As Haitian immigrants lose their legal status, Ohio models resistance
What DHS does next – and how the American people respond – is unclear
“We are now at the mercy of God and anything can happen to anyone almost, now, any time,” Vilés Dorsainvil, who runs the Haitian Support Center in Springfield, Ohio, told the Springfield News-Sun this morning.
Some 330,00 Haitian immigrants who were living legally in the United States under the temporary protected status (TPS) program officially lost that status this morning.
The Trump administration announced in November that it would revoke TPS for Haitians. The move was stayed earlier this year by Washington, D.C., federal judge Ana C. Reyes, who found that it was motivated at least in part by the Trump administration’s obvious racial animus. But her order was reversed in June by the Supreme Court. And Reyes today officially lifted the stay.
It’s not yet clear how DHS will proceed – specifically whether it will begin mass deportation of people who over time have made their homes here, sending them to a country the U.S. State Department has declared unsafe for travel. That would be as cruel and disruptive as anything DHS has done before.
What’s also not clear is how ordinary Americans will respond, particularly in the seven states where Haitian TPS recipients live and work. Will they protest? Will they defend their neighbors?
One of those states is Ohio, which 45,000 Haitians with TPS status call home, including at least 15,000 in Springfield alone.
And judging from what happened in Ohio last week in response to a new ICE policy forcing local Haitian immigrants to wear ankle monitors reminiscent of slave shackles, the response could be intense.
Last Week in Ohio
Starting last week, Haitian immigrants being summoned to the Cincinnati ICE field office in Blue Ash, Ohio, were only allowed to leave with bulky black boxes chained to their lower legs. They were also instructed not to travel anywhere outside a 75-mile radius from their homes.
Many Ohio residents, full of outrage and revulsion, gathered outside that facility early Sunday morning, lining the roads, singing, and carrying signs. “Hundreds of Ohioans, all the way down the block over there, snaking all the way across here, at 7:50 a.m. in the morning,” MS Now’s Alex Tabet reported in a video.
When immigrants arrived for their appointments, protesters waved and shouted support and encouragement, as seen in this video.
“We are witnessing how fearful they are, and there is so much anxiety going on,” Dorsainvil told MS Now. “Specifically, they’re very much ashamed of the ankle monitors on their feet... When they get home, they are ashamed to show that to their kids because they’re not criminals.”
“This reminds me of slavery,” Deborah Thompson, a retired minister attending the protest, told Tabet. “Historically, slaves were shackled. This is shackling. This is modern-day shackling. And when I saw the ankle bracelets, I thought ‘this is how slaves felt’.”
But, she said, “Our community cares, and we see people as neighbors and not as enemies…. People are showing up and saying to the world – and saying to Donald Trump – ‘We’re not the America you’re trying to create. We are an America that loves our neighbors and loves people and cares about people no matter where you come from, no matter your color, no matter your accent. We are a people that care.’”
“I came to bear witness to the great wrong that’s being done to people who came here for a better life and had the rug pulled out from under them,” protester Bethany Rogers of Cincinnati told WVXU. “It doesn’t make humanitarian sense. It doesn’t make economic sense. It’s purely for ideology.”
An observer from out of state noted on Threads:
The ankle monitors being forced on Haitian refugees and other immigrants aren’t just about tracking people. They’re highly visible to draw attention, create stigma, and publicly label the person wearing one as someone to fear or treat differently.
History has already shown us what happens when governments require marginalized groups to carry visible markers that separate them from everyone else.
Immigration attorney Carolyn Marks, who accompanied two Haitian clients to appointments with ICE on Sunday, told the Washington Post that the broad use of the monitors is definitely new. “In the past, they have been used with people who have criminal records or had missed court hearings or an order of deportation,” Marks said. “But all these people had been and are complying with the law.”
Elsewhere in Ohio
Last week in Springfield, faith leaders including the Rev. Carl Ruby gathered to implore DHS to exercise humanity, WXVU reported.
“We’re here to respectfully ask Homeland Security and ICE to do what President Trump has repeatedly promised, and that’s focus only on the worst of the worst and that we support efforts to keep our border secure,” Ruby said. “We support efforts to deport people who are violent offenders so long as it is done humanely. But we are asking them not to come to Springfield and deport folks here.”
If they do come, Ruby told the Ohio Capital Journal, “We will encourage people to protest peacefully. There are many who are willing to place themselves between ICE and people who are targets for detainment and deportation.”
Ruby also told the outlet that he and his colleagues have been working for the past 18 months to build “a very large coalition of faith leaders not only here in Springfield, but across the state of Ohio and across the nation who will stand with us if we have anything like what took place in Minneapolis.”
