Farah Larrieux has spent 16 years building her life in the United States. She started a successful communications business, worked part-time in the hospitality industry and made a comfortable life for herself in Miramar, Florida, a suburb of Miami.
On Monday, the Trump administration started taking it all away after the Supreme Court cleared the path for it last month.
The court sided with the administration’s move to strip Haitian immigrants like Larrieux of Temporary Protected Status — the lawful protection that had let the 47-year-old live and work in the U.S. legally. Overnight, she told MS NOW, the American dream she had built turned into “a nightmare.”
“The idea of [the] United States, the ‘land of opportunity for all’ — is it really for all?” Larrieux said.
She is one of an estimated 1.8 million immigrants the Trump administration has stripped of lawful status since the start of President Donald Trump’s second term, according to an MS NOW analysis of figures compiled by immigration advocacy groups and data publicly posted by the Department of Homeland Security.
That total goes well beyond TPS holders. It also includes immigrants who received parole status through a Biden-era app known as CBP One, and a separate program for Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans and Venezuelans. The figure is likely an undercount, immigration lawyers and advocates say, because it assumes overlap between TPS holders and people with certain parole status.
They are people who built their lives through legal channels — healthcare workers, hospitality workers, small-business owners — and who now face return to countries some say they will not survive. One Haitian immigrant, Maryse, told MS NOW she would be going back to a “war zone.” Another, Vilbrun, said he came to the U.S. thinking he “had nothing to fear because I’m not a criminal.” The prospect of returning to Haiti is dire, he said: “I know I would die” if forced to return. Both asked only to be identified by their first names, out of fear of being targeted.
The State Department designates Haiti as a “Level 4 — Do Not Travel” country, the riskiest classification. A travel advisory issued July 10 warns of kidnapping, terrorism and violent crime it describes as “rampant.”
Immigration lawyers describe a deliberate effort to strip legal status at scale. “They take people who are lawfully here and they remove that lawful status — that’s what you see across the board,” said David Leopold, an immigration lawyer in Ohio. The administration is also blocking people who have legal status from applying for extensions or status changes, Leopold said, describing a campaign to “de-legalize” immigrants that is running on “steroids.”
Immigration lawyers, immigrants, legal scholars and policy experts who spoke to MS NOW described the Trump administration’s approach to immigration as “punitive,” “unprecedented” and larger in scale than any seen in recent history. Several said it echoed a time when the country instituted racial and ethnic quotas in its immigration policies.
“This is how you create a shadow population,” said Pratheepan Gulasekaram, a professor of constitutional and immigration law at the University of Colorado Law School. “This is how you create a population of unlawfully present people in the country who would rather try and spend their time evading enforcement than whatever horrors might await them.”
The sweeping deportation campaign, Gulasekaram said, marks a return to the America of the late 1800s and early 1900s, “when the United States was being constructed as a white, and specifically a Northern and Western European white, nation.”
The White House did not respond to questions about comparisons between Trump’s immigration policies and those of past presidents who prioritized white immigrants. “The Trump Administration continues to lawfully end the egregious abuses to our immigration system that have hurt Americans for years,” White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson said.