Following a June 25 Supreme Court decision allowing the Trump administration to end Temporary Protected Status for Haitians and Syrians, immigrant communities in New Bedford, Massachusetts are grappling with job losses, fear of deportation, and uncertainty. The ruling also affects Hondurans, whose TPS ended last year, and Salvadorans, whose status expires in September. Pastor Lander Saintelus, community advocates, and TPS holders describe the toll on families, local businesses, and the broader community.
This story was originally published by The New Bedford Light and distributed through a partnership with The Associated Press.
Pastor Lander Saintelus doesn’t have to imagine what the end of Temporary Protected Status for Haitians will look like. He has watched the effects unfold inside his own community in New Bedford for months. And they have only intensified.
When Homeland Security announced more than a year ago that Haiti’s TPS would be terminated, Saintelus witnessed the fallout at the Bright Morning Star International Ministries, the Pentecostal church he leads.
By February, nearly his entire 100-member congregation was jobless. By March, he was helping families pay utility bills to keep the lights and heat on. Soon, he started answering calls from members too afraid to leave home to come to church because they feared immigration agents were waiting outside.
Then, on June 21, just after Sunday service, Saintelus says, he stepped outside his church on Page Street and saw three unfamiliar black vehicles parked at the curb. He said the people inside were wearing vests with “ICE” across the chest. Panic rippled through the congregation.
“I had to keep (everyone) inside the church until they were gone,” he said. Twenty minutes later, the vehicles left, and the pastor and his wife began to drive the congregants home. “We were in shock,” he said. “That’s the situation that we are living in right now in America.”
That encounter made the threat real, Saintelus said. Four days later, the U.S. Supreme Court allowed the Trump administration to proceed with its plan to end TPS for Haitians and Syrians, potentially exposing hundreds of thousands of people from those countries to deportation.
Estimates of the number of Haitian TPS holders in Massachusetts range from 22,000 in a recent UMass Boston report to 45,000, according to the offices of the governor and attorney general.
The decision opens the door to ending protections for TPS holders from about a dozen other countries.
In New Bedford, that includes Hondurans, whose TPS status ended last year. The court decision leaves them little hope of reviving their lost status. It also includes Salvadorans, whose TPS status expires in September.
TPS was one of several major immigration programs established by the Immigration Act of 1990, a law sponsored by then-Massachusetts Sen. Edward M. Kennedy. The move came after the Reagan administration, in the 1980s, refused to extend executive protections to people fleeing El Salvador’s bloody civil war.
“(It’s) a form of immigration status that provides work authorization and protection from deportation for a specified period of time,” said Alexander Holtzman, director of the Deportation Defense Clinic at Hofstra University Law School. “Congress has used temporary protected status to protect individuals from countries that are not safe to return to.”
Issued at the discretion of the Secretary of Homeland Security, the status covers people from nations experiencing instability stemming from natural disasters — like the 2010 Haiti earthquake — to conflict and more. The status can be granted to people from the designated nationalities for periods of six to 18 months.
But, Holtzman said, the word “temporary” is more nuanced than it first appears, saying that sometimes a calamity begets more calamity, meaning that extensions can become regular and the status starts to feel permanent.
“A reason that might justify granting TPS can change over time if additional conditions prolong the suffering of a populace and make it dangerous to return,” he said. Even so, because the status is temporary, it does not lead to legal permanent residency or citizenship on its own.
The Supreme Court’s recent decision gives the administration broad power to end TPS protections.
“The majority (of justices) at least decided that that’s not something that courts can weigh in on,” Holtzman said. “It’s purely within the discretion of the Department of Homeland Security.”
Redin Almendarez and his wife moved to New York City shortly after Hurricane Mitch made landfall in Honduras in October 1998, devastating their native land. Less than three months later, the U.S. Department of Justice declared Hondurans eligible for TPS protections. By March 2025, more than 51,000 Hondurans lived in the U.S. with the protections.
Some of those are among 972 Honduran residents in New Bedford, including the Almendarezes, who moved to the city in 2001.
