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Tucked into neighborhoods across Central Ohio are thousands of Haitian families who’ve built lives, businesses, and communities—many under a federal designation called Temporary Protected Status (TPS). Now, with that protection set to expire on February 3, their futures hang in the balance. This conversation dives into the shifting terrain of U.S. immigration policy and how it’s playing out in real time across Central Ohio. It unpacks the legal pathways available to immigrants and refugees, the challenges of navigating a system marked by long backlogs and limited resources, and the broader implications for citizenship, deportation, and belonging.
Featuring Lourdes Barroso de Padilla, Columbus City Councilmember; Emily Brown, Director of Immigration Clinic, The Ohio State University Moritz College of Law; Sophia Pierrelus, Entrepreneur and Former Secretary of the Mouvement Patriotique des Haïtiens Conscients (MPHC); Angela Plummer, Executive Director, Community Refugee and Immigration Services (CRIS), with moderator Danae King, Underserved Communities Reporter, The Columbus Dispatch.
If you would like to dive more deeply into this topic, our friends at the Columbus Metropolitan Library suggest checking out Raiding the Heartland: An American Story of Deportation and Resistance, by William D Lopez, 2025.
Photographs by: Ian Alexander Photography
