way.

But the latest ruling suggests potential limits to Trump’s efforts to strip legal status from about 2.5 million people on TPS, humanitarian parole and other temporary and highly tenuous ways to remain in the country with work authorization. That number — referred to as “twilight status” in a recent report by the Migration Policy Institute — ballooned under the Biden administration.

Every court that has considered the merits of a lawsuit challenging one or more of the administration’s TPS decisions has ruled against Noem, and several have concluded that the administration was at least partly motivated by racial animus against nonwhite immigrants, said Andrew Tauber, one of the lead attorneys for Haitian TPS holders.

“The record is replete with statements by President Trump evincing a deep-seated animus toward Haitian immigrants, in particular, and nonwhite immigrants in general,” he said.

Springfield is home to roughly 15,000 Haitians — a community Trump denigrated while running for reelection in 2024 by falsely suggesting they eat their neighbors’ cats and dogs. Many worried that if their TPS status is ended, the administration might surge immigration officers to the city to begin rounding them up. Hours before the stay was granted, though, McLaughlin said DHS didn't “have any new operations to announce.”

Jean Philistin, a former teacher turned Springfield real estate agent, said ending TPS protections “would have been a disaster” for the community. A recently released preliminary Bureau of Labor Statistics survey showed that the Springfield area lost 1,100 jobs between December 2024 and December 2025.

In South Florida, home of one of the country's largest Haitian communities, advocates and nongovernmental organizations are advising TPS holders on how to manage their assets, and prepare powers of attorney and living trusts in case of family separation, said Paul Namphy, political director at Family Action Network Movement. They are also encouraging them to carry a copy of Reyes' decision with them as proof of work authorization.

“The impact of TPS and Judge Reyes' decision from last night on the Haitian community is enormous, but risks being very short-lived,” said Namphy.

In North Miami Beach, which is home to about 18,000 Haitians, Mayor Michael Joseph said “God sent relief” in the form of the judge's Monday ruling. But he said anxiety persists in his community over the prospect of a government appeal.

“The fever still persists,” he said. “It gives some type of stability, but at the same time you don’t know when the next hammer or the next shoe is going to fall.”

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Guillaume reported from New York. Associated Press reporters Sudhin Thanawala in Atlanta; Julie Carr Smyth in Columbus, Ohio; Hannah Schoenbaum in Salt Lake City; Gisela Salomon in Miami; and Elliot Spagat in San Diego contributed to this report.