Meanwhile, in somewhat related news, an Ohio airport has become a flashpoint for protesters. As the Akron Beacon Journal reported:
Two flights likely filled with immigrants being deported lifted off from Akron-Canton Airport Saturday morning even as about 200 protesters stood outside the airport entrance calling for an end to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
Here are some photos and video.
The Beacon Journal has put a spotlight on the airport with some serious investigative journalism that found it “has become a major hub for an airline charter company that conducts immigrant transportation and deportations.” It reported:
More than 130 chartered Boeing 737 flights operated by Eastern Air Express have landed at Akron-Canton since April 20, sometimes to pick up people in restraints who have disembarked from a prison bus or unmarked vans….
From a vantage point on West Airport Drive and looking beyond a chain link fence, one can see mostly Black and brown detainees who appear to be cuffed and shackled disembarking from buses and vans, checked by guards and then instructed to climb the stairs to the plane, one at a time.
And it’s not just immigration that has Ohioans riled up. The Beacon Journal also noted the activities of two other grassroots groups in the state.
Members of the pro-democracy Ohio District 14 Partners have held protests 73 weeks in a row in Mentor, a suburban community about 25 miles east of Cleveland, with between 40 and 80 people consistently showing up for the events, the paper reported.
And within the last month, the Burning River Brigade in Northeast Ohio has:
Rallied outside a Cuyahoga County GOP fundraiser featuring Sen. Jon Husted and U.S. Rep. Max Miller. The brigade held pictures of President Donald Trump and sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein and a giant sign that read “Pedophile protector party picnic” with an arrow pointing to the entrance of the GOP gathering.
Traveled to Washington, D.C., and held up a sign that said “State of Warmooze is now closed” in front of a Reflecting Pool full of algae.
Went viral for holding a sign reading “Someday a mortician gets to super glue his lips shut” over a Cleveland freeway overpass alongside a picture of Trump and Epstein.
The Trump Administration v. Protesters
It’s becoming clearer every day that the Trump administration is going to use every tool at its disposal to undermine the resistance.
Mother Jones reported on how what’s become known as the Prairieland case “became the Justice Department’s proving ground for its new war on antifa.” In July 2025 one protester outside a detention center in Prairieland, Texas shot a police officer. But some of the protesters who had nothing to do with the shooting were charged and convicted on federal terrorism and conspiracy charges and received draconian, decades-long sentences.
“Prosecutors spun up an elaborate tale of a Texas ‘Antifa Cell’ engaged in a campaign of terror,” the magazine reported. “Conspiracy charges can be an exceptionally powerful tool, enabling prosecutors to win convictions against defendants who were only marginally involved in alleged crimes. And as anti-ICE protests ramped up, the Trump administration began seeing conspiracies everywhere.”
The Guardian also wrote recently about Erik Davis, a professor of Buddhist studies, who “was one of thousands of Minnesotans who had rallied earlier this year when the Trump administration launched an aggressive crackdown on immigrants in the Twin Cities.” Davis now faces six years in prison on conspiracy charges:
In its 94-page indictment, the government has argued that Direct Action Minnesota, the loose coalition of organizers that Davis was connected with, conspired to obstruct federal law enforcement and had “ties” to “antifa”. The prosecution follows a pattern seen in other cases against demonstrators this year, with the government highlighting the comments and actions of some activists in the coalition to paint all 15 defendants as agitators pursuing violence against ICE…
“It’s petty revenge,” Davis said. “They’re trying to portray being part of a community as an illegal conspiratorial act.”
NPR reported on the growing use of conspiracy charges against protesters, particularly conspiracy to impede or injure officer. NPR found that “since President Trump took office last year, the Justice Department has charged more than three dozen people in at least 10 cases” using that statute. “All of them involve people protesting federal immigration enforcement. The government has also indicted nearly 50 people on conspiracy charges in Michigan, Texas and Minnesota using different legal statutes.”
The takeaway: “The rise in conspiracy charges has caused some legal experts to worry that the federal government is stretching the bounds of the law to sweep up political activists who oppose the Trump administration’s deportation agenda.”
The article’s kicker:
Katie Schwartzmann, legal counsel with the organization Protect Democracy, says more indictments against protesters could be coming.
“It’s important to see these indictments and the use of this law for what it is, which is an attempt to scare Americans,” Schwartzmann says. “But also, Americans should not be afraid to organize peaceful resistance in this moment. Those acts of ordinary people organizing and working together have been the most important force for justice in the history of our country.”
