A Church of One and a Plaza of 300: What Sunday, August 30 Looked Like in Springfield — and the Six Things Worth Doing This Week

On Sunday, August 30, a Pentecostal pastor in Springfield, Ohio held a service for one person. The same afternoon, in the same city, roughly 300 people filled the plaza in front of City Hall. Both of those things were the same story.

Sunday is the day this community can be counted. Last week it was counted twice, and the two numbers point in opposite directions — one at how many people are now afraid to walk out their front door, one at how many are willing to stand in a public square about it. Here is what is actually verified, what is only being claimed, and what has not changed at all.

What happened

A church of one. Pastor Fontil Daity told Kathryn Post of Religion News Service, reporting for NPR’s Weekend Edition Sunday, that his Pentecostal congregation used to draw 80 worshippers. On the Sunday Post describes, it was Daity and a single member. He prayed for her and sent her home after learning ICE was in the neighborhood. Some churches in the city have cancelled services altogether.

A plaza of 300. That same Sunday afternoon, about 300 people gathered in the plaza in front of Springfield City Hall for an event called “Unshackle Springfield” — a potluck, songs, speakers from several faiths, and a march seven times around the building they called a “Jericho March,” WYSO’s Katie Geniusz reported. It is the continuation of the campaign that held a press conference at Greater Grace Temple on Friday, August 28.

Two demands, both specific. Pastors travelled from across Ohio, packed food boxes for Haitian families and wrote letters to elected officials, WYSO’s Kathryn Mobley reported. Their demands: that DHS stop requiring ankle monitors, and that it release Springfield pastor Joubert Adrien, taken on August 20 and, as of Sunday, still held. That is ten days of public, organized, well-covered pressure that has not brought one man out of a county jail.

An ankle monitor on a work permit. At Christ Episcopal Church, Post met a man who had just come back from a local ICE field office fitted with an ankle monitor. He works at a hospital. He has an active asylum case and a work permit. He asked NPR not to print his name because of that case. He said he worries his patients will now think he is a criminal.

The letters. Haitians in Springfield are receiving letters ordering them to report to ICE offices near Cincinnati. James Fluerijean of the Haitian Support Center told Post that the people he sees all take the monitor rather than go back — “the whole world they know going back to Haiti is being placed in a death sentence.”

What people are afraid to do. Vilès Dorsainvil of the Haitian Community Help and Support Center, speaking at Sunday’s rally, listed it plainly: people are afraid to go to work, afraid to take their children to school, afraid to seek medical care, afraid to report a crime.

Claimed, and not verified

Three things circulated this weekend that deserve to be separated from the record.

“The judges made a decision they must go home.” That was border czar Tom Homan on CNN’s State of the Union, asked why the administration is returning Haitians into gang violence. He also said, in the same answer, “I don’t know the conditions in Haiti. I have never been in Haiti.” The claim that a judge personally ordered these individuals out is not what ended TPS. Ending TPS was a government decision, made by the Department of Homeland Security and allowed to proceed by the courts. It is not an immigration judge ordering you, by name, to leave. The distinction is not a technicality — it decides what your next step is, and you can check it yourself. See below.

How many people have been arrested in Springfield. Nobody official will say. DHS and ICE were asked directly by the Washington Examiner for a count and declined, with a spokesperson saying only that the department “does not discuss ongoing or future operations.” Every number this site has published — more than 40 Springfield Haitians across four Ohio jails, the day-by-day arrest tallies — comes from reporters and community groups counting by hand. There is no official list coming. A quiet week is not evidence of safety, and a name you cannot find on a jail roster is a reason to keep looking, not a conclusion in either direction.

Population figures. Three outlets published three different counts of how many Haitians live in the Springfield area in a single week. We are not repeating any of them. It does not change what one family should do on Monday morning.

What has not changed

This part is the same today as it was in July, and it will be the same tomorrow.

Losing TPS is not a deportation order. It ended a status. It did not, by itself, order anyone out of the country. If an immigration judge has already ordered your removal, that is a separate thing and it is real — see a lawyer about it this week. But most people reading this do not have one, and the difference matters enormously.

You do not have to open your door. An officer who does not have a warrant signed by a judge — not an ICE form, a judge’s signature — does not have the authority to make you open it. You do not have to answer questions. This is true at your home, and it is true on a Sunday.

A pending application is not the same as protection from enforcement. This site published that in August from ICE’s own guidance, and this week’s reporting shows it in practice: a man with a work permit and an active asylum case still came out of his appointment wearing a monitor. That is not a reason to give up on paperwork — it is a reason not to skip legal advice because you assume your paperwork already answers the question.

Nobody has to leave. The offers of money and a flight are offers, not orders, and accepting one can change whether and when you are able to come back. Talk to a lawyer before you sign anything.

What to do this week

1. Check your own immigration court case — free, and in one phone call. The Justice Department’s automated line, 1-800-898-7180, is toll-free, 24 hours a day, and acis.eoir.justice.gov shows the same information online. Both need your A-number. Both are in English and Spanish only, so ask someone to sit with you if you need Creole. If you have never had a case in immigration court, there will be nothing there to find — that is a normal result, not a bad one.
2. If a letter arrives telling you to report to ICE, talk to a free immigration lawyer before the date on it, not after. A report date has ended two different ways in Springfield this month: some people leave with an ankle monitor, and this page has also reported ICE taking people into custody at the appointment instead. Which one your situation points to is exactly what a lawyer who reads your file can tell you. Start at Got a letter to report to ICE? and free legal help.
3. Decide today who takes care of your children if you do not come home. Not as a prediction — as paperwork. Make a family plan.
4. Know what you will say before someone knocks. Read it, then say it out loud once so it is there when you need it: know your rights. Put a card in your wallet: print a rights card.
5. If someone has stopped answering, start tonight. Search the detainee locator, then call the jail. A transfer out of state can happen in about a day, so the lawyer call belongs the same night, not the next week. Find someone detained.
6. Do not wait for a campaign to free anyone. Three hundred people in a public plaza, statewide press coverage and a named pastor’s ten-day detention have not, so far, produced a release. Public pressure is worth having. It is not a legal strategy, and it is not a substitute for a lawyer on your specific case.

One last thing

The most quoted sentence out of Springfield this Sunday came from Dorsainvil, and it was not about policy: “Just for a few moments imagine waking up every morning and wondering whether leaving your house could change your life forever.”

That is an accurate description of what fear does, and it is why this page is careful with numbers. Staying home has its own costs — missed work, missed school, a child who does not go to a doctor, a crime nobody reports. It is also not your only protection. The door, the papers, the phone call, the plan: those are things you control this week, and they are worth more than any figure anyone quoted about Springfield in the last seven days.

Every factual claim on this page is checked against our status board before it publishes. If you believe something here is wrong, tell us — we will correct it.