Haitian immigrants revived America's turkey town. This Thanksgiving together might be their last.
CROIX-DES-BOUQUETS, Haiti —In a proud but unfinished home on a dirt road where goats and children walk together, four generations of one family live under an earthquake-proof roof.
Jean Felix Petit-Frere, a 63-year-old grandfather, has paid for the house’s every cinder block, walls that keep his wife of 37 years, two daughters, son-in-law, mother-in-law and granddaughter safe from the chaos and slums that surround them.
But Petit-Frere has never set foot in the house. He lives in North Carolina, working at the world’s largest turkey-processing plant, Butterball’s facility in the small town of Mount Olive.
Petit-Frere is one of nearly 59,000 Haitians working under a temporary protected status program created for them after a 2010 earthquake triggered a humanitarian crisis. Like many of those immigrants, he sends a large portion of his wages home, a critical financial pipeline to an impoverished country where many children bathe in buckets and clean water is sold in bags.
He may not be able to send money home much longer.
President Trump has moved to end the protections for Haitian immigrants, arguing that temporary rules cannot be allowed to remain in place indefinitely. Along with plans to take away similar protections for certain people from Nicaragua, El Salvador and Sudan, Trump’s moves would lead to the deportation of 200,000 workers who have more than 200,000 U.S.-born children.
Immigrants and advocacy groups are suing to block the deportations, and both they and the White House await a ruling in federal court.
The administration says the program has run its course, arguing that temporary rules for Haitians cannot be allowed to remain in place indefinitely.
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