Haitians don’t eat cats, but they do work in nursing homes and airports

Haitians do not eat cats, unlike people in some foreign countries. They do, however, work in nursing homes and airports in the U.S., reports The Washington Post:

The Department of Homeland Security alerted employers this week that it had officially ended humanitarian protections for 350,000 Haitian immigrants, triggering mass layoffs that threaten to disrupt summer travel and destabilize an array of essential institutions and industries up and down the East Coast and across the Midwest.

Nursing homes terminated hundreds of workers, including nursing assistants, dietary aides and housekeepers, industry and union leaders said. At airports including those in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, and Boston, contractors terminated scores of Haitian workers, including janitors, cabin cleaners and wheelchair attendants, according to union leaders at Service Employees International Union 32BJ.

At Florida schools, landscapers, bus drivers and other staff were fired. And in New York City, dozens of security guards were terminated only to be rehired because of confusion around their eligibility to continue working, union officials said.

The tumult comes about a month after the U.S. Supreme Court granted the Trump administration permission to cancel the humanitarian program, known as temporary protected status (TPS), potentially stripping permission to live and work in the United States from as many as 1.3 million immigrants from Haiti, Syria and a dozen other countries.