The Wall Street Journal reported that “ICE has deployed a round-the-clock digital dragnet to scour the public internet” to “surface everything from potential threats to agents to activities that could disrupt ICE’s operations”:
The program has ensnared U.S. citizens and activist groups that alert community members about ICE activity. Contractors prepare daily reports and dossiers on threat actors, identifying the poster’s name, location, date of birth, workplace, Social Security number, vehicle registration and criminal history when possible.
To unmask anonymous online critics, DHS has sent hundreds of subpoenas to social-media companies, according to people familiar with the matter. Its agents have tracked down Americans at work and on the road, asking them to sign letters acknowledging their online speech about ICE “may” be a crime.
The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, which is part of the Organization of American States, held a hearing on Tuesday on the Trump administration’s violent suppression of protests against federal immigration policies.
“As Donald Trump attacks the courts, weaponizes the Department of Justice, and targets attorneys who challenge his administration, we have been forced to seek justice beyond our borders,” two of the people who requested the hearing wrote in The Guardian.
One of the speakers at the hearing was the Rev. David Black, who described getting shot in the head with pepper balls last year after inviting masked ICE agents, stationed on the roof of a Chicago detention center, to repent. He testified:
The Trump administration’s method is recognizable because it is consistent with the consolidation of power by other authoritarian regimes to stigmatize migrants, to label their defenders extremists, to punish dissent, and to privilege compliant religion above prophetic religions. In the name of God, I pray that this commission will name what is happening for what it is: state violence used to suppress religious expression, peaceful assembly, and dissent.
The Week in the Courts
The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals has ordered Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency to issue $20 billion dollars of climate grants that it improperly terminated. The ruling will replenish the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, the Biden-era “green bank” that provides money to nonprofits to support low-cost loans and investments for renewable energy projects across the country.
A federal judge in Maryland temporarily blocked a U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services policy banning non-governmental organizations from providing voter registration assistance during naturalization ceremonies. Judge Adam B. Abelson cited administration invocations of the “replacement theory” – such as Vice President JD Vance’s accusation in 2022 that Democrats are encouraging an “invasion” of immigrants to “bring a large number of new voters to replace the voters we already have” – as evidence that the ban “was motivated by discriminatory intent.”
The Trump DOJ’s Civil Rights Division is now 0 and 20 in its lawsuits demanding that states turn over their unredacted voter rolls. Read Democracy Docket for the details.
A federal judge in Washington, D.C, overseeing the last of the prosecutions seeking to hold accountable those responsible for the events of January 6, 2021, “reluctantly” granted the Trump DOJ’s request to erase the seditious conspiracy conviction of Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes. Judge Amit P. Mehta wrote that “Today’s epilogue diminishes the gravity of that day, denigrates the work of the prosecutors and law enforcement officers who secured these convictions, and excuses criminal acts that caused a centuries-long pillar of our democracy – the peaceful transfer of presidential power – to buckle.”
A federal judge in California overseeing a major lawsuit over alleged racial profiling by federal agents during their violent surge in the Los Angeles area last summer is holding DHS in civil contempt for “undue delay” in turning over communications from cell phones used by those agents. Judge Maame Ewusi-Mensah Frimpong imposed a $500 per day fine on DHS until it complies. The January order to turn over the records “was clear – and Defendants have had months to comply,” she wrote. “The clear and convincing evidence shows that Defendants have acted intentionally and not in good faith.”
25 states filed suit in the Court of International Trade over Trump’s new tariffs, calling them “a pretext for imposing the same sweeping tariffs the administration has repeatedly tried and failed to enact.” The suit points out that “For more than a year and a half, the President has unilaterally imposed tariffs without legal authority to do so” and argues that “The Administration’s third attempt to impose worldwide tariffs – now through Section 301 of the Trade Act – is equally unlawful.”
Must Click
Mother Jones writes about Sherman Austin: “This Programmer Wants to Use Your Phone to Fight ICE”.
WTOP News reports: “Clergy, civic groups hold SAVE Act protest and get-out-the-vote rally in DC”. Members of Repairers of the Breach were also arrested following a demonstration inside the Hart Senate office building.
The Columbia Journalism Review writes about El Grito Media, a small, young, digital-first newsroom stood up by the League of Latin American Citizens (LULAC), whose short videos “cover a range of subjects affecting the Latino community, from immigration and law enforcement to mental health and childcare.” Here’s one report on federal agents using a new slur – “tonk” – to describe targets of immigration operations.
Protect Democracy exposes “What a year in D.C. has cost the National Guard” – and it’s not just money. “Trump’s deployment is quietly unraveling the Guard’s core mission.”
So full of hope — and tears.