Everyone in the House

A school district in Florida counted its students last week and found more than eight thousand fewer of them than it had a year ago. Among the children the district classifies as immigrants, the two largest drops were Venezuelan and Haitian. The number of Haitian children fell from 2,110 to 1,395 — 715 desks, in one county, in one year.

That is the newest verified thing this page knows today, and the honest way to read it is household by household. So that is how this is written.

This is not a prediction about you. Nobody has to leave the country, and losing TPS is still not a deportation order.

The child at the desk

Orange County Public Schools, which covers Orlando, gave its data to Central Florida Public Media. The number of students the district classifies as immigrants fell from 18,517 in October 2025 to 13,211 this October, a loss of more than 5,300. The district said it noticed a sharp decline in Haitian enrolment this summer, around the time the change to Haitian TPS took effect.

Two things in that reporting matter more than the totals.

The first is what the classification is. The district counts these students under the federal Every Student Succeeds Act, which covers children aged 3 to 21 who were born outside the United States and have been in American schools for three years or less. The district said the data is collected for federal education reporting and does not indicate a student’s current immigration status. It is a funding and reporting category. It is not a list of anybody’s papers, and it is not a finding about your child.

The second is what the numbers do not say. The newsroom wrote plainly that the data does not establish that the TPS changes alone caused students to leave, and does not show where those children went — how many graduated, how many moved to another district, how many are being taught at home, how many simply no longer fit the three-year rule. Fabiola Gomez, who heads Casa de Venezuela Orlando, told the station she had heard that some families left the state or turned to homeschooling. That is what she said she had heard; no agency has published a count.

This week: if your child is enrolled, keep them enrolled, and keep your own dated copy of the enrolment record, the immunisation record and any address verification the school holds. If you are asked for a document you do not recognise, ask for the request in writing before you hand anything over, and keep a copy of what you give and the date you gave it (tools and checklists).

The parent who could be detained

This page published the Maryland standby-guardianship form yesterday, and it is still the most useful thing a household can finish on its own. Form CC-GN-041 names in advance who may care for your children if immigration detains you. The Maryland Judiciary publishes a bilingual English–Haitian Creole version, CC-GN-041BLH, eight pages, free on the court’s own website. It takes two witnesses and nothing is filed in court to make it exist.

The limits travel with it, in the court’s own words: it must be completed and filed in English, the standby guardian’s authority “will end after 180 days” unless that person petitions the court, and the parent “retain[s] full parental rights” and may revoke it at any time. It is paperwork about who looks after your children; it is not immigration status, and it does not stop anyone being detained. The rest, including the clinic that helps with it, is in yesterday’s entry on the feed.

Maryland is one of only nine jurisdictions — eight states and the District of Columbia — whose standby guardianship laws are triggered immediately by a detention or deportation, according to Priya Baskaran, a law professor at American University. Where immigration is not written into the statute, she told the Baltimore Banner, relying on it is “kind of a gamble.”

This week: if you are in Maryland, download the Creole version and sign it. If you are not, ask a lawyer what your own state’s law does before you rely on anything (find free legal help). Either way, write the family plan tonight — who collects the children, who holds the documents, which relative gets the phone call (tools and checklists).

The person with a check-in or a monitor

This page carried, on Saturday, the account of people re-detained at ICE check-ins after years of complying. The instruction has not changed and it is the uncomfortable one: go to your appointment anyway. Not appearing can produce an order in absentia, which is worse than the appointment.

Take someone with you who can tell your family where you were taken if you do not come home. Write down the date, the time, and the name of every officer you speak to. If you are wearing a GPS ankle monitor, do not try to take the device off yourself; if it is injuring you, ask a doctor to put that in writing, keep your own copy of the letter, and give a copy to a lawyer and not only to the officer (know your rights · if someone is detained).

The relative in Haiti waiting on money

Digicel’s internet service went down again on Monday — the third interruption in less than a month, after one on Sept. 23 and another on Oct. 4 and 5. In a statement on Oct. 12 the company said two of its international fibre-optic links along Route Nationale 1 appear to have been damaged: “We received reports of heavy gunfire in the area in question, and we believe this may have caused damage to our international fiber-optic cables.” It said its technical teams were “assessing the best way to safely access the area,” and it gave no date for restoration. Customers inside and outside Haiti could not connect.

This page is not printing anything about whether mobile-money transfers were affected, because the company’s statement did not say and no newsroom this page read has reported it.

This week: if you sent money and cannot reach anyone, check that it arrived before sending again, and keep the date, the amount and the reference number of every transfer. That written record is what a transfer company acts on when money goes missing. Nobody will ever ask you for your secret code — not a bank, not MonCash or NatCash, not a transfer agent, and not anyone who telephones while a service is down. Nobody may charge you a fee to unlock money that is already yours.

The person who heard the rally

At the Covelli Centre in Youngstown, Ohio, on Monday night, the president spoke about Springfield and said: “All of a sudden, they dropped 35,000 people in from Haiti, and it didn’t work out too well.” He then repeated the claim about Haitian residents of Springfield he had made in a 2024 debate, which was unsubstantiated then and remains so. Chants of “deport” went up from the audience. It was his second Ohio visit in ten days; this page covered the first, on Oct. 3.

The speech did not say what the 35,000 counts, over what period, or where the figure comes from. This page’s own published figure for Springfield is the Columbus Dispatch’s reporting that more than 10,000 Haitians live there, and this page is not going to pretend those two numbers have been reconciled by anybody.

What can be said exactly is this: a speech is not a removal order. No rally, no press conference and no number said from a stage removes anyone. Removal requires a legal process in which you have rights, and for most people that means a case in immigration court.

This week: you cannot check a speech, but you can check your own case, free, in one call. The immigration court system runs an automated line, 1-800-898-7180, open 24 hours, which will tell you from your A-number whether you have a case at all, your next hearing date, and whether a judge has decided anything. The online version at acis.eoir.justice.gov shows your most recent case only. If you have never had an immigration court case you will find nothing, and that is an answer, not an error. The line is in English and Spanish only, so bring someone who can interpret.

What has not changed

TPS for Haiti and Syria is terminated, effective July 27, 2026, and the work permits that rested on it expired the same day. This page re-read the USCIS pages today: the stamp has not moved, both designations are still listed as terminated effective that date, and the newest Haiti entry in USCIS’s I-9 guidance for employers is still the one released on July 29.

Losing TPS is still not a judge ordering you personally to leave, and most people who lost it do not have such an order. A minority do — if an immigration judge has already ordered your removal, that order did not go away when TPS ended, and nothing said at a rally changes it either. If that is you, see a lawyer this week (find free legal help).

And do not sign anything you have not read, do not give up a job or a lease because of a speech, and do not pay anyone who says they can keep you off a list. Nobody may charge you a fee to put your name on anything (know your rights · tools and checklists).