The Boston City Council voted unanimously this week to press the city and the Commonwealth of Massachusetts to provide emergency housing for Haitian immigrants who lost their legal status when the Supreme Court allowed the Trump administration to end the Temporary Protected Status for Haitians.
The 12-0 vote, taken Wednesday, backs a resolution calling on officials to convert underused public buildings into shelters for former TPS holders who can no longer afford housing on their own, according to reporting by Hoodline’s Mitch M. Rosenthal, which drew on the Boston Herald. Councilors Miniard Culpepper, Ruthzee Louijeune and Henry Santana proposed the measure.
“Boston cannot control federal immigration policy, but it can control its own actions and resources,” Santana argued, according to the Herald. Councilor Julia Mejia said the city should put its empty spaces and resources toward the crisis, while Culpepper framed the resolution around “the immediate humanitarian needs of residents who may lose their housing.” The buildings, the resolution says, would have to meet fire, building, health, sanitation, and accessibility requirements before being used.
The bill was promoted by City Councilor at Large Ruthzee Louijeune, the first Haitian-American elected to the Boston City Council, as the Herald noted, and she described responding to a crisis at Logan Airport one night, staying away from home until 1 a.m. the next day.
More than 100,000 residents of Haitian descent live in Massachusetts, the second-largest such population of any U.S. state, and roughly 71 percent of Boston’s Haitian community is concentrated in Dorchester, Mattapan and Hyde Park, according to World Population Review. Those are the neighborhoods where the end of TPS is now being felt most directly.
Temporary Protected Status for Haitian nationals expired on July 27, 2026, ending the work authorization and deportation protections of people who had lived and worked legally in the United States for years, the Herald reported.
The Trump administration announced the decision through the Department of Homeland Security in November 2025, and the Supreme Court cleared the way in June 2026, ruling in Mullin v. Doe that federal law bars courts from reviewing DHS decisions to terminate TPS. That ruling stripped protections from more than 300,000 Haitians nationwide, roughly 45,000 of them in Massachusetts, per the Herald.
The courts have offered no reprieve since. On October 5, the Supreme Court vacated and remanded a Ninth Circuit ruling that had briefly paused the terminations for Haitian and Venezuelan immigrants, ordering the lower court to reconsider under the Mullin precedent, according to Envoy Global. TPS for Haiti was first designated in January 2010 and had been renewed repeatedly because of the country’s ongoing instability.
The council did not say what it would cost to house potentially thousands of former TPS holders, the Herald reported, though Mejia said she plans to push for funding in the city budget. Boston is negotiating from a tight position: it drew on its emergency reserve fund to close a $70 million shortfall in the fiscal year that ended June 30, 2026.
The state has little room to spare.
Governor Maura Healey capped the Emergency Assistance family shelter system at 7,500 families in November 2023, creating a waitlist, according to the Massachusetts Municipal Association. Legislation Healey signed in April 2024 imposed a nine-month limit on shelter stays, with later rules capping stays at overflow sites to five days, per Mass.gov. The state spent $978 million on the emergency family shelter program in fiscal 2025, a cost the Herald ties to an immigration surge. As of July 2024, the state also barred families from sleeping overnight in Logan Airport’s terminal, routing waitlisted applicants to temporary sites instead.
Boston’s status as a sanctuary city offers legal protection but not financial relief. The city’s 2014 Trust Act survived a federal challenge in May 2026, when a district judge dismissed a Department of Justice lawsuit arguing the city could be forced to assist with civil immigration enforcement, according to the Public Rights Project. The council had already reaffirmed the Trust Act in December 2024, barring Boston Police from honoring civil ICE detainer requests while preserving cooperation on major criminal investigations, per the City of Boston. None of those protections, however, come with housing money or a mechanism for municipal subsidies.
Boston is not alone in bracing for the fallout. A coalition of 47 local governments, including New York City and Los Angeles County, warned in an April 2026 court filing that abrupt TPS revocations would strain municipal emergency-housing systems and local economies, according to the Public Rights Project — and Hoodline has reported on similar terminations affecting South Sudanese nationals in Boston and Salvadorans across Massachusetts, as federal courts have repeatedly declined to intervene.
https://ctninfo.com/?p=44918&preview=true
Source: Hoodline
AI Use Policy:
Some of CTN’s journalists are not native English speakers and draft their work in French or Haitian Creole. We then use AI-assisted translation software to produce the English versions, and traces of machine-generated phrasing may occasionally remain. Every article — in any language — is written, reviewed, and edited by CTN’s staff writers and editors, who remain responsible for its accuracy. CTN also uses AI to convert text into audio.
