Many Say New Orleans is More Northern Caribbean than American

Key Points

• The Supreme Court’s June 2026 ruling in Mullin v. Doe cleared the way for DHS to end Temporary Protected Status for Haiti.
• An estimated 5,000 Haitians live in Louisiana, most in the greater New Orleans area, many working in elder care and healthcare.
• A federal judge previously found the termination was likely motivated in part by racial animus, before the Supreme Court set that ruling aside.
• Haitian refugees who arrived in New Orleans between 1809 and 1810 nearly doubled the city’s population and shaped its Vodou traditions, its music, and its food.
• Free Haitian craftsmen built Tremé, the oldest Black neighborhood in the country, next to Congo Square, yet the neighborhood is now nearly 45% Airbnb and short-term rentals.
• Congress is considering bills to extend TPS for Haitians through 2029, though the outcome remains uncertain.

The Haitian community in New Orleans is bracing for a crisis most of the city has not noticed yet. In June 2026, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Mullin v. Doe that federal courts have no authority to second-guess the Department of Homeland Security’s decision to end Temporary Protected Status for Haiti. That ruling cleared the way for roughly 350,000 Haitians nationwide, and an estimated 5,000 across Louisiana, to lose their legal right to stay.

Most of Louisiana’s Haitian population lives right here, in the greater New Orleans area. Many work in healthcare, filling jobs in elder care and nursing homes that hospitals and facilities have struggled for years to staff. Nora Ahmed, legal director of the ACLU of Louisiana, has said the pattern is not random. Documented immigrants, she said, are easier to find and easier to deport, precisely because they did everything the government asked of them.

A Debt New Orleans Has Never Fully Repaid

New Orleans owes its cultural identity to Haiti in ways most residents never learned in school. Between 1809 and 1810, nearly 10,000 refugees fled the Haitian Revolution and settled in this city. They arrived in roughly equal numbers of free people of color, enslaved people, and white planters. That single wave of migration nearly doubled New Orleans’ population overnight.

Those refugees did not just pass through. They built. Haitian free people of color tripled the city’s existing population of free Black residents, reshaping its laws, its churches, and its streets. Haitian Vodou merged with West African spiritual traditions already practiced here, forming what we now call New Orleans Voodoo. The drumming and call-and-response traditions Haitian refugees carried helped shape the gatherings at Congo Square. Historians trace those same rhythms forward into the birth of jazz. Even the food on our tables, red beans and rice, jambalaya, carries a Haitian hand.

Black New Orleans, as the world recognizes it today, is partly a Haitian creation. That history should matter now.

The Neighborhood They Built Is Pushing Them Out

Nowhere is that debt clearer than in Tremé. Free Haitian craftsmen, skilled builders fleeing the revolution, settled the neighborhood just steps from Congo Square in the early 1800s. They built it themselves, raising the low-slung Creole cottages that still line its streets today. By 1841, Black residents and Haitian immigrants owned 80 percent of the land there, making Tremé the oldest Black neighborhood in the United States.

The irony is hard to miss. The same community built one of Black America’s first neighborhoods, steps from the square where its music and spiritual traditions took root. Now it’s watching that neighborhood be sold out from under it. Tremé is now nearly 45 percent Airbnb and other short-term rentals. It ranks among the most intensely gentrified neighborhoods in a city researchers call the fifth-fastest gentrifying in the country.

Haitian immigrants did not just influence New Orleans culture. They built the ground it stands on, literally, cottage by cottage. Now the community facing deportation is the same one still watching its oldest neighborhood slip away.

The Legal Ground Just Shifted

TPS was never meant to be permanent, but it was never meant to be canceled this way either. Congress created the program in 1990 to protect people fleeing war, disaster, or conditions that made return unsafe. Haiti first received that protection in 2010, after an earthquake killed as many as 300,000 people. The designation was renewed repeatedly, including as recently as 2023.

In November 2025, then-Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem moved to end it anyway, determining that conditions in Haiti no longer justified protection. A federal judge blocked that decision earlier this year, finding it was likely motivated in part by racial animus. The Supreme Court’s June ruling swept that block aside, holding that the law simply does not allow courts to review DHS’s decision at all.

Some members of Congress are now pushing bills that would extend Haitian TPS through 2029 or return that authority to the courts. Whether either effort succeeds is still an open question.

What This Means for New Orleans

For Haitian families in New Orleans, the ruling is not abstract. Work permits tied to TPS are lapsing. Legal status that once felt settled now depends on case-by-case decisions attorneys admit they cannot predict. Healthcare facilities that depend on Haitian workers to staff elder care may soon face staffing gaps they cannot easily fill.

This community has weathered exclusion before. In 1809, Louisiana’s territorial governor tried to stop free Haitians from entering at all. He worried there were already “too many” free people of color in the city. They came anyway, and the city is unimaginable without them. New Orleans has a choice now. It can treat this as someone else’s immigration story, or recognize a community that helped build Black New Orleans and stand with it.

This story connects to broader threats facing Black political power in Louisiana right now. Read more on Lincoln Beach, Essence Fest, and the Black Right to Vacation and She Came for New Orleans. New Orleans Slapped Back. for more on how Louisiana’s Black community is fighting to hold its ground.

For the full legal breakdown of the Supreme Court’s ruling, see Verite News’ reporting on Haitians in New Orleans reeling from the decision.

About the Author: C.C. Campbell-Rock is an investigative journalist covering civil rights, voting rights, and community accountability for Black Source Media. Her reporting focuses on the policies and power struggles shaping Black political life in Louisiana.