For the past two months, hundreds of Haitians in Springfield have been targeted by immigration authorities and forced to wear ankle monitors, as the Trump administration metes out collective punishment to appeal to its far right base.
Since the U.S. Supreme Court cleared the way for the Trump administration to end Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for Haitians at the end of June, immigration enforcement has ramped up its detentions and deportations of Haitians — with its surge most concentrated in Springfield, Ohio.
The overturn of TPS was followed by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) sending letters to Haitian immigrants in Springfield, requiring them to report in person so they could be fitted with ankle monitors to track their locations until it is decided whether they will be deported. Throughout August, ICE’s surveillance of Haitians in Springfield through ankle monitors continued to rise.
Michaelle Louis, a Haitian organizer in Springfield, spoke with Truthout about the effects of the ankle monitoring program on members of her community.
Community members have “described their fear, their feeling of isolation, shame, anxiety and uncertainty,” as a result of being forced to wear ankle monitors, she said. For many, the monitors affect their ability to work, travel, and be around others, as community members sometimes fear being around people who are being tracked.
On August 31, Pierre Damas Bel, a 20-year-old Springfield resident, died in an apparent suicide after being forced to wear an ankle monitor.
“I take it very personally,” Louis said, “because as a mom of a 16-year-old, they shared the same high school, and they knew each other.” Louis spoke of witnessing the confusion and pain in Haitian youth since the administration ended TPS at the end of July — and being unable to answer her own teenage daughter’s questions about why this was happening. “I can feel the pain” Damas Bel’s family is going through, she added.
Around the same time as Damas Bel’s death, faith leaders and community members — including Louis — launched the “Unshackle Springfield” campaign. In their initial press conference, organizers compared the ankle monitors to shackles forced onto Black people during slavery in the U.S.
Since then, activists have held press conferences, marches, and rallies, demanding an end to the government’s targeting of Haitians and the release of detained community members, including two local pastors detained at the end of August. The campaign is also demanding a path to citizenship or residency — permanent protected status — rather than a return to temporary status.
One of the pastors, Pastor Joubert Adrien, was released on bond in mid-September. While this was considered a victory for the campaign, Unshackled Springfield is still agitating for the release of many others, Louis told Truthout, noting that 76 members of the community have been detained by ICE.
Some community members have reported over the past few weeks that, when summoned to Department of Homeland Security (DHS) offices, they have been given a monitoring app on their phone rather than an ankle monitor, said Louis. This is likely a slight dialing-back on the part of immigration enforcement, and Louis considers it a result of the advocacy of the Haitian community and their allies. But it is not an official change, and hundreds of Haitians are still being forced to wear ankle monitors in Springfield — “so we have to keep pushing the campaign forward,” Louis concluded.
The targeting of Haitians in Springfield did not begin this year. It began in September of 2024, when false rumors of Haitians in Springfield eating their pets spread rapidly through far right and neo-Nazi online sites.
Brian Concannon, director of the Institute for Justice & Democracy in Haiti, explained to Truthout that these false reports “blew up” because of “people who were racist and opposed to Haitians,” including Donald Trump and now-vice president JD Vance, who was the senator of Ohio at the time.
Even though the lies were discredited, the far right “kept amplifying those demonstrably untrue accusations against Haitians,” Concannon added, “because they got value out of inflaming their base.”
Immigration enforcement’s use of ankle monitors today “is a complete outgrowth of that,” Concannon argued. “Because Springfield became a symbol for the administration’s ability to rile up its base, they kept going back to that well” and are “very clearly going after the Haitians in Springfield because of their symbolic value” to the far right.
Concannon also said that there is a risk, particularly after the midterm elections, that the Trump administration will ramp up its cruelty against Haitians even further.
The administration is caught between riling up its anti-immigrant base, and tempering its actions to avoid repercussions like the blowback from Operation Metro Surge in the Twin Cities, which saw a major protest movement and resistance that forced the administration to shift its tactics and to backtrack, at least from its most visible acts of repression.
But while Springfield has faced particular collective punishment to serve far right appetites, Haitians across the country have been increasingly targeted.
“For the entire Trump administration, there has been about one plane a month going to Haiti,” Concannon said. “Starting in July [with TPS overturned], they upped that to one plane a week. There’s between 100 and 150 people in most of these planes. So the number of Haitians being deported has quadrupled.”
Concannon also pointed out that at least seven judges had ruled that the administration’s prior attempts to terminate TPS were illegal, most of them finding that the attempts were motivated by racism, before the Supreme Court overturned these rulings in June.
When Pierre Damas Bel died at the end of August, Louis said that his father expressed to her that, at this point, he just wanted to return to Haiti.
But for most Haitians in the U.S., that isn’t an option. Haiti currently faces one of the world’s most severe hunger crises, with nearly half its population experiencing acute food insecurity. The country also has 1.5 million internally displaced people due to violence and instability. And much of this has been due to long-term U.S. policy.
“There’s been a bipartisan bias against Haiti in terms of U.S. foreign policy where as a country, we cannot let Haiti succeed, because if we did, then Haiti would play a leading role in the global fight for racial equality” — as it did when it defeated slavery in the Haitian Revolution, and since then in its fight for reparations, Concannon said.
Shireen Akram-Boshar is a socialist writer, editor and Middle East/North Africa solidarity activist.
