The End of TPS for Haitians Is A Moment of Truth for Zohran Mamdani

Edited by Sam Thielman

GO DOWN FLATBUSH, Rogers, Bedford, Nostrand or Utica Avenues in Brooklyn between Eastern Parkway and the Junction. This much-overlooked but deeply lived-in area in the middle of the borough is practically synonymous with the Caribbean diaspora: Jamaicans, Trinidadians, Bajans, everyone else. You'll see the flags of the islands on the cars, in the restaurant windows, on the clothing. You'll hear the accents on the streets. You'll smell the flavors of the cuisine, a reprieve from the typical summertime New York bouquet of garbage and marijuana. 

Especially conspicuous, at least if you're a native English speaker, will be the fritay spots, tax assessors and storefront radio stations that declare themselves, in Kreyol, the voices of the Haitian people. Walk into the libraries and you'll see the free copies of Haiti Progrès, a Kreyol-language paper that used to be headquartered on Flatbush Ave. Since 2021, when you get off the 2/5 at Newkirk, the station tells you you're in Little Haiti. As someone who has called here home since 1980, I can tell you that Flatbush is unimaginable without Haitians, as it is unimaginable without all the rest of the Caribbean diaspora. (Crown Heights, too, but someone from Crown Heights should speak for it, not me.) 

But today begins a new period of fear in Flatbush, and hardly just here. Because today, thanks to the Supreme Court and the Trump administration, is the end of TPS, or Temporary Protected Status, for Haitians and Syrians. Since 2010, TPS has shielded Haitians in the United States from deportation while Haiti remains wracked by the political and economic turmoil that is often the result of U.S. intervention—intervention that usually bills itself as a solution for Haiti's crises. 

Right now, for instance, Blackwater's Erik Prince has a new company that's conducting drone strikes in Haiti—killing literally more than a thousand people, including at least 17 children, between March 2025 and late January 2026—and the Defense Department's task force there is integrating its forces with Prince's own. Everyone who knows Haitian history, and especially the history of France and the United States refusing to let Haiti live in freedom and keep its wealth for its people, understands the resonance of drone strikes in Port-au-Prince. A hundred years before Erik Prince, U.S. Marines dropped what amount to barrel bombs on the restive population, one of the earliest experiments with civilian bombing during a U.S. counterinsurgency. The bombs are as forgotten in the United States today as the private military company's contemporary drone strikes have been ignored.   

In 2024, J.D. Vance set off a wave of terror, complete with bomb threats, in Springfield, Ohio after he demonized its small community of Haitian refugees. In an unsurprisingly crass statement today, the Department of Homeland Security told Time that while it won't be specific about its imminent crackdown, "What we would say now is it’s closing time which means you don't have to go home, but you can't stay here." Right on time for the end of TPS, ICE has returned to killing people, this time in Texas and Maine.

It does not take a visionary to see that filling New York with ICE agents to grab, cage and deport black people—maybe those with unfamiliar accents, maybe just whomever's on the street at the wrong place at the wrong time—is a preoccupation for the administration. White House Border Czar Tom Homan loves nothing more than to threaten a surge of ICE officers to New York. Notice that he has recently done so in direct response to New York elected officials strengthening the state's sanctuary laws. That tells you all you need to know about ICE's perspective on what passes for democracy in this country. 

Arrayed against Homan and his thugs is Zohran Mamdani. Mamdani has had the most accomplished first six months in office of any New York mayor of my lifetime. He's gotten his rent freeze, he's pushed Gov. Kathy Hochul left to tax the rich, they've announced universal preschool for two-year olds and up, crime is down, hundreds of thousands of potholes have been filled, he's getting rid of burdensome anti-common sense licensing requirements for small businesses, and the Knicks are champions. In all this, Mamdani is demonstrating the power and the promise of municipal socialism.  

But there is one fight Mamdani has ducked, and tens of thousands of New Yorkers cannot afford for him to duck it anymore. That's his relationship with the NYPD—and its holdover commissioner, Jessica Tisch, a billionaire heiress whom Mamdani has retained as a concession to two city communities determined to see municipal socialism fail: the oligarchs and the police. Yesterday, my college friend Sally Goldenberg and her New York Times colleague Emma Goldberg wrote, fairly, that in contrast to DSA's aggressive expansions of what's politically and economically possible, its leaders "have been a lot more muted around public safety reforms."

I wrote about Tisch, the NYPD and Mamdani in this long November piece that I won't rehash. But the cost of being muted about "public safety" right now will be paid by Haitians who are trying to build their lives here. And as I wrote then, they will not see their fate sealed by the typical establishment-Democrat who's happy to throw a black immigrant population to the wolves if it gains them a grudging acceptance from the police. They'll see socialists deciding that they're a sacrificable population. Is that something that we, as New Yorkers, as socialists, can accept? 

