LITTLE HAITI — Father Hilaire Belizaire stood on the steps of St. Jerome Church and surveyed what he called a neighborhood lacking its former vibrancy. The people “aren’t coming out,” he said. They fear being sent back to their tumultuous Haitian homeland through President Donald Trump’s recent executive orders placing strict limits on immigration, he explained.
Father Belizaire is the pastor of St. Jerome, which he said is unofficially known as the cathedral church of Brooklyn’s Haitian community. Its location at the corner of Nostrand and Newkirk Avenues overlooks the heart of the Little Haiti section of East Flatbush. On Jan. 20, the same day as Trump’s inauguration, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) issued a directive to allow agents with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to arrest suspects inside “sensitive areas” like schools and churches.
The Trump administration insists the measures are meant to protect everyone in the United States by purging the nation of criminals from other countries. According to DHS, “Criminals will no longer be able to hide in America’s schools and churches to avoid arrest. The Trump administration will not tie the hands of our brave law enforcement and instead trusts them to use common sense.”
The directive has had a chilling effect on Sunday church attendance at St. Jerome, said Father Belizaire, who is also the diocese’s Haitian ministry coordinator. For example, he said, the 7:30 a.m. Mass on Sundays in Creole typically packs the upper church with 350-400 people. On Jan. 26, the parish’s bulletin reported 260 people at the early Mass. “The church was kind of empty,” Father Belizaire said. “I thought, ‘What’s going on?’ And then it dawned on me why the people were not coming out.”
He added that the Trump directives have also taken a chunk out of the local economy. Sidewalks stretching in front of the church were full of street vendors a couple months ago, he said, but only a few remained when The Tablet visited on March 11. “This is usually a very busy place — merchants selling Haitian products and Caribbean products,” Father Belizaire said. “There’s always music, and they’re always cooking and barbecuing.”
While people are slowly returning (295 attended the early Sunday Mass in Creole on March 2, according to the church bulletin), parishioners are also aware of the decline in attendance. Alberte Jean-Baptiste said she spoke with some migrants who were afraid to attend Mass. “It’s ICE. They’re afraid,” she said. “Some are old, too — they’re not all young people.”
Lisa Santel, also a parishioner, said she urges the people to come back to Mass. “We only tell them that Jesus is there,” she said. “He will not allow those people to come inside to get you. But I know people who don’t send their children to school.”
That’s a problem, added parishioner Michelle Joseph, because many low-income people had relied on school lunches and breakfasts to help feed their families. “The kids go hungry,” she said. Father Belizaire said the people at his parish are not hardened criminals and were legally in the United States through a Temporary Protected Status (TPS) designation for Haitians.
TPS allows immigrants to live and work legally in the country. Haiti is one of 17 countries that these designations exist for. Others include Venezuela, Afghanistan, Ukraine, Nicaragua, and Syria. Haiti still roils from the aftermath of earthquakes and hurricanes, plus political turmoil that left a power void filled by violent street gangs. Still, the Trump administration rolled back extensions of TPS for Haitians. On Feb. 20, DHS Secretary Kristi Noem vacated a decision by the Biden administration to extend Haiti’s TPS by 18 months.
The new action will end Haiti’s TPS on Aug. 3, 2025, instead of February 2026. Noem has said Biden’s DHS abused TPS, which allowed massive influxes of Haitians. Many of them crossed the border illegally and still received TPS, according to Noem. Trump also ordered a phase-out of a “humanitarian parole” program, which, since 2014, has allowed eligible U.S. citizens and lawful permanent residents to apply for parole for their family members in Haiti.
This allowed family members to be in the United States before their visa issues were completed. Trump’s order “will return the humanitarian parole program to its original purpose of looking at migrants on a case-by-case basis,” according to the DHS statement. Father Belizaire said he recently counseled two Haitian women — one a nurse, the other pregnant — who have been in the country legally through TPS.
Facing an earlier deadline of Aug. 3, he advised the women to explore the possibility of gaining legal asylum, considering the dangers that lurk in Haiti. To that end, he referred them to Catholic Migration Services of Catholic Charities of Brooklyn & Queens. But, he noted, asylum is no easy fix because obtaining it involves a complicated process.
Meanwhile, he keeps ministering to the spiritual needs of the immigrants who, he said, are becoming increasingly desperate. “This is the story of our lives, and it’s really a very bad situation,” he said. “As a pastor, I’ve never felt so helpless.” His solution: Prayer, especially for President Trump and his administration, which he does each day. “They need to understand their role as God’s instruments,” Father Belizaire said. “They are put in that position to serve the people — God’s people.”