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After Emmanuel Damas’s death, families are left asking what comes next — and whether they’re safe.
Ruthzee Louijeune is a lawyer and at-large city councilor in Boston.
On March 2, Emmanuel Damas died in the custody of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Arizona. He had been in a coma, stemming from an untreated toothache he’d been complaining about for weeks.
He was taken into ICE custody last September after Boston Police arrested him on a domestic incident. Damas had been healthy and living legally in Boston as a political asylum applicant from Haiti. His 76-year-old mother and younger twin brothers flew to Arizona to fight for Damas to be unshackled on his hospital bed for his final breaths. The Saturday after his mother returned from Arizona, I visited her at her home. No words can describe a grieving mother’s agony.
Over the past year, my City Hall office has been flooded with calls from residents across our city. Their questions are simple, but the answers are not: What will happen to us now? Will I lose my job? Should I be afraid to go to work?
Last Wednesday, a man came to my office with his daughter. ICE had picked up his wife, a Brazilian national, and was holding her in Colorado. Without her income, the family could not afford both child care and rent, so they faced eviction. My staff and I listened, made phone calls and sent emails. We are doing all we can to help.
Recently, I have been convening some heavyweight philanthropic institutions and the mayor’s office to commit more than $3 million in a public-private partnership to support Boston’s immigrant communities.
I’ve been so focused on the work because that is what this moment demands. But I’ve also been hoping it could ease heartbreak. It has not.
Damas’s story is not isolated. It is part of a larger moment of fear and uncertainty for immigrant families across the country.
Damas was in the United States under a different status, but 350,000 Haitians are living and working in the United States now under Temporary Protected Status.
Many of them have been living here under this status since the 2010 earthquake in Haiti. They have US citizen children who have lived here for their entire lifetimes, teenagers in our schools. They are our bus drivers, home health aides, construction workers, and small-business owners. They pay taxes, collectively in the billions over time nationally. They volunteer in our churches and neighborhoods.
President Trump does not disguise his hatred of Haitians, which is steeped in anti-Blackness. In both of his terms, judges found that racial animus motivated his attempts to end TPS for Haitians and blocked his efforts. On March 6, an appeals court upheld the latest order. The Trump administration filed an appeal to the Supreme Court last week. The court has decided to hear oral arguments on an expedited basis in April, with a decision to follow in late June or July. An unfavorable ruling would expose 350,000 Haitians to deportation proceedings.
Meanwhile, our own State Department warns people not to travel to Haiti due to gang activity and control.
Representative Ayanna Pressley has filed a petition to force a vote in the House of Representatives to redesignate Haitian TPS, despite opposition from the Republican leadership. We are close to the signatures needed but have more work to do. I wish for a better future for Haiti. I long for a day when I can travel there to pay my respects to my beloved grandmother who raised me and who died in 2022. But such a voyage would now be unsafe.
I long for a Haiti whose soccer team, joyously making its first appearance in the World Cup in 52 years in Boston in June, could have played even one of its qualifying games in Haiti instead of nearby Curaçao.
Our Haitian neighbors with TPS can’t return safely to Haiti, and neither can I. Nor, as Damas’s death shows us, can they live safely exposed to the ICE deportation machine.
Do not let the Trump administration gaslight you. It is trying to create unlawful immigrants by stripping them of their lawful TPS status. The data show that immigrants commit fewer crimes than US citizens.
We must hold ICE accountable. We cannot feed more human lives to an irredeemable system rooted in racism, authoritarianism, and xenophobia. We cannot allow TPS to fall.
No matter what happens in Washington, our values of becoming a more perfect union rooted in progress and compassion must remain at the heart of who we are.
Even in uncertainty. Even in heartbreak.
https://www.bostonglobe.com/2026/03/20/opinion/tps-haitians-boston/
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