Why Should Delaware Care?
Many Haitian immigrants in Delaware are fleeing to Canada as the Trump administration throws their temporary legal status into jeopardy and Haiti remains unsafe to return to. The people who remain are stuck in a state of limbo, sometimes too scared to leave their homes.
The deportation letters for Anne’s family members arrived in April. Even her niece’s 1-year-old baby got one.
The letters came about a month after President Donald Trump shuttered the humanitarian program that had brought Anne’s family from Haiti to Delaware amid the outbreak of a gang war just one year earlier.
The program, established under the Biden administration, created what federal officials called safe and orderly pathways for up to 30,000 immigrants to enter the United States each month from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela to live and work for up to two years.
Trump administration officials argued that ending the program, and therefore revoking the temporary legal status of more than 500,000 immigrants, was a return to “common-sense” policies, with the move fitting into the larger mass deportation strategy Trump campaigned on.
“It’s a shame for the U.S. to do something like that,” said Anne, who asked to only be identified by her first name out of fear of retaliation as her family continues their immigration proceedings.
Today, only one family member remains in Delaware. The rest fled to Quebec, Canada, in search of better conditions.
And they’re not alone.
Violent gangs, kidnappings and political instability have made returning to Haiti essentially impossible. And with the U.S. government’s hostility toward immigrants on the rise, many have moved on to Canada.
Many Haitian immigrants are now living in a worrisome limbo as their legal status is ensnared in federal court rulings. The Biden-era programs are gone, and a separate, government-sanctioned Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for Haitian immigrants is set to expire in February — leaving another 330,000 Haitian immigrants nationwide open to potential deportation.
In Delaware, the temporary protections encouraged the state’s bustling Haitian community to grow and thrive in recent decades. With immigration programs in jeopardy, many have lost their jobs and are too scared to even leave their homes as their protection is in question.
“(Haitians) are feeling a lot of fear and a lot of pressure because of the Trump administration,” Chesnel Jean-Vilma, a Delaware resident from Haiti, said through a Haitian-Creole interpreter.
Haitian churches in Dover and Smyrna have lost handfuls of families as they leave the First State for French-speaking areas in Canada, according to Emanie Dorival, a leader with the Mitspa French Seventh-Day Adventist Church in Smyrna.
Haiti was the top country of citizenship for asylum seekers processed at Canadian land border ports of entry in 2025, according to data from the Canada Border Services Agency.
Still, Canada has seen a 42% drop in the total number of asylum applications processed from January through September, compared to the same period last year, according to Luke Reimer, spokesperson for the Border Services Agency.
Other temporary protections in jeopardy
Pastor Guy Danjoint peered at the gray filing cabinet. Frayed slips of paper scribbled with the word, “TPS,” peeked above the handles of each of the seven metal drawers stacked in Danjoint’s office inside his Dover church.
Danjoint leads the Haitian Evangelical International Ministries Church, where he’s helped hundreds of Haitians process and file their immigration paperwork.
The cabinet was bursting with hundreds of Temporary Protected Status cases of Haitian immigrants in Delaware who Danjoint helped over the years. Each person granted the government protection because they were unable to safely return to Haiti — largely because of violence, persecution and natural disasters in the island nation.
Under TPS, more than 330,000 Haitian immigrants can live and work in the United States without fear of deportation. In 2023, nearly 5,000 Haitians lived in Delaware, with Haitian Creole being the primary language spoken at home in 5,607 households in the state, according to U.S. Census Bureau data.
In June, however, the Trump administration moved to terminate Haiti’s TPS designation, stripping thousands of people of their status and opening them up for potential deportation. The administration has argued that TPS is a temporary program that’s been exploited and misused to become a permanent form of protection.
A federal judge subsequently blocked the Trump administration’s attempts to end Haiti’s TPS designation early and preserved the protections until February 2026.
“People are worried,” Danjoint said.
Felix Sainte, a Dover business owner and member of Delaware’s Haitian community, had to print out his mother’s permanent resident information, also known as a green card, for her to carry at all times. She was scared someone might profile her and wanted to have it to walk around with, Sainte said.
Haiti’s initial TPS designation came in the wake of a devastating 2010 earthquake that killed over 300,000 people and injured thousands more. The status is a government protection granted to immigrants who are unable to safely return to their country due to environmental disasters, ongoing armed conflicts or other “extraordinary” conditions, according to the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.
Trump tried to do away with most TPS country designations during his first term but was stalled by federal courts. In the first months of his second term, Trump has attempted to end TPS protections for more than 1 million people from eight countries: Afghanistan, Cameroon, Haiti, Honduras, Nepal, Nicaragua, Syria and Venezuela.
Earlier this month, the U.S. Supreme Court allowed the Trump administration to move forward with the removal of TPS protections for thousands of Venezuelan migrants in the country. The removal of protections leaves about 600,000 Venezuelans susceptible to deportations in early November.
TPS for Haitians in the U.S. is set to expire on Feb. 3, 2026. And the filing cabinet in Danjoint’s office is rife with cases of people who will be affected — with many unsure of what comes next.
For Anne’s family, though, Quebec has offered a fresh start. Four of the relatives who she originally sponsored to come to the U.S. have now been living in Canada for about six months.
“When I look at them carrying the baby going to Canada, it was really sad,” Anne said.
She hopes her niece’s young child can go to school there as her family seeks a better life than what they found here.
