MIAMI — Come Tuesday, Richard has only bad options to choose from. He’s one of the more than 300,000 Haitians nationwide who will lose their Temporary Protected Status, per the Trump administration’s decision to end the program on Feb. 3.

Richard fled Haiti in February 2023, a year and seven months after President Jovenel Moïse’s assassination plunged the nation into anarchy, empowering organized crime to take over much of the country and to subject the population to extreme violence and deprivation.

In the intervening months, Richard, who asked to be identified by a pseudonym because he worries about legal repercussions, said he regularly feared for his survival. He was held at gunpoint. Gang members locked three of his closest friends in a car and burned them alive, he said.

So he fled his hometown, the notoriously gang-ridden Cité Soleil slum in northern Port-au-Prince, to South Florida, where he picked up a housekeeping job at the Toby & Leon Cooperman Sinai Residences, a continuing care retirement community in Boca Raton.

He can’t go back to Haiti. “It’s dangerous,” he says. But he can’t stay in the U.S., either — not legally at least, if a court order doesn’t block the termination. His life is here, though, and he doesn’t know where else to go.

“I can’t travel now,” Richard said, “and all of my savings are invested here, in the U.S.”

In the same boat are tens of thousands of Haitian TPS holders in Greater Miami, home to the largest such population of any metropolitan area in the country.

Miami’s TPS holders contribute hundreds of millions of dollars annually in state and federal taxes, and they pump more than a billion dollars a year into the national and local economies, estimates Phillip Connor, a research fellow at Princeton University’s Center for Migration and Development who analyzed data from the U.S. Census Bureau. Many of them serve invaluable roles in certain critical sectors, like health care.

Some business owners say the loss will reverberate throughout South Florida’s economy — the most dependent on their labor of any region in the country — and will hit hardest in key industries, including health care, especially for the elderly.

Florida is home to nearly half of Haitian TPS holders

Richard hopes to one day become a nurse, and he’s studying nursing at a college in South Florida. “I want to take care of people,” he said.

His housekeeping job at Sinai Residences pays for nursing school. Richard is one of about 40 Haitian TPS holders who make up the community’s 450-plus staff.

Those workers account for 9% of the company’s employees. They’re nurses, nursing assistants, housekeepers, cooks, dietary aides, memory care workers and waiters, and they’re integral to Sinai Residences’ operations, said Rachel Blumberg, the community’s CEO: “There’s no department spared.”

Nor are many of Florida’s other critical industries.

The state is home to 158,000 Haitian TPS holders — nearly half of all Haitian TPS recipients in the U.S. That’s more than triple New York state’s Haitian TPS-holding population, the second largest in the country.

More than 90,000 of Florida’s Haitian TPS holders are part of the state’s workforce, and Connor’s analysis suggests they contribute more than a half-billion dollars annually in combined federal, state and local taxes, on top of $2.6 billion in annual contributions to the national and local economies.

The Miami metro area, which extends up through West Palm Beach, is home to about 90,000 of the state’s Haitian TPS holders — roughly equivalent to the combined Haitian TPS populations of New York, Massachusetts, New Jersey and Pennsylvania — 52,000 of whom are part of the local workforce, Connor found.

Approximately 9,000 work in leisure and hospitality, another 9,000 in wholesale and retail trade, and 8,000 in agriculture. An additional 6,000 work in health care — including about 4,000 as nursing assistants, often in eldercare centers like Sinai Residences, Connor’s analysis of Census data shows.

Especially in health care settings, those workers often fill roles that native-born Americans are less inclined to take, said Blumberg, who estimates that nearly 70% of her staff is foreign-born.

Farther south in Pompano Beach, Jennifer Stevens, vice president of healthcare at the John Knox Village of Florida retirement community, said she’s concerned about losing the hard-to-come-by experience of the 10 TPS-holding Haitians who work for her as certified nursing assistants.

Continuity of care is key to quality of care, she said. Like at Sinai Residences, many of John Knox Village’s TPS holders have worked there for years.

“It’s a huge loss for us,” said Stevens. “There’s no price you could put on the knowledge of really knowing the residents and being able to meet their needs seamlessly.”

Priceless as that knowledge may be, trying to replace it will be costly, Stevens said. Paying overtime wages to fill gaps left by the newly undocumented Haitians could cost Knox Village, a nonprofit, well into the thousands of dollars, Stevens estimates.

Plus, she fears nursing homes, hospitals — any care centers — will now compete for a smaller pool of qualified workers. They’ll have to pay higher wages to attract applicants, ultimately driving up costs for patients and residents, she said.

But in other sectors, where undocumented work is more common, those who lost their status could reenter the workforce — just without papers, said Helene O’Brien, Florida state director for 32BJ SEIU, a national union that represents property-related service workers, like custodians, security officers, doormen and maintenance staff.

“It’s going to hurt American workers’ wages, because all it does is create a huge ocean of desperate workers who will do anything to survive,” she said. “That is undercutting people who actually have papers.”

‘We are frightened about losing them’

But at Sinai Residences, the biggest concern is losing the workers who have accompanied residents day in and day out for years. Blumberg said many residents at Sinai, a Jewish community, relate to the plight of their Haitian caregivers, “whether it’s themselves or their ancestors being ousted from countries.”

“You kind of think of Anne Frank,” she said, adding that “I’ve had residents that have said to me, ‘Can I hide them in my apartment?’”

Fran and Gene Smolar, who have lived at Sinai Residences for a decade, lamented the imminent loss of some of their most cherished caregivers.

“They are kind, they are caring. They are excellent workers, and we are frightened about losing them, and frightened for them as well,” said Fran, 88.

Soon after, Blumberg told the couple that a member of the culinary team who serves them daily would be losing their status.

Fran stared silently across the table at Blumberg, her mouth slightly agape.

“Oh God,” she whispered, covering her eyes.

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(Miami Herald staff writer Jacqueline Charles contributed reporting.)

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