Miot, it cleared the way for the administration to move ahead with ending TPS for Haitians and Syrians while litigation continues. About 350,000 Haitians and 6,100 Syrians were immediately at risk. If the administration succeeds in ending TPS more broadly, more than a million people could ultimately be affected.²
Nor does the ruling make every TPS worker illegal to employ overnight. Work authorization depends on each person’s employment documents, automatic extensions, court orders, and whether the worker has another legal basis to remain. That caveat matters legally. It does not change the direction of the policy. The ruling begins the process of turning a legal workforce into an unauthorized one, country by country and expiration date by expiration date.
In Massachusetts, a report from Senator Elizabeth Warren, Senator Ed Markey, and Representative Ayanna Pressley warned that ending TPS for Haitians would worsen already serious staffing shortages in health care, elder care, and disability services. Haitian workers are not an ornamental part of that system. They are inside it, especially in nursing homes, home care, and programs for people with disabilities.
The report says about 13,000 Haitian TPS holders work as nursing assistants nationwide, caring for roughly 65,000 patients every day. The Massachusetts Senior Care Association told investigators that about 2,000 care workers have either already lost their work authorization or remain at risk of losing it because of the administration’s attacks on immigration protections. The Association of Developmental Disabilities Providers said that without Haitian TPS workers, its members would have had about 50 shifts unfilled on a single February day, the day a federal judge temporarily blocked the administration’s attempt to end TPS for Haiti.³
Those are not theoretical shifts. One missing aide can mean a nursing home resident waits longer to be lifted out of bed. One missing home-care worker can mean an elderly woman misses the person who knows how she takes her medication, how she likes to be washed, when she is frightened, when she is not herself. One missing direct-support worker can mean a person with autism or an intellectual disability loses the familiar face who knows how to keep a hard morning from becoming a crisis.
“Our care economy does not run on apps or algorithms–it runs on people,” Markey said.³
Workers can be counted in statistics. Care depends on particular people.
In South Florida, NBC Miami reported on Marie Shirley Sanon, a certified nursing assistant at Miami Jewish Health. She has lived in the United States on TPS for 22 years, paid taxes, raised two daughters, and cared for elderly patients. Her facility’s CEO, Jeffrey Freimark, said Miami Jewish Health stood to lose 37 TPS employees. A resident, Marion Marker, asked the question that sits underneath the whole argument: “If we didn’t have them, who would we have?”⁴
A Haitian mother from Florida who arrived in the United States when she was 7 told the Associated Press that TPS after the 2010 earthquake allowed her to go to school and become a nurse.