What Is Waiting If You Go Back

People in Haitian households in the United States are being told, in different ways and by different people, that they should think about going back. Some of it comes from the government. Some of it comes from a relative on the telephone. Some of it is simply the pressure of a work permit that expired in July and a status that ended with it.

This page is not going to tell you what to decide. That decision belongs to you and to a lawyer who has read your file. What this page can do is set out, plainly and with its sources named, what is verifiably on the other side this week — not in general, not next year, but in the days this article was written.

What follows is organised by doorway: the hospital, the road, the office and the money. Each section ends with one thing you can finish this week without anyone’s permission.

This is not a prediction about you.

The hospital

On Monday, Oct. 19, medical students from the Faculty of Medicine and Pharmacy of the State University of Haiti called a press conference at a library in Pétion-Ville to say that the country’s main public hospital is still closed, and has now been closed for 32 months.

The Hôpital de l’Université d’État d’Haïti, in Port-au-Prince, is the hospital that takes referral patients and where much of the country’s medical training happens. The students said that a plan to move its services to another facility — which, according to them, the health minister, Bertrand Sinal, announced in September — has produced nothing they can see, and that without a working teaching hospital they cannot complete the clinical part of their training.

Two limits belong with that, and this page is stating them rather than smoothing them over. The September announcement is the students’ account of what the minister said, not a statement this page read from the ministry; this site could not reach the health ministry, and no official answer to the students has been reported. And the report this page read does not say why the hospital closed, so this page is not going to supply a reason it has not read. The figure of 32 months is the newsroom’s own.

What it does mean is concrete. If someone in your household has a serious medical condition, you cannot assume there is a hospital waiting at the other end.

This week: make your own copy of every prescription, diagnosis and hospital record anyone in your household holds, and give a copy to a lawyer — not only to an office. A condition that is written down is something a lawyer can use. A condition nobody wrote down is not.

The road

On Sunday, Oct. 18, gangs ambushed a vehicle belonging to the Gang Suppression Force — the multinational force the UN Security Council authorised — at Santo, in Croix-des-Bouquets, inside the Port-au-Prince metropolitan area. The force said its personnel returned fire with helicopter support and that it was still verifying the circumstances. In the same statement it asked people living in Santo and the communities next to it to stay in their homes and keep away from the area where it was operating.

A young resident reached at Santo by Vant Bèf Info described families shut inside their houses, children made to hide under beds, people keeping away from the windows.

This is not one neighbourhood’s problem. A report the force itself filed for April to August says armed groups still hold or influence the major access routes into Port-au-Prince. And the United Nations report presented to the Security Council on Oct. 19 says attacks have spread into rural areas, naming Saint-Michel-de-l’Attalaye, Marigot and Léogâne.

This week: if anyone in your family is planning to drive to or from the airport in Haiti, or to travel anywhere to collect a document, do not treat any road as open on assumption. Have someone confirm by telephone first. This site could not reach any Haitian authority to ask which roads are passable, and the force gave no end time for its operation.

The office

If your plan depends on a paper coming from a Haitian government office — an identity card, a birth certificate, a passport — then what is happening to those offices is your problem too.

Fifteen Haitian unions published a joint note on Monday, Oct. 19 giving their government until Thursday, Oct. 29 to meet three demands: withdraw the notice imposing a 15% levy on workers, pay a fourteenth month of salary to civil servants in all ten departments, and settle the state’s debts to the hospitals that treat insured public employees. If those are not answered, the note says there will be a day of union and popular mobilisation across all ten departments on Friday, Oct. 30, with a second deadline of Monday, Nov. 30 and two further mobilisation days on Tuesday, Dec. 1 and Wednesday, Dec. 2.

On the same Monday, employees of the state’s national vocational training institute protested at its own offices in Pétion-Ville over pay, a 15% levy and their health cover, and said they would keep going until their demands were met.

Nobody has published a list of offices that will close, and this page has still seen no report of whether any Haitian government office opened or shut on Oct. 19. So read those as announced dates and not as a schedule of closures.

This week: if a relative is collecting a document for you, ask them to finish it before Oct. 29, and to telephone or go in person to confirm the office is open before you count on it. Do not let a deadline on this side — a filing, a school form, a lawyer’s appointment — depend on a paper from an office whose hours nobody has confirmed. There are checklists for this at tools and checklists.

The money

Be careful with promised money, in both directions.

Families displaced from Bas-Delmas and Solino who are living in a camp on the grounds of the public works ministry at Delmas 33 protested on Monday, Oct. 19. They told Vant Bèf Info that the Haitian state had promised them 100,000 gourdes a family — about $766 at the central bank’s reference rate for Oct. 19 — to help them go back to their neighbourhoods, and that more than six months after that commitment nobody in the camp has been paid. No agency has answered them, and this page has seen no statement about either the promise or the delay.

That is the shape worth remembering. A promised payment is not a plan. If a decision in your household is resting on money somebody says will be waiting on arrival, it is resting on the same kind of promise that has not yet reached the people who have been waiting for it in a camp for six months.

And on this side of the water: nobody may charge you a fee to “sign you up” for anything on the strength of conditions in Haiti, because there is nothing to sign up for.

This week: if anyone has offered to register your family for a payment, a programme or a place on a list, treat the fee itself as the warning. Ask which organisation receives the money and get the answer in writing before anyone hands over anything.

What has not changed

None of the above changes anyone’s status in the United States, and this is the part people get wrong in both directions.

TPS for Haiti and Syria is terminated, effective July 27, 2026, and the work permits that ran with it expired the same day. That is what the USCIS page an employer or a clerk actually reads says, and this page checked it again this week: Haiti and Syria sit under the designations that have ended, each with that date.

Losing TPS is still not a deportation order. It is not an instruction to leave, it does not by itself put anyone on an aeroplane, and nobody can tell you otherwise and produce a document that says so.

There is a minority this sentence does not cover, and they need their own version of it: if a judge has already ordered your removal, that order did not go away when TPS ended, and it needs a lawyer this week.

If you are not certain which of those two describes you, you can check it yourself, for free. The immigration court’s automated line, 1-800-898-7180, will give your next hearing date and an immigration judge’s decision from your A-number, and the case status page at acis.eoir.justice.gov shows your most recent case. Both are in English and Spanish only. If you have never had an immigration court case, you will find nothing there — and that is information too, not a failure.

Before anyone decides

Going back is a decision some families will make, and making it with accurate information is better than making it on a rumour. That is the only reason this page prints any of the above.

If it is being weighed in your house, take it to a lawyer before you take it to a decision. Leaving can affect whether and how you are able to come back, and that is a question about your own file, which only a lawyer who has read it can answer. You can find free legal help here, and know your rights if immigration officers come to your door in the meantime.

This is not a prediction about you.