Empty pews and fear of ICE on Maryland’s Eastern Shore after TPS ends for Haitians

SALISBURY, Md. (AP) — These are harrowing days for the Word of Life Center, a church that for many years has been a vibrant hub of the Haitian community in Maryland’s Eastern Shore region.

A bridal shower and yard-sale barbeque were canceled. So were English-language classes. The senior pastor of the nondenominational congregation in Salisbury, Roosevelt Toussaint, said attendance at Sunday’s service dropped by more than half. Normally, more than 500 people would have heard his sermon, titled “What to do in a time of crisis.”

The reason for empty seats, Toussaint said, is that many community members are unwilling to venture from their homes, fearing arrests and deportation since the Trump administration moved to end Temporary Protected Status for more than 1 million people from numerous countries. Among those affected: roughly 350,000 Haitians who have been living and working legally in the U.S. for years.

In Salisbury, the Eastern Shore's biggest city, about 10% of the 33,000 residents are Haitian, many of them employed under TPS as farmworkers, caregivers and in the poultry plants that are the region’s economic backbone.

Like other Haitians losing TPS, they now face an agonizing choice: Try to stay in the U.S. and find underground work, constantly fearful of being caught by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents. Or return to a nation so overwhelmed by gang violence and poverty that some feel deportation is tantamount to a death sentence.

Toussaint, the Word of Life Center's pastor since 1995, said he had a message for President Donald Trump.

“We’re expecting you to have compassion for our people. They haven't done anything wrong,” Toussaint said. “All they came to this country to do is to work, to make a difference in our economy. … There’s no security at home. If you really send us over there, you send us to die.”

At Sunday's service, the first since the expiry of TPS protections, Toussaint exhorted his congregants to persevere.

“I’m praying this afternoon that God can make you invisible to the enemy,” Toussaint told them in Haitian Creole. “They put a lot of terror in your heart. But God has come to tell you: ’Do not be afraid!’ ”

Some of the congregants who are U.S. citizens said they attended the service in solidarity with those losing TPS. Among them was Marjorie Estimé, who wore a Haitian flag draped around her neck.

“I want to tell the president of the United States to stop the ICE program, so that the people can work, so ICE can stop shooting them, persecuting them, and we can go back to normal,” Estimé said about the Trump administration's crackdown on legal and illegal immigration .

But ICE had been pressing ahead, according to advocates and attorneys who say the agency is calling Haitians in for ankle bracelets and telling them not to travel more than 75 miles from their home address.

“Instead of them heavily descending on communities, they are using tactics to bring those people into their offices to either detain them ... and telling them that if they don’t self deport, they will be called back, to report within a month,” said Guerline Jozef, president at the Haitian Bridge Alliance.

The TPS termination affecting Haitians was challenged in district courts. On June 25, the U.S. Supreme Court sided with the government, allowing the TPS program to end while triggering weeks of confusion as to the timetable for enforcement.

On July 27, the work permits were not extended, and fear mounted in Haitian communities — not only due to the loss of jobs but also because it exposed them to deportation.

“It’s just like a hurricane at Category 5 — that’s how bad it is,” said Samson Orneus, a member of Toussaint's church. He helps the pastor lead the local Haitian Development Center of Delmarva and runs WOLC Immigration Services, an immigrant assistance business in Salisbury.

Throughout last week, news spread on social media about arrests by immigration authorities at gas stations and outside supermarkets.

“We had a population living legally, raising their kids, paying their bills, and with the decision (to end TPS), they were left in limbo,” said Marie D. Fouché, founder and executive director of Safe Harbor Circles. It provides support to immigrant communities across the Eastern Shore and recorded more than a dozen arrests of immigrants in recent days, including some with TPS.

“They have left their kids at home,” she said. “They went to the grocery, shopping at Walmart to cook for them and feed their family. But they got arrested in the parking lot, and they’ll never go back.”

Asked about ICE enforcement activities in Salisbury, the Department of Homeland Security said via email that DHS “does not discuss ongoing or future operations.”

“Temporary Protected Status is exactly that — temporary,” the email said. “For too long, TPS has been allowed to function as a de facto amnesty program despite Congress never intending it to be permanent.”

At a nearly empty barber shop in Salisbury, a Haitian on TPS ventured in for a haircut. Like several others, he asked to remain anonymous for fear of deportation.

“They’re not going after the people committing crimes,” said the 39-year-old man, who has been a caregiver at a nursing home since moving to Salisbury in 2020. “When I go out to the street, I’m in fear.”

The United States initially gave TPS to Haitians following a devastating earthquake in 2010 and extended it several times since.

The Trump administration pushed to end that status, saying conditions in Haiti improved. Yet almost 1.5 million people have been  displaced because of gang violence, and most Haitians need humanitarian aid.

“What this administration is doing hurts me so much because it’s inhumane,” said Leila Borrero Krouse, an immigration specialist with CATA, a nonprofit supporting Eastern Shore farmworkers.

“In all of these years that I’ve been working with immigrants, I’ve never met a criminal, a rapist, an abuser,” she said. “Most come to take jobs that others don’t want. And it’s heartbreaking to see how they’re suffering.”

The immigration crackdown has upended the life of Patricia Grace Louis-Jacques, a nursing student at Salisbury University who has family members and friends affected by the end of TPS. Last week, her best friend asked her to take care of her infant child if she got detained.

“From that moment, I knew things got bad,” Louis-Jacques said at a nearly empty Caribbean Creole Café under a painting of Toussaint L’Ouverture, a leader of the Haitian Revolution. “Their lives have tremendously changed.”

Not far from the church, near a Perdue Farms poultry plant, a Honduran woman spoke from the home which she has rarely left for a year since the Trump administration ended TPS for nearly 80,000 Hondurans and Nicaraguans .

She said she worked at Perdue Farms for more than two decades, repetitively cutting chickens with scissors on a fast-paced line, before losing her job last year after her TPS expired.

Her 25-year-old son, who was born in the U.S., worries that she will be detained. He often calls, reminding her to keep her living room curtains closed and avoid answering the door. Sometimes, she said, she hides by locking herself in a bathroom, where she keeps a Bible.

On weekends, she used to attend church and volunteer for events advocating for the rights of immigrants. These days, she only takes out her two dogs to the yard and then returns indoors.

“It’s terrible to live in this anxiety,” she said. “It isn’t fair to those of us who came to this country not to cause harm, but to try to have a better life.”

Associated Press writer Gisela Salomon in Miami contributed to this report.

Associated Press religion coverage receives support through the AP’s collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content.