Who in the House Got a Letter

The letters have been arriving in Springfield for months. This page has carried them since Aug. 6: an envelope telling someone to come to an ICE office on a particular morning, and to have a monitoring device fitted when they get there.

What is new, in a dispatch Slate published on Monday morning after its reporter spent three days in the city, is who is now receiving them. James Fleurijean, the office assistant and interpreter at the Haitian Support Center, told Alexander Sammon that letters have been arriving ordering children as young as four to report to ICE facilities to have monitoring set up.

“They don’t have a choice,” Fleurijean said. “They are compliant to the law.”

Here is what this page can and cannot tell you about that. It is one named community worker’s account, carried inside a national newsroom’s own reporting, and Fleurijean sits at the desk these families come to. But no agency has published a policy about summoning children, this page has not seen one of these letters, and ICE has not answered on the record in anything we could read. That the government has not confirmed it does not make it safe to ignore. It also does not make it a rule.

So this article is not organized around the policy. It is organized around the house — because the practical question in a Springfield kitchen this week is not what the policy is, it is which of us got a letter, and what do we do on Thursday morning.

This is not a prediction about you.

The child whose name is on the envelope

If a letter arrives with a child’s name on it, the letter is the fact. Not the rumour about letters, not this article, not what a neighbour heard. Read what it actually says: the date, the time, the street address of the office, and whether it names a person to ask for.

Then do three things before the date.

Find a lawyer, and bring one if you possibly can — free legal help lists the organizations that do this work without charging. Photograph or photocopy the letter, write the date you received it on your own copy, and keep that copy somewhere that is not the same place as the original. And go to the appointment.

That last one is hard to write, and it is still right. Not appearing is the one move that reliably makes things worse: for a court hearing it can produce a removal order entered in your absence, which is far harder to undo than attending ever was.

There is one more decision to make in advance, and it is the one families put off because it is unbearable. A child who is a United States citizen cannot be deported. But a parent who is removed may have to decide very quickly whether that child leaves with them or stays. Decide it now, while everyone is at the kitchen table and nobody is rushing you. Write down who would care for the child, how they can be reached, and who has copies of the birth certificate and the passport. The family plan and documents page walks through it, and a Maryland form that names who cares for your child exists in Haitian Creole.

The person already wearing something

Sammon writes that he was told ankle monitors have become less common in Springfield since the death of Pierre Damas Bel, the twenty-year-old student this page has carried since Sept. 1 — and that ICE has begun monitoring pregnant women with devices worn on the wrist, and other people through an app on their phone.

This page reported advocates’ account of a move to an app on Sept. 17. The wrist devices are new here. Both halves are a reporter’s account rather than an agency announcement, and neither changes what you should do.

If you are wearing a device of any kind: do not try to take it off yourself, whatever it is doing to your skin. Go to every appointment. If the device is injuring you, ask for medical attention in writing, keep your own dated copy of what you asked for and when, and give that copy to a lawyer rather than only to the officer.

And if your reporting channel changes — if you used to go in person and now you are told to use an app, or to email, or to call — that change is the thing to document. Keep your own dated copy of every message you send and every paper you hand over. A check-in you cannot prove you made is exactly the part of the record that goes missing later.

The person with a hearing three hours away

The same dispatch describes what a weekday afternoon at the Haitian Support Center actually consists of: windows papered over from the inside, blinds drawn, the door locked, a volunteer watching the parking lot — and most of the staff’s time going on arranging rides. Two hours to ICE offices in Cincinnati or Blue Ash. Three hours to court hearings in Cleveland. The dates and times change often.

That last detail is the one that costs people their cases, so take it seriously: check your own hearing date yourself. Do not rely on anyone’s description of it, including a letter that arrived weeks ago.

The free automated immigration-court line is 1-800-898-7180, open 24 hours, and acis.eoir.justice.gov shows the most recent case. Both work by A-number. Both are in English and Spanish only, a real gap for a Creole-speaking household, so have someone who reads English sit with you. And if you have never had an immigration court case, you will find nothing at all — that is not an error, and it does not mean something has been hidden from you.

Write down what you are told and the date you called. Give it to a lawyer.

The person who did not come home

On Oct. 13, ICE arrested Aleksander Nilaj at the Manhattan immigration court. He runs a food pantry in the Bronx that serves roughly 7,000 people a month; it closed in the days after. He is Albanian, not Haitian — and the reason his case is in this article is the two things about it that reach every reader here.

The first is the doorway. He was taken at an immigration court. This page reported on Oct. 1 that a federal judge struck down ICE’s policy of arresting people at immigration courts, in an order that took effect immediately. That order was never a promise that nobody would ever be arrested there: the newsrooms that read it said it restores an earlier policy that still permits arrests in limited circumstances, and one reported that arrests at 26 Federal Plaza had slowed but continued. Nobody has said which circumstance was claimed in his case, and this page is not going to assume one. What the ruling did not reach at all is a criminal courthouse, a state courthouse, traffic court, family court — or a check-in.

The second is what his supporters hit when they went looking for him. Documented reports that his current location could not be confirmed, because of recent changes that strip records for detained people who have removal orders. This page carried that change on Sept. 30.

If someone you love disappears from the system, understand precisely what a blank screen is: it is a fact about the agency’s records. It is not a fact about the person. It does not mean they were released, or moved, or deported. Keep checking, and write down the facility, the date and the time every single time you look — that log is what a lawyer will need. How to find someone in detention is the page for this.

The adult whose permit ended in July

Almost nobody in that building is allowed to work. Driver’s licences are gone with the status. That is the condition underneath everything above, and it is why a letter about a four-year-old lands in a house that already has no income.

Two things are worth saying plainly to that person. Nobody may charge you a fee to put your name on a list, a petition or a programme that would “fix” this — and when someone appears offering exactly that, in the week after a frightening piece of news, that is the oldest pattern there is. The scams and free legal help pages are the check.

And your documents still matter even when they did not protect you. Get things in writing, keep your own copies, give copies to a lawyer and not only to an officer, and log the dates. That is the record a case is built from later.

What has not changed

TPS for Haiti and Syria is terminated, effective July 27, 2026, and those work permits expired the same day. We verified that against USCIS’s own page again this morning; it has not moved.

Losing TPS is still not a judge ordering you personally to leave, and most people who lost it do not have such an order. But if a judge has already ordered your removal, that order did not go away — and that is the week to see a lawyer, not next month.

Nobody has to leave. If you are weighing going back anyway, talk to a lawyer first, because leaving can affect whether you are able to return.

Free legal help · Know your rights · Report ICE activity · Family plan and documents