Sanctuary laws generally instruct the NYPD, like other public agencies, to adopt a posture of noncooperation. On one level, it's important to compel Tisch to prove herself and the NYPD capable of noncooperation. Not only is the NYPD tied into ICE through the local Joint Terrorism Task Force, but Tisch herself has cooperated proactively with ICE to cage Leqaa Kordia for nothing more than her advocacy for Palestine. As I wrote in my November piece, if ICE seeks NYPD cooperation on something it claims is a criminal matter, that is one of many end-runs around sanctuary laws—as Kordia learned—available to it. 

But on another, more human level, noncooperation can hardly be sufficient against a lawless, violent deportations force empowered by the Supreme Court to racially profile. I do not for a second have any illusion that the NYPD would actually protect Haitians or any other New Yorker from its cousins in ICE—certainly not without aggressively and thoroughly enforced orders, and likely not even then. But I ask you to consider how it will look when ICE forces a screaming mother to the ground while nearby cops continue playing Candy Crush. Then consider how it will sound when elected officials, including the mayor, say there was nothing that the NYPD could have done while she screamed, because there's federalism and legal procedure to consider. 

There's a helpful woman from the NYPD who works as my kids' school's safety officer. I run through a scenario in my head when I see her. Should ICE walk in, she's supposed to demand a warrant from them, per this spring's supplementary sanctuary law. If they continue on, is her job to stop ICE from advancing further, or to stand aside while they terrorize the children? I'm not being polemical—I don't know the answer to that question. [I asked my principal this last year. She said, “The first thing we’ll do is call our lawyers.”—Sam.] As best I can tell, Tisch has not issued instructions that the public can understand here. That's because Mamdani has not accompanied his accommodation of Tisch with any visible pressure to protect New Yorkers from ICE. And now ICE has a mandate to hunt Haitians who live here. Once ICE intensifies its arrests, will a city of immigrants be set at ease by speeches about federalism, proceduralism and the limited lawful powers of local authorities? Speeches made not by establishment Democrats whom socialists organized to replace based on an agenda of meeting people's material needs, but socialists ourselves? 

The road to abolition begins with local obstruction. And whatever can be accomplished to protect New Yorkers from ICE begins with pressuring Tisch. The NYPD commissioner must explain how her force will protect-and-serve Haitian New Yorkers. That will put Tisch in a difficult position, for she doesn't want to make the public aware that the NYPD is under no obligation to actually protect people. The easiest way for her to obscure that reality is to force the NYPD into various positions of bureaucratic obstruction for ICE. But achieving that means pressuring Mamdani, who does not appear to be pressuring Tisch. Deferring this confrontation will do nothing but clear a path for ICE to run through Flatbush and many other places. 

But on the other hand, if Mamdani and municipal socialism can force the NYPD into a position between ICE and its targets, if it can prove that it is not deterred by legal formalisms that ICE violates on a daily basis, then it can lead the way on public resistance to ICE. Socialist New York can be the first city to channel the widespread anger and disgust at ICE into a concrete municipal agenda that other towns, cities and states around the country can adapt to their own circumstances. Mamdani has shown in the most recent congressional and state elections that the promise of socialism can reshape politics in its image. It can be like that against ICE. With TPS gone and the right determined to end birthright citizenship, it has to be. 

If municipal socialism doesn't so much as try to stop ICE, when the stakes are the highest, it will discredit itself no less than the Democratic Party has. Is that something the socialist movement in this city can stomach? 

TPS IS ALSO gone for Syrians. I mean zero disrespect to the Syrian community in New York by focusing on the Haitian community in the piece above. Syrians in New York must also be protected from ICE. I focus on Haitians because they're my neighbors, my friends, my kids' friends. 

CAN I ALSO SAY that a whole lot of recent journalism about the end of TPS has focused on the turmoil into which it will throw sectors of the economy, like in-home health care, where Haitians tend, locally, to work. True as that may be, it's simply gross—the wages of dehumanization—to locate the value of Haitians not as human beings, but as a source of cheap labor. I ask you if that journalistic focus does not reproduce the ugliest tradition in the United States. 

WHILE DONALD TRUMP has held off—for now—another wave of airstrikes on Iran, the regional war continues. Saudi Arabia is fending off attacks from Ansarallah (the Houthis) in Yemen while today Iranian-coalition militias in Iraq fired on Saudi petroleum facilities. That seems a whole lot like a challenge to the Iraqi prime minister's assurances in Washington that he's bandwagoning with the United States.