Eighty-Nine Went and One Did Not: What a Date on a Removal Manifest Is Actually Worth

At 1:29 on Thursday afternoon an ICE charter touched down at Cap-Haïtien with 89 people aboard: 77 men, 12 women and three children. That is the Miami Herald’s count, reported by Jacqueline Charles, who has been at the other end of these flights since the first one in August. It is the same Thursday rotation this page has tracked for four weeks, leaving out of Alexandria, Louisiana and stopping in Florida before it turns south.

One name that was supposed to be on that plane was not. Pastor Molis Augustave — stopped near York, Pennsylvania on Sept. 4 for a burned-out light while making DoorDash deliveries, in ICE custody the next day — had been scheduled for transport at 10:08 a.m. Thursday. He was not among the 89. He is still in ICE custody, and as of this writing neither his lawyers nor ICE has said publicly what kept him off the aircraft.

That gap, between a date that was set and a plane that left without him, is the whole subject of this piece. It is not a happy ending and we are not going to dress it up as one. But it is the single most useful thing a frightened household can understand this week, because almost everything families are told about removal dates is wrong in one direction or the other.

What is actually on the record

Three things are documented, and it is worth separating them by how solid each one is.

The flight happened and the count is a real count. Eighty-nine people, landed at 1:29 p.m., with the breakdown of men, women and children. That is a newsroom standing at the airport, not a projection. Earlier flights on this page came with numbers that were plans — “prepare for 71,” “capacity up to 78” — and those are not the same kind of fact at all. A plane landing is also not a list: no official manifest has been published, and nothing has been released about whether anyone aboard had held TPS.

The court file is real, and it is incomplete. In Augustave v. Acuna, case 1:26-cv-03591 in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Louisiana, a petition for a writ of habeas corpus was docketed Sept. 16 and an emergency motion for a temporary restraining order was docketed Sept. 17, filed by attorney Logan Joseph Duplessis. The case is assigned to Judge David C. Joseph. What the docket does not give us is a readable decision. We are not going to tell you a judge saved him, because we cannot read anything that says so, and a family that believes a court has ruled when no ruling is public will make decisions on a fiction.

The paperwork moved, and it did not stop anything. Days after his arrest, Augustave’s wife — a U.S. citizen — was notified that USCIS had approved the petition she filed to adjust his status. He was arrested anyway, detained anyway, and put on a manifest anyway. This is the hardest sentence on this page and it has been true all summer: an approval notice in the mail is not a shield at the side of a road.

What a removal date is, and what it is not

A date on a removal manifest is an operational plan. It is ICE scheduling an aircraft, a route and a seat. It is not a judgment, it is not final, and it changes — sometimes because a lawyer moved, sometimes because a consulate would not issue a travel document, sometimes for reasons nobody outside the agency ever learns. This page has now watched a manifest grow by two dozen names between Tuesday and Thursday, and watched a scheduled passenger stay on the ground. Both directions happen.

So the two wrong beliefs to get rid of are these. The first is that a date means it is over and there is nothing left to do — which leads families to stop calling lawyers in exactly the 72 hours when a filing can still be made. The second is that a date is probably nothing, because someone’s cousin had one and is still here — which leads families to skip the arrangements that only matter if the plane does leave. Both of those beliefs cost people things they cannot get back.

The courthouse is decided by where the body is

This is the practical fact that most families learn too late. A habeas corpus petition — the filing that asks a federal judge to look at whether someone is being lawfully held — must be filed in the federal district where the person is physically detained, not where their family lives, not where their church is, not where they were arrested. Augustave was taken in Pennsylvania. His petition is in Louisiana, a thousand miles from his congregation, because that is where ICE is holding him.

And it follows that a transfer moves the courthouse. If someone is moved from a county jail in Ohio to a facility in Louisiana overnight, the district that can hear their case moves with them. That is why the detainee locator is not a formality and not a comfort item: it is the thing that tells a lawyer which court to walk into. If you do only one thing when someone stops answering, do that one. Find someone detained.

What a pending case does not stop

On the same day the plane landed, a Haitian father in San Diego named Walto Deshommes was detained by ICE minutes after dropping his two-year-old daughter at a Head Start program in North Park. The child’s mother, who asked to be identified only as Suze, told KGTV that both of them held TPS until it ended in July and that both have asylum cases pending. The organization that runs the program confirmed the arrest and said staff called the child’s emergency contact.

Put that beside Augustave’s approved petition and the shape is clear: a pending asylum case does not prevent an arrest, and an approved family petition does not prevent a detention. Pending cases matter enormously — they are often the thing a lawyer builds a release or a reopening on — but they do not function as protection in a parking lot. Plan as though the arrest can happen, and keep the case alive so there is something to fight with afterward.

What has not changed

Losing TPS is not a deportation order. TPS for Haiti and Syria has been terminated since July 27, 2026, and the work permits ended the same day, and none of that converts into an order that a person be removed. Removal still requires a process, and in that process you still have rights — including the right to stay silent, the right to a lawyer at your own expense, and the right not to open your door to anyone without a warrant signed by a judge. None of that was suspended by the termination, and none of it was suspended by Thursday.

We also re-checked the official record today, as we do every run: the Federal Register’s document and public-inspection feeds carry no TPS notice for any country in either direction, and the USCIS TPS page is unchanged. If you hear otherwise from a WhatsApp group this weekend, it is not there yet. What we can and cannot confirm.

Five things to finish before next Thursday

1. Write down the A-number. Nine digits, on every immigration document. A lawyer can do almost nothing without it. Give a copy to one trusted person who does not live in your house.
2. Name the person who picks up your children. Then actually put them on the school or daycare emergency-contact card, in writing, this week. In San Diego that card is what let a two-year-old go home.
3. Decide who holds your papers. Passports, birth certificates, case receipts, the lease. One person, one place, known to everyone in the household. Tools and checklists.
4. Get a consultation, even a short one. If there is a pending case, a reopening, or a family petition, a lawyer needs to know before a date exists, not after. Find legal help.
5. Arrange the other end before you need it. If someone in your family could be put on one of these flights, money and a ride in Haiti have to be arranged before the plane leaves. The arrivals this page has documented came in after the migration office’s working hours, to a city many of them do not live in.

Eighty-nine people made that trip on Thursday. One person who was booked did not. Nobody can promise you which of those two your family will be, and anyone who does is selling something. What can be said is that the difference between them was made of filings, phone numbers and people who knew where to look — and all three of those are things a household can put in place on an ordinary afternoon, before there is a date at all.