Molis Augustave had already been seated on the plane. The Haitian pastor, who has spent the better part of a decade in York, Pennsylvania, was aboard a deportation flight bound for Haiti on Thursday morning when, minutes before takeoff, officers walked him back down the aisle and off the aircraft.
Nearly 90 other Haitians on the flight were sent onward; Augustave was not.
The last-second reversal, his attorneys say, came from an outcry that reached from his congregation in York to the governor’s office in Harrisburg.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement agreed to hold off on removing him while U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services reviews his pending green card application, the outcome his legal team had been pressing for.
“Molis is still in this country; he was not on that flight,” Ama Frimpong, legal chief for the advocacy group We Are CASA, said at a Friday news conference reported by Fox43 in York.
Augustave, a married father of two who leads the congregation at Iglesia de Dios Voz de Alerta and also delivered for DoorDash to make ends meet, is one face of a much larger reckoning now confronting Haitians across the country.
After the Trump administration ended Temporary Protected Status for Haiti this summer, roughly 350,000 people who had been living and working in the United States legally saw their protection lapse, and for some, long-dormant removal orders spring back to life.
About 15,000 Haitians live in Pennsylvania, according to NewsNation, which first reported Augustave’s reprieve.
His path into ICE custody was almost mundane. On Sept. 5, local police in York County stopped him over a broken taillight and an expired registration; ICE detained him after determining he carried a final order of removal, and within 12 days he was routed toward a deportation flight, his lawyers said.
According to ICE, Augustave first entered the country without authorization in 2016 and an immigration judge ordered him removed in 2018, but he had been building a life in Pennsylvania under TPS, and in 2024 he began the process of seeking permanent residency. When Haiti’s TPS ended, that older removal order became enforceable again.
In the two weeks that followed his traffic stop, Augustave was moved among three ICE facilities in Pennsylvania and Louisiana before being staged for removal in Alexandria, Louisiana, the launching point for many of the flights now returning Haitians to their homeland.
He spoke to his wife, Omara Nunez, on Thursday night and described how frightened he was as he was loaded onto the plane, Frimpong said. Nunez, in an interview with Newsweek cited by NewsNation, said she never expected the crackdown to reach her own family. “I have seen Molis help other people, including people with family members in detention,” she said. “But I did not imagine it would happen to me.”
The intervention was unusually broad and crossed party lines.
As his lawyers filed emergency motions in Louisiana — a habeas corpus petition, a request to reopen his case, and a bid to stay his removal — Gov. Josh Shapiro and Sen. John Fetterman, both Democrats, joined Republican Sen. Dave McCormick and Rep. Lloyd Smucker in pressing Homeland Security leadership on Augustave’s behalf, We Are CASA said.
At a federal hearing Thursday, a Justice Department attorney indicated that ICE would allow the immigration agency to review his residency application before proceeding, the concession advocates had sought.
Frimpong credited the public campaign, not any single court order. “There was so much attention that was being put on his case,” she said. “People were calling their elected officials, people were making noise.”
Augustave’s case is not the only one drawing that kind of pressure.
His reprieve came a day after another Haitian pastor, detained in Springfield, Ohio, in August, was released from federal custody, two clergymen whose supporters mobilized to keep them in the country as removals to Haiti accelerate.
For all of that, the relief is partial and provisional. Augustave has not gone home to his family; he remains in the Central Louisiana ICE processing center while his applications sit unresolved, with no timeline for a decision. His lawyers have been blunt that a reprieve is not a resolution. “Complete justice is that husband and father walking through his front door to greet his children again,” said Jossie Sapunar of We Are CASA.
The stakes extend well beyond one household. The United States is returning growing numbers of people to a country its own State Department warns Americans not to visit, a Haiti where armed groups control much of the capital and more than a million people have been driven from their homes. Augustave was pulled from Thursday’s flight. The plane, and the policy behind it, left without him.
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