Jackson Voltaire, a pastor who leads a fellowship of 255 Haitian Baptist churches in Florida, prayed a personal blessing for Donald Trump the day after the election.
But Voltaire also met to pray with leaders of his churches who were worried about what might happen to Haitians’ legal status in the country.
“We may tell people not to worry, but for most of them, there is cause to worry,” Voltaire said. “But when we fix on our eyes on Jesus, the worry starts to dissipate. The strength and comfort we find in God’s promises are stronger than the fear.”
President-elect Trump made mass deportation a central part of his campaign, promising to remove millions of immigrants from the United States, including Haitians. The official Republican Party platform vows to “carry out the largest deportation operation in American history.”
In campaign speeches, Trump talked about undocumented immigrants committing violent crimes, but he also indicated he would end certain legal immigration programs like one for Haitians.
These proposals could affect more than 10 million people in the US and result in family separation for millions since most undocumented immigrants live in households with legal immigrants.
Haitians are largely in the country legally, under a program for those fleeing war called Temporary Protected Status (TPS), which covers Haiti and other nations like Venezuela and Nicaragua. Trump unsuccessfully tried to shut down the program in his first term and wants to end it again.
Haiti currently does not have a functioning government, which makes any deportation difficult, and locals live under warring gangs.
Voltaire said he prayed not just for Trump to bless the United States but for God to find people to change the course of the nation of Haiti so people would not have to flee the country for safety in America. Voltaire prays that Haiti can go “back to the glorious season when that nation was considered the Caribbean pearl.”
Trump made promises to deport millions in his 2016 campaign, but the deportation numbers over his first term look about the same as the Biden administration’s. The Obama administration still has the record for largest number of deportations in one year.
This time, Trump has proposed a more drastic means of deportation: deploying the National Guard to arrest undocumented immigrants. He has often cited the Eisenhower administration’s “Operation Wetback,” where federal and local law enforcement did sweeping raids to deport perhaps a million people, some of whom turned out to be US citizens.
Immigration experts doubt that Congress will provide the funding for mass deportations, and that infrastructure is not easy to scale up. One immigration group estimated the cost of deportation of every undocumented person in the US at $315 billion.
Even if there isn’t the money for mass deportations, “I don’t want to tell people it’s all going to be fine. I think we are going to see an uptick in deportations of very sympathetic people,” said Matthew Soerens, the head of advocacy at World Relief, an evangelical refugee resettlement organization. “Everyone agrees with deporting violent criminals.”
While evangelicals supported Trump in the election, they also historically have more compassionate views on immigration. They support legal status for “Dreamers” (undocumented immigrants brought to the US as children), oppose family separation, and feel the US has a moral obligation to accept refugees. One view that has shifted recently, though, is that they see immigrants as an economic drain.
Faith-based groups are hoping to make the case to Trump that immigrants have value.
“We are going to be pleading with him, appealing to his commitment to stand with the persecuted church, to his statements that he believes in legal immigration,” said Soerens.
“We … believe in the possibility of progress and urge the incoming administration to consider the immense value that immigrants and refugees bring to our nation,” stated Krish O’Mara Vignarajah, the head of Global Refuge, a faith-based refugee resettlement agency.
Family separation is the most unpopular immigration policy among white evangelical Christians.“It’s unclear what President-elect Trump will do,” Soerens said.
Deportations would hit the Latino community disproportionately. Latino evangelicals support extending legal status to Dreamers and other undocumented immigrants who have lived in the US a long time. But most of those evangelicals (60%) voted for Trump in the last election largely based on social issues like abortion and the origins they may have in countries with Communist or leftist regimes.
“While Latino evangelicals are neither a monolith nor one-issue voters, when it comes to immigration many Latino congregations have expressed deep concerns around the language of mass deportation and its impact on the ministry of and with the Latino church,” said Gabriel Salguero, the president of the National Latino Evangelical Coalition, in a statement to CT.
“We ask ourselves how churches can collect the tithes and offerings of immigrant members while being silent on policies advocating their mass deportation,” he said. “Our sincere prayer is that there finally would be a bipartisan immigration solution that respects the rule of law and honors the dignity of all people.”
Political pressure has long kept Congress from enacting immigration reform; a bipartisan border bill proposed in February to restrict migrants at the border and address the asylum process failed when Trump objected to it.
Other legal immigration programs are in question. Humanitarian parole has allowed Afghans, Ukrainians, Haitians, Cubans, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans to find legal shelter in the US, but Trump pledged to deport people in that program.
“Get ready to leave,” Trump said.
Many Ukrainians fleeing the war in their country have come to the US under humanitarian parole. Paul Oliferchik is the son of refugees from the Soviet Union and was until recently a pastor of a Ukrainian Assemblies of God church in New York, the city that is home to the largest Ukrainian population in the US. He now serves at a Chinese church in the city.
His wife is the daughter of Ukrainian refugees, who received help from a Lutheran organization to resettle in the US, he recalled. “We moved as refugees and were tremendously blessed,” he said.
But many of the Ukrainian evangelical immigrants he knows are Trump supporters—they don’t make political decisions based on immigration but on socially conservative issues.
He thinks they likely do not know about the potential ending of the humanitarian parole program. Either way, he hopes they will stand with other refugees.
“God helped to bring many of us here to the States to live,” he said. “God was telling Israel when he was bringing them out of Egypt to remember. If we don’t remember that God himself brought us out and redeemed us, it might reflect on how we treat others who are also just trying to make it out and to live.”
In Trump’s first term, he tried to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program for those known as Dreamers but ran into legal hurdles. Immigration experts have said that his legal advisors have learned from their first attempts at undoing some of these programs and might be more successful this time.
Led by longtime immigration advisor Stephen Miller, the Trump team is looking for other ways to narrow legal immigration, The Wall Street Journal reported, like a policy that would block immigrants who have disabilities or low income.
One program fully under the president’s purview is the refugee program, and in his last term Trump temporarily suspended the entire program then dramatically reduced the numbers of refugee admissions to a record low.
In 2020 when he completed his term, refugee admissions were down to 12,000 from the historic average of 81,000 a year. Trump in his 2024 campaign criticized Biden’s refugee admissions and said he would bring “brand new crackdowns.”
The previous Trump administration’s crackdowns in some cases arrested immigrants without criminal records who had been in the country for decades.
In 2017, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers arrested hundreds of Iraqi Christians in Detroit, some on their way to church. These Christians would have faced persecution and “even death” if they had been deported, evangelical leaders wrote to the Trump administration at the time.
During legal fights about the deportation, many Iraqi Christians were held in US detention for more than a year before their release, and some were deported. (Some of the individuals did have criminal cases that led to deportation; others had no criminal record.) Many of the Chaldean Christians did not believe they would be deported because they had supported Trump and believed his statements about protecting persecuted Christians.
Whatever the scale of deportation in the next administration, Trump’s promises have already led to anxiety in immigrant communities.
“The sense I get from most of my Haitian friends is that their concern is not so much about deportation, because they have a protected (albeit temporary) status that shields them from deportation,” said Jeremy Hudson, pastor of Fellowship Church, one of the largest churches in Springfield, Ohio, which has a large Haitian population.
“The concern I have heard them talk about more is how they will be treated and viewed by the local citizens.”
Trump has talked about undocumented immigrants “poisoning the blood of our country” and promised to rescue “every town that has been invaded and conquered.” He and his vice president, JD Vance, went after Haitians repeatedly, spreading the false story that they were eating people’s pets in Springfield.
Voltaire, the pastor in Florida, said his Haitian churches are still dealing with the fallout of those remarks.
“The impact of the Springfield thing is … here to stay,” he said. “But Haitians are a resilient people. They have been through a lot.”
In the meantime, Haitian pastors must continue to serve the immigrants who are in their churches.
“It is our prayer that people will find strength and comfort in the love we show them,” he said. “Ultimately, we pray that God’s name will be glorified in the lives of all immigrants, Haitians or wherever they are from.”
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