Each morning, breakfast for Solange French started with eggs and the same familiar face. French is 91, lives in New York, and for years has counted on Martha Nelson, a home health aide from Haiti, to help her shower, get to her doctor’s appointments, and make it through the day. Nelson’s right to work rested on Temporary Protected Status, the federal designation that lets people stay and work legally when their home country is too dangerous to return to. That protection ended for Haitians on July 27, 2026. “Life would be impossible,” French told the Associated Press, imagining the mornings Nelson wouldn’t arrive.
French is one of hundreds of thousands. Roughly 350,000 Haitians held the status when the termination was announced, according to Associated Press reporting. In Mullin v. Doe, decided June 25, 2026, the Supreme Court ruled that courts can’t review the executive branch’s decision to end a TPS designation. That removed the last real legal obstacle. U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services confirmed on July 29 that Haitian work permits in the affected categories are no longer valid. The fight over exact timing isn’t finished. Inside workplaces, the effect had already begun: employers started separating Haitian workers this summer, and some let them go ahead of the final dates, unwilling to risk a compliance mistake.
The Sector Losing Workers Is Also the Biggest Home for Black Business Owners
Black-owned businesses cluster in one industry more than any other. Health care and social assistance held 38,319 Black-owned employer firms in 2020, and those firms employed 468,433 people, the Census Bureau reported. These are home-care agencies, adult day programs, group homes, and nursing-support companies.
The same industry leans on immigrant labor, and Haitians are a large share of it. About 103,000 Haitian immigrants worked in health care in 2021, the Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan group that studies immigration, found. That made Haiti the sixth-largest origin country for immigrant health-care workers. Most fill the hands-on jobs that keep a care business open: nursing assistants, personal-care aides, home-health aides. Those are relationships built over years, and they don’t transfer to a new hire overnight.
Black Women Absorb the Loss in Three Places at Once
Many of the people who own care businesses, work inside them, and depend on them are Black women. That overlap means one policy can reach the same household three ways: through a company’s payroll, through an aide’s paycheck, and through the unpaid hours a family member picks up when paid help disappears. When a trusted caregiver leaves, the cost doesn’t vanish. It moves. Some families move a parent into a facility that charges more. Others pull a daughter or sister out of paid work to cover the gap, trading her wages for hours she isn’t paid for.
The scenes are already documented. In Sunny Isles Beach, Florida, an 87-year-old Holocaust survivor lost the Haitian aide who had come to her home every week for a decade. Jewish Community Services of South Florida let that aide go, along with 17 others, once their status lapsed. In Nanuet, New York, a group home run by The Arc Rockland stood to lose 19 caregivers with the status, on top of 20 it had lost to earlier immigration changes.
Removing the Workers Won’t Hand Their Jobs to Anyone Else
A common assumption runs the other way. Pushing out immigrant workers, the argument goes, opens jobs for U.S.-born workers, including Black workers competing for the same roles. In care work, the evidence points in the opposite direction. Researchers at MIT and Harvard found that every 1,000 additional immigrants in a metro area added roughly 173 health-care workers. Those gains added to the domestic workforce rather than replacing it. “When immigration rises in a city, it significantly increases the health care workforce,” said Jonathan Gruber, the MIT economist who co-authored the study. Run in reverse, the finding means pulling caregivers out shrinks total care capacity instead of freeing up slots.
The contraction is already measurable. The number of noncitizen immigrant workers fell by about 600,000 from January 2025 to April 2026. That estimate comes from KFF, a nonpartisan health-policy research group. Reduced immigrant participation in the workforce “is going to exacerbate existing worker shortages,” said Drishti Pillai, the group’s director of immigrant health policy.
Some Black workers in directly competing, lower-wage roles could gain openings where immigrant labor exits, or a little more bargaining power. Earlier research by economists including George Borjas documented that effect for lower-skilled Black men. Where those gains appear, they tend to be uneven and local. An opening only helps if the job is reachable. Many come with irregular hours, physical demands, credential requirements, or pay that doesn’t cover childcare.
For Black Owners, the Real Loss Is the Value of the Business
For a worker, the immediate loss is a paycheck. For an owner, it’s larger and slower. A care agency that can’t staff its cases turns away clients, runs on overtime, or leans on temp agencies that charge more. Reduced capacity and lost clients lower the cash the business will bring in over the years ahead, and a business is worth what its future cash flow is worth. An owner forced to sell in that position sells low.
The households behind these jobs often carry mixed legal status. Many Haitian workers live with U.S.-citizen children and relatives, so a lost paycheck can stall a home purchase, a college fund, or an insurance payment for a family that is otherwise secure. Guerline Jozef, executive director of the Haitian Bridge Alliance, a nonprofit that advocates for Haitian and other Black immigrants, called the termination, in her words, “an act of violence against Black migrants.” The workers losing status, the owners losing staff, and the families losing income are, in large part, the same Black community.
Black Institutions Are Fighting the Terminations in Congress and the Courts
Black political and legal institutions have treated the terminations as an economic issue, not only an immigration one. The Congressional Black Caucus and the Haitian Bridge Alliance held a national town hall on the terminations that drew more than 500 participants. Nineteen state attorneys general, led by Maryland’s Anthony Brown, took the argument to the Supreme Court. Ending the status, they wrote, would drain workforces, raise health-care costs, and weaken state economies.
For owners, the exposure concentrates wherever a single immigrant-heavy role carries the business. Federal guidance on employment verification, which USCIS keeps updated as the litigation moves, lays out which documents stay valid and for how long. Employers are leaning on that record to avoid cutting workers loose too early. The legal schedule is still shifting, so the dates that count are the ones posted when a decision has to be made, not the ones that were current a week before.
