Haitian immigrants in the U.S. legally are overwhelmingly Christian and they work to support the economy

In These Dark Times, Stand Up for Human Dignity

Echo essay published in The New York Times by Lydia Polgreen

In 2024, this has been a brutal year for people in many places across the globe. Sudan is in the grip of a merciless civil war. Bombs, disease and starvation stalk the people of Gaza. The people of Ukraine face another brutal winter in the maw of Russian aggression. These all deserve our attention, but I want to ask you, our readers, to think of someplace a little closer to home, a nation whose history and fate are so deeply intertwined with ours: Haiti.

I followed news from Haiti for two decades, and I struggle to remember a year as grim and hopeless as 2024. Armed groups control about 85 percent of the capital, Port-au-Prince, in the grip of horrific violence and a seemingly endless political crisis. 

More than 4,500 people have died in blood-soaked battles among gangs, with an overmatched police force barely capable of protecting its own members, much less civilians. Politically, it is in free fall. The country is on its fourth prime minister this year.

The United States has a long history of meddling and manipulating in Haiti and a long tradition of demonizing Haitians. But none of that history could prepare me for the ugly slander visited upon Haitian immigrants to the United States by JD Vance and Donald Trump. They spread baseless rumors 😠😞😢that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, were kidnapping and eating pets. Haitian residents of the city, many of whom went there to work in its manufacturing sector, are living in fear, and many have fled.

A vast majority of Haitians in the United States are here legally. Many recent arrivals are under temporary protected status granted by the federal government because of the acute violence in Haiti. Their presence in cities like Springfield (Ohio), which was desperate for more workers to spur economic growth, is one of countless examples of Haitians helping to build the prosperity of the United States, despite being treated with contempt and derision. They join a proud tradition of Haitian Americans contributing at every level of American society, right up to the highest reaches of political, economic and cultural power.

A vast majority of Haitians in the United States are here legally. Many recent arrivals are under temporary protected status granted by the federal government because of the acute violence in Haiti. 

Their presence in cities like Springfield, which was desperate for more workers to spur economic growth, is one of countless examples of Haitians helping to build the prosperity of the United States, despite being treated with contempt and derision. They join a proud tradition of Haitian Americans contributing at every level of American society, right up to the highest reaches of political, economic and cultural power.

Many of the organizations that have stepped up to try to help newly arrived Haitians in the United States are under tremendous strain. They need our help. Elsie Saint-Louis, the executive director of Haitian Americans United for Progress, told me that just as the demand for help has grown to unprecedented proportions, slowdowns in city and state reimbursements for its work have left the organization hanging by a thread.

“It’s a crisis everywhere you turn,” she said. After fleeing gang warfare in their homeland, Haitians find themselves fleeing violent threats here in the United States. “People who are in Springfield are navigating toward anywhere they can go because they’re so scared,” Saint-Louis said. “There’s a mass exodus.”

For almost 50 years, Haitian Americans United for Progress has provided a wide range of services to Haitian and other immigrant communities, primarily in New York. In normal times it provides maternal and child health care and counseling, teaches civics for aspiring citizens, helps young people prepare for college, offers immigration counseling and connects new arrivals with community support. The past year has required digging much deeper as the organization has expanded its reach to help Haitian immigrants across the country. But it is struggling to keep up.

I can’t think of a better way in these dark times to stand for human dignity than to support the vital work of helping those who in the face of brutal demonization nevertheless seek to find safety and new life on our shores.

Lydia Polgreen is an Opinion columnist and a co-host of the “Matter of Opinion” podcast for The Times.

Now that Trump and Leon Musk have unchecked power: All Americans will be vulnerable to their selfish chaos

Echo opinion column published in The New York Times by Lydia Polgreen:  I Never Panic. I’m Panicking Now. 😱

For over a month now, my mother has been pestering me about her missing passport. It was in her closet, she said, and suddenly it was gone. It was expired, and renewing would be easier if she had the old one. She had no immediate travel plans, just a vague desire to visit Ethiopia, the country where she was born and raised, at some point in the future.

As we often do with our elders, I gently brushed off her increasingly insistent requests for help. She lives in Maryland; I live in New York. It hardly felt urgent. She is forgetful. She misplaces things all the time. It would turn up, I was sure.

When I woke up the morning after Donald Trump had been swept back to the presidency by a slim but decisive margin, I was seized by a sudden, cold panic with the thought ‘Where is Mom’s passport?’ What if Trump’s administration made good on its deportation promises and she suddenly needed to prove that she is, indeed, a naturalized citizen of this country? Did my frail, 73-year-old mother have her papers in order should the knock come on her door?

This feeling caught me completely by surprise, much more so than Trump’s victory, which, after all, was a very likely possibility. I am not given to panic. I think catastrophic thinking is almost always overblown. Panic and alarm💥❗ : These are feelings that a lifetime of observing the world from a sanguine (aka "optimistic"), journalistic remove, always taking the long view, had taught me to extinguish the moment they flared. What good can come from such strong emotion❓

After all, we’ve been here before, haven’t we? Trump was president once before, and even though he managed to enact a great deal of cruelty and bungle a pandemic, most of us survived, didn’t we? He was never that popular with voters, but even an uninspiring candidate like Joe Biden managed to defeat him soundly at the ballot box.

Yet ,as I’ve tried to summon that sanguine (aka "optimistic") self over the past two weeks, she has stubbornly refused to show up.

I have a sense that many other people are feeling similarly abandoned by their more resilient selves, instead finding a new, excruciating sense of vulnerability. The sensation has only deepened as Trump’s preposterous cabinet announcements have rolled out and his cruel policy plans for grotesque campaigns of deportation, vengeful prosecution and heedless budget slashing come into view. Despite myself, I am panicking.
It is hard not to ask what clues I might have missed along the way. For instance, why hadn’t I paid more attention to what my mother’s fixation on finding her passport might have told me? She was asking about it in part because she was considering returning to Ethiopia permanently in search of a lower cost of living. Like a lot of Americans, particularly immigrants, she has been very worried about money. She lives on the Social Security and veteran’s benefits my father earned. Groceries are expensive, even for an older woman living alone who doesn’t have much of an appetite. The electricity bill for her tiny apartment, her cable TV and internet: These things seem, as a portion of her meager income, obscenely expensive, never mind the escalating costs of prescription medication.

Another blow came a couple of months ago, when the giant corporation that owns the apartment complex where she lives hiked her rent by nearly 10 percent. When I saw the amount, I felt a wave of nausea. I assured her that of course my brothers and I would help, but how would a person who did not have an affluent child with no children of her own manage such a sudden, sharp hike in the cost of something as essential as shelter? And in any case, she hated the idea of being a burden on her children. Looking now at her situation, indeed around my neighborhood and city, our country, this world, I can see that we are clearly on the wrong track.

Thinking about this election has felt a bit like staring into the sun. The blaze blinds rather than illuminates. Most especially at times of confusion and overwhelm, I have found it useful to turn toward similar but more distant stars for understanding. It is useful to ask: Where have I seen this particular shade of light? 

When have I felt the scorch of this particular form of heat?

My mind instantly went to the first time I became acutely acquainted with my own vulnerability, almost 20 years ago. I was 29 and had just started a job as a foreign correspondent for The Times in West Africa. Many of my friends in New York were envious because I was moving overseas right after George W. Bush had been re-elected, this time winning both the popular vote and the Electoral College, despite the moral atrocity of the Iraq war and so much else.

But all that hardly crossed my mind. I was thrilled to start my dream assignment. I was so insulated from worry by my youthful cloak of invincibility that I brushed aside strange things that were happening with my body. Usually I had a voracious appetite, but I was somehow never hungry. Despite this, my trousers kept getting snugger even as my watch band got looser. A sharp, jangling pain rattled in my belly when driving across potholed streets.

One day at the beach a woman congratulated me on my pregnancy. I was not pregnant, but it was undeniable that I looked as though I was. Shaken from my complacency, I went to the doctor. Within a couple of days I was on a plane headed back to New York, where I would be diagnosed with advanced ovarian cancer.


It was a disease that typically struck much older women, and I had no family history to explain its early arrival. It was, my oncologist assured me, just dumb luck.

Six months later, after surgery and rounds of chemotherapy, I returned to my dream job. But I had been unmistakably altered by the experience. Once, I feared almost nothing. Not in a reckless way, but through the cool, rational assessment of odds. I had once been able to say, when boarding rickety commercial airplanes in impoverished countries, what are the odds of this plane crashing? Traveling by road, I knew, was statistically speaking much more dangerous. Cancer demolished this equanimity. If that random, extremely unlikely diagnosis could happen to me, then anything could. For a time this fear was all-consuming and paralyzing. Eventually, I learned to integrate this new uncertainty into my risk calculus and got on with my life and work.

What that experience taught me is that none of us know the direction or velocity of our vulnerability. It is, mercifully, unimaginable to us. The best-case scenario for the luckiest among us is a gentle drift into frailty and old age. We will all die, one way or another, and so will everyone we love. Thankfully, I have remained cancer free. I was both wildly unlucky and incredibly lucky at the same time.

Trump’s victory feels like a diagnosis, though Americans disagree profoundly on whether he is the disease, symptom or cure.


Anyone who has faced mysterious symptoms knows that diagnosis brings its own bleak satisfactions, even or especially if the news is very bad. Cancer, with apologies to Susan Sontag, is an irresistible metaphor for our current moment. If 2016, felt like a fluke, a bolt of lightning akin to a freak accident, this feels systemic. What is cancer, after all, but something mysterious and unconstrained that our own body builds within itself?

America is about to undergo a radical course of treatment. My mother hoped Kamala Harris’s promises to take on corporate landlords, to lower prescription drug prices and protect Medicare and Social Security would help her live a better life. Ultimately, what appears to be, at best, a very narrow majority of Americans decided to vote for Trump’s hard medicine.

Early signs make it likely that his second term will make his first look like child’s play. With control of Congress and a conservative supermajority on the Supreme Court, there is little holding back his darkest impulses to punish his enemies and reward his friends. He seems determined to take his slender victory and treat it like a historic mandate to reshape American life in profound ways.


Regardless of how you voted, we are all about to find out precisely how vulnerable we really are.