Senator Edward J. Markey of Massachusetts announced Tuesday that he will go to the Senate floor to ask his colleagues to pass legislation extending Temporary Protected Status for Haiti, just two days before the court order shielding Haitian work permits is set to lapse.
Our Haitian friends and neighbors play key roles throughout our communities, Markey said, describing the legislation as an effort to restore Temporary Protected Status and give Haitian nationals stability. Now, I’m headed to the Senate floor to call on my colleagues to pass it.
Markey will seek unanimous consent — a request that passes a bill immediately if no senator objects.
Work authorization for Haitian TPS holders is valid through Friday, July 24, under a federal court order, according to guidance issued this month by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. USCIS has described the extension as limited relief that lasts only until the lower courts fall in line with the Supreme Court’s June 25 decision in Mullin v. Doe, which cleared the way for the administration to proceed with terminating the designation.
The bill is H.R. 1689, introduced by Congresswoman Laura Gillen of New York with Republican Congressman Mike Lawler as an original cosponsor. Its operative language is a single sentence directing the Secretary of Homeland Security to designate Haiti for Temporary Protected Status until three months after January 20, 2029 — April 20, 2029, three months past the end of the current presidential term.
It reached the House floor only because Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley’s discharge petition collected 218 signatures on March 28, bypassing House leadership. The House passed it on April 16 by 224 to 204, with 10 Republicans crossing over.
A discharge petition is a House mechanism; what moved to the Senate was the bill itself, along with a companion measure, S. 4814, that Markey introduced June 17 with Senator Lisa Blunt Rochester of Delaware, Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer, and 16 other senators.
Who is affected
An estimated 350,000 Haitian nationals hold TPS, according to figures compiled by Fwd.us before the administration’s first termination attempt.
TPS holders’ contributions are estimated at $5.9 billion per year, including roughly $805 million in federal and payroll taxes and $755 million in state and local taxes.
The concentration in care work is what has drawn business and industry groups into the fight. About 13,000 Haitian TPS holders work as nursing assistants, caring for some 65,000 patients, the Boston Globe found. Another 8,000 work as caregivers to roughly 12,000 children and older adults, according to Americans for Immigrant Justice, a Miami-based nonprofit law firm.
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce has urged the Senate to take up H.R. 1689, warning of disruption to employers and citing the same workforce numbers. Aging services organizations have pressed the case for the direct-care workforce.
In Massachusetts, roughly 45,000 TPS holders live in the state, most of them Haitian. A lot of them work in nursing care facilities, according to state figures reported by the Globe. Amy Nishman of the workforce agency JVS Boston told the paper the loss would decimate certain industries in the state, warning of school bus driver shortages by September.
The state’s own demographics sharpen the stakes. A report from the MassINC Policy Center and Boston Indicators found the rate of new immigrants arriving in Massachusetts fell by more than half during the first six months of the current term, and concluded the state needs at least 60,000 net new immigrants a year by 2030 to hold its working-age population steady.
Markey and Pressley documented much of this in January, when they convened a field hearing at Jubilee Christian Church in Mattapan and entered the testimony into the legislative record. About 46,000 Haitians and Haitian-Americans live in the Commonwealth, more than half of them in the Boston metropolitan area.
Conditions in Haiti
The premise of the designation is that Haiti remains unsafe for return, and the record on that has not improved.
Roughly 1.5 million people are displaced inside Haiti, according to the International Organization for Migration — a figure approaching the displacement that followed the 2010 earthquake. The UN reports 6.4 million people, more than half the population, need humanitarian assistance, and 5.8 million are expected to go hungry this year.
More than 5,500 people were killed in gang violence in 2025, according to the UN. Carlos Ruiz Massieu, the Secretary-General’s Special Representative for Haiti, said in a recent interview that about 1,600 more were killed in a three-month span this year, and estimated that criminal groups of 10,000 to 15,000 members control or influence 70 to 75 percent of Port-au-Prince. In violence around Cité Soleil earlier this year, the UN documented at least 542 people killed, 355 injured, and 176 women and girls raped.
Secretary-General António Guterres visited Port-au-Prince on June 16, touring the headquarters of the new gang-suppression force the Security Council authorized in September to replace the underfunded Kenyan-led mission. The 2026 humanitarian appeal for Haiti had received about 25 percent of its $880 million target by mid-June. Officials hope a first round of elections can be held before the end of 2026, allowing an elected president to take office in February 2027 — the first in more than a decade.
Against that backdrop, more than 270,000 people were forcibly returned to Haiti in 2025, according to the International Rescue Committee. Nearly a fifth of them were already internally displaced before they left.
A court can pause a termination, and the Supreme Court has now foreclosed that route. Only Congress can create the designation outright and fix a date that an administration cannot move — which is what Markey is asking the chamber to do, and why he is asking now rather than after Friday.
Editorial Disclaimer:
This article was originally written in English. Other language versions are produced using AI translation software, and errors are possible — the English version is authoritative. CTN also uses AI to convert text into audio.
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Editorial Disclaimer: This article was originally written in English. The French and Haitian Creole versions are produced using AI translation software, and errors are possible — the English version is authoritative. CTN also uses AI to convert text into audio.
