In the Twilight Zone

By Pooja Bhatia

The United States offers some migrants some protections, but these are temporary. Pooja Bhatia describes the experience of Haitians who navigate complex bureaucracies with no promise of something stable at the end of their struggle.

IT WAS ALMOST spring this year when I met V., but he was still recovering from his first winter blizzard.

He’d arrived in Brockton, Massachusetts, from Port-au-Prince, Haiti, the previous November, with permission to stay for two years—one of 126,000 Haitians who in 2023 received what the U.S. government calls “sponsored humanitarian parole.” In Haiti, the initiative is known as “Programme Biden,” or simply “Biden,” and though it provides only grudging, temporary reprieve to its beneficiaries, it remains an object of cherished hope and wild fantasy. For many of its citizens, Haiti has become a cul-de-sac of hell. The state is broken, armed groups control most of the capital, and violence is general and specific—a daily, mortal risk. When the United States offers escape, you might not look too hard at the fine print. Three months after the program’s launch in January 2023, more than half a million Haitians had applied.

“How long could he and his family impose without contributing to rent and the bills for heat and electricity?”

V., thirty-four, had been a radio producer in Haiti; he’d made tentative forays into hosting. V. wasn’t sure what he’d do when his time in America ran out, but he knew what he wanted in the meantime: work. “I didn’t leave my home and come all the way here to play games,” he told me, reaching over to lower the volume on the phone his three-year-old was playing with. “But now it’s been almost five months already that I’m just sitting and doing nothing.” It was stressful, he said. He had a lot of people to support. His sponsor in Brockton was a friend, but how long could he and his family impose without contributing to rent and the bills for heat and electricity?

We were sitting at donated school desks in a windowless room at the Immigrant Family Services Institute in Mattapan, just south of Boston. IFSI is the nerve center of the state’s effort to welcome new arrivals from Haiti; it’s an orderly but crowded place, and every square foot seems occupied by cadres of social workers, legal assistants, language-learning coordinators, benefits specialists, clergy, therapists, and the migrants they are helping. Even the cubicle of the lead attorney can fit only a couple of extra chairs. Most everyone is of Haitian descent. The basement is a vast warehouse of secondhand clothing, linens, books, and toys, all meticulously inventoried and free for those in need. Staffers at IFSI had helped V. apply for a work permit in December, including securing a waiver of the $410 filing fee. In April, the fee rose to $520. For most recent Haitian migrants, these amounts sit somewhere between unduly onerous and impossible; by definition, after all, they cannot yet avail themselves of legal work.

The authorities took weeks to respond to V.’s application. Eventually he was given an appointment on February 13 to do the requisite “biometrics”—fingerprints, essentially, though he had already been fingerprinted on arrival to the United States. The appointment was scheduled about fifty miles away in Rhode Island, and while transportation would be a hassle, V. considered the scheduling a good sign. But on the eve of his appointment, a blizzard threatened. Nervous about missing it, V. hired a driver to take him there for $150 roundtrip. He felt he had little choice, having been repeatedly told that “immigration affairs can be a little sensitive.” In the event, the storm was milder than anticipated. The roads were clear, and V. made it to the biometrics office with time to spare.

And then he discovered the office was closed in anticipation of the storm.

What he couldn’t figure out, as he spoke about it four weeks later, was why no one had told him.

Continue reading “In the Twilight Zone,” an essay by Pooja Bhatia, on our site.

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