Three or four nights a week, from 10 pm to 6 am, Mireille bends over a conveyor belt, quickly plucking out bad beans or kernels of corn bound for the cannery. The seasonal work started in July, and it ends this month. After this, she’ll need to find a new job. But her biggest concern isn’t the job market—it’s what happens on November 5. She’s heard Donald Trump’s promises of mass deportation, even of immigrants who are here legally like Mireille—and she’s heard the insults he’s hurled against Haitians in particular.
“I’m worried,” Mireille told me through a translator. She was nervous even to speak about immigration, and she asked that I use her first name only. “I just came to the country. I haven’t worked enough, and I have nothing saved. Going back home would be a disaster.” Haiti is now facing an acute hunger emergency and a lack of clean water. Tens of thousands of Haitians have been displaced by political violence. Gunmen rampage through towns and massacre children.
Mireille came here to Delaware in search of a better life, but the promise of stability now seems hazier than ever. Through those long overnight shifts, the same thought keeps playing in her mind: “I didn’t leave anything back home in coming here, and then to go back there with nothing in my hands?”
Mireille arrived in the United States in April 2023, three months after the Biden administration implemented a two-year “humanitarian parole” for Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans ‘fleeing political violence and natural disasters to find work in the U.S.—up to 30,000 people per month. The program formally known as the Processes for Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans (CHNV) is “divine intervention” for Haitians with no other options, said Emanie Dorival, a nurse practitioner who works with the Haitian community in Delaware. “There is no way all these Haitians and the other countries who are part of that program would have been allowed to come.” People who worked as lawyers, doctors, nurses, and accountants in Haiti now find themselves on the production line, she said. “They’re doing whatever to survive. It’s about survival.”
At Mireille’s church in a small town a few miles from the capital of Dover, about three-quarters of congregants are recent arrivals. Haitians were the largest group of immigrants within the program, with about 214,000 moving to the U.S. and filling jobs in industries that have struggled to retain workforces, especially after Covid killed and disabled so many workers. The program also revitalized dying towns,........