SPRINGFIELD, Ohio – The long-feared loss of their temporary protected status means hundreds of thousands of Haitian immigrants in the United States are days into a new reality of knowing they could be deported at any time.
And until they are, many must cope with having to wear an ankle monitor issued by the Department of Homeland Security — a piece of surveillance technology that has become a fact of life for an increasing number of people in the United States now without legal residency.
After the Supreme Court allowed the Trump administration to end TPS for Haitians, Immigration and Customs Enforcement personnel began requiring the monitors for those in Springfield, Ohio, long a scapegoat for the administration. Another judge made that ruling official Wednesday by lifting an order that blocked the administration from moving ahead.
Although ankle monitors have been deployed for decades on those involved in immigration proceedings, the Trump administration is aggressively expanding the use of the devices, which are more commonly associated with people charged with crimes or out on parole.
In 2025, ICE awarded a contract worth up to $1 billion to BI Inc., a Boulder, Colorado-based manufacturer of GPS-enabled ankle monitors and other “detention alternatives” and a provider of monitoring services. That followed a multiyear contract worth $2.2 billion awarded in 2020 to BI, a subsidiary of the GEO Group, one of the nation’s largest private detention firms.
In June 2025, under then-Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, ICE ordered its field officers to slap ankle monitors on immigrants “whenever possible,” a departure from longstanding policies such as using app or voice check-ins, even though at least one study has questioned their effectiveness in immigration settings.
As a result, over 30% of the more than 183,000 people ICE monitored on an average day in the past fiscal year using “alternative to detention” methods were forced to wear an ankle or wrist monitor, up from 18% the previous year.
In fiscal 2025, people in the program showed up for court appearances 98.2% of the time, a number that actually dipped very slightly the following year as the use of ankle monitors went up. (Those figures aren’t broken down by the type of monitoring, and the percentage of people who showed up for their final deportation hearings went from 86.4% to 91.1%, according to ICE data sourced from BI.)
BI did not immediately respond Friday to MS NOW’s request for comment on its government contracts.
It’s estimated that 330,000 to 350,000 Haitians in the U.S. previously held TPS. In Springfield alone, the diaspora is estimated to be around 12,000. Many of them received letters from DHS in recent days calling them to an ICE field office in Blue Ash, Ohio, about an hour away.
As they emerged last Sunday with monitors around their ankles, they were enveloped by hundreds of demonstrators protesting the administration’s actions.
“They’re very much ashamed of the ankle monitors,” said Viles Dorsainvil, the executive director of the Haitian Support Center in Springfield who escorted those summoned to the ICE facility in Blue Ash.
“When they get home with them, they’re ashamed to show that to their kids because they’re not criminals,” said Dorsainvil, who connects Haitians in Springfield to legal, interpreter and mental health services.
For people who are in immigration court proceedings, it’s not new for ICE to force them at check-ins to choose between an ankle monitor or being detained, said Rebecca Bundy, the supervising attorney at Advocates for Basic Legal Equality, or ABLE, in Toledo.
“However, for many folks in the Haitian community … these are not people who are in immigration court proceedings. They are people who filed affirmative asylum applications with USCIS, and so the jurisdiction and the procedure is completely different,” she said.
“We’re actually not sure yet how the immigration enforcement, CBP, and ICE are claiming to have the authority to impose these restrictions, impose the ankle monitor,” Bundy added.
MS NOW reached out to DHS about its ankle monitor policy, including whether officers are following the same policy in other Haitian American enclaves. DHS didn’t comment on the monitors specifically, instead quoting a song by the band “Semisonic.”
“It’s closing time which means you don’t have to go home, but you can’t stay here. The good news is it’s not too late to get a $2,600 check and a free flight home,” a DHS spokesperson said in a statement.
Trump notoriously targeted the Haitian community in Springfield on the debate stage against then-Vice President Kamala Harris in the fall of 2024, greatly amplifying an unfounded rumor that had been confined to smaller corners of social media.
The DHS letters and ankle monitor tactics have Haitian leaders in Springfield worried about the mental health of their community.
“I’m worried a lot about self-harm and strokes because some of them tell me they got that letter and they haven’t slept,” said Annette Huelskamp, a 38-year-old Haitian American volunteering at the Haitian Support Center in Springfield.
James Fleurijean is the administrative assistant at the Haitian Support Center and a former TPS holder himself who volunteers his time while also being at risk of deportation. He said the ankle monitor