• The Supreme Court ruled in favor of the Trump administration’s termination of Temporary Protected Status for Haitians, ending work authorization for approximately 350,000 people at the end of July 2026.
  • Long Island mother Linda Mancuso said her nonverbal, 23-year-old son Michael lost his Haitian caregiver “Jean” in late July after the aide’s work permit expired.
  • AHRC Nassau CEO Stanfort Perry said his organization laid off 19 Haitian staff this year and 22 last year and is struggling to recruit replacements.
  • Jewish Community Services of South Florida lost 18 Haitian TPS holders; communications director Sarah Katzenstein said the loss has been “devastating” for Holocaust survivor clients.
  • A Department of Homeland Security spokesperson said TPS “is exactly that - temporary” and called claims that immigrant workers are essential to healthcare “grossly false and lazy.”
  • A June 2025 Pew Research survey found 39% of Americans supported ending Haitian TPS while 59% disapproved.

Linda Mancuso has been “praying on a daily basis” that her son Michael’s Haitian caregiver will be able to come back to work. The end of Temporary Protected Status for Haitians forced the layoff of the aide, identified only as Jean, along with 18 other Haitians employed at his Long Island nonprofit, leaving Michael without a worker Mancuso described as “a lifeline.”

Michael is a 5-foot-10, nonverbal 23-year-old who requires hands-on help with daily activities. “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,” Mancuso said.

Mancuso said she was “a ball of nerves” when she agreed at age 19 to send Michael to residential care. When he met Jean in the adult home, she said, “Certain people just have it. He’s literally a lifeline.”

The Trump administration first announced in June 2025 that it would remove TPS for Haitians, and the ensuing legal battle went to the Supreme Court. The court ruled in favor of the administration, paving the way for 350,000 Haitians to lose their status at the end of July. Holders can no longer legally work in the US and are at risk of deportation.

At AHRC Nassau, the nonprofit that employed Jean, CEO Stanfort Perry said the organization let go of 19 Haitian staff this year and 22 last year as other immigration-related terminations took effect. “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,” Perry said. “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 TPS holders, the remaining aides are working overtime, according to Sarah Katzenstein, the organization’s director of strategic communications and marketing. “That is a huge financial strain on a nonprofit like us,” she said. Katzenstein said many of the affected clients are Holocaust survivors who had built years- or decades-long relationships with their Haitian caregivers. “They had relationships with these home care aides for years - some of them for decades,” she said. “It’s a very intimate relationship, so to these clients, the loss of having their Haiti TPS-holding caregivers truly is devastating.”

Haiti numbers among the top five countries from which immigrants in the direct-care workforce come, according to Kezia Scales, vice president of policy and research at the Paraprofessional Healthcare Institute. Scales said the industry was already understaffed and that waitlists for many care services were long before the TPS terminations. “We simply do not have enough people in our domestic market, when you exclude immigrants, to fill those jobs,” Scales said.

A Department of Homeland Security spokesperson pushed back on the characterization that immigrant workers are essential to the healthcare sector. “Temporary Protected Status is exactly that - temporary,” the spokesperson told the BBC. “The assertion that the only way we can support the healthcare industry is by allowing unvetted illegal aliens to remain in the country is grossly false and lazy.”

Jewish Community Services has been writing to elected officials to advocate for Senate Bill 4814, which would match a bipartisan bill already passed in the House to extend TPS for Haitians. The Senate effort is currently stalled, blocked by Republican opposition.

Hundreds of Haitians have been deported since the Supreme Court ruling, despite widespread gang violence in Haiti. White House czar Tom Homan defended the deportations in a recent CNN interview. “The judges made a decision they must go home. And they need to go home… we’re just enforcing the law. And we’re doing it in a way that the American people voted for,” Homan said.

Polling suggests Americans remain divided on the policy. A Pew Research survey in June 2025, before TPS for Haitians was withdrawn, found 39% of Americans supported ending TPS while 59% disapproved. AP-NORC polling released in August 2026 showed support for Trump’s overall immigration policy has fallen 10% since the start of his second term, though it remains relatively strong compared with other issues like the economy. On deportations, about half of US adults surveyed said Trump had gone too far, a figure about the same as the start of the year.

Back on Long Island, Mancuso said she is grieving not only for her son but for Jean and other TPS holders living with uncertainty about deportation. “I’m hoping against hope that this thing gets resolved,” she said. “I care about [Jean] as a human being, he needs a livelihood - and this has been a livelihood for him, and he’s good at it, helping my son. And it’s directly impacting my son by his lack of presence here - and I want him back.”