“Long Island mother-of-two Linda Mancuso has been ‘praying on a daily basis’ that her disabled son’s Haitian caregiver will be able to come back to work,” reports the BBC.
Jean, the Haitian caregiver, was laid off from work at the end of July from his job at a nonprofit caring for disabled people. He was laid off because the Trump administration ended temporary protected status for Haitians. Temporary protected status (TPS) lets foreign nationals from unsafe countries like Haiti work in the U.S., but only as long as the U.S. government chooses to let them stay.
Mancuso’s 24-year-old son Michael has extremely low intelligence and is nonverbal. “Showering, sleeping, eating, tying his shoes – Michael can’t tie his shoes – I mean, there’s so much hands-on involvement, and Jean did all of that,” she notes.
His Haitian caregiver was a lifeline. “But Michael lost that lifeline weeks ago, when his employer had to lay Jean off along with 18 other Haitians. Their temporary protected status (TPS) – which allows eligible foreign nationals from unsafe countries to work in the US – had expired.”
The expiration of that status means that those Haitians can no longer legally work in the US and are at risk of deportation. “The healthcare industry, with a robust Haitian workforce, has been hit particularly hard – with legions of employers forced to fire TPS holders who work directly with patients,” the BBC says.
“More than a dozen countries have had their TPS terminated in Trump’s second term and Haitians make up nearly a third of all TPS recipients affected. The care industry is feeling the effects.”
“The industry was already under-staffed and waitlists for many care services – from home health aides to assisted living – were already long.”
The Paraprofessional Healthcare Institute says that America does “not have enough people in our domestic market, when you exclude immigrants, to fill those jobs.”
National advocacy groups are lobbying for changes to immigration law that would strengthen the long-term care workforce – including changes that “would expand legal pathways for international caregivers”.
At AHRC Nassau, which employed Jean, CEO Stanfort Perry is exhausted. His nonprofit was forced to lay off 19 Haitian staff this year, because the federal government took away their TPS status.
“It takes us months to recruit one individual to work in this field, train them and prepare them to provide compassionate, caring support to a person with an intellectual and developmental disability,” he added. “I’m competing with fast-food restaurants, grocery stores and retail for staff, because they pay more than what we are able to pay.”
At Jewish Community Services of South Florida, which lost 18 Haitian staffers who were TPS holders recently, the remaining aides are working overtime. “That is a huge financial strain on a nonprofit like us,” it said.
Haitian TSP holders worked in nursing homes and airports, doing useful things. In July, the Washington Post reported:
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.
Hundreds of Haitians “have been deported to Haiti in recent weeks, and some say they have been left with no money, no protection from gangs and no place to go,” reports The New York Times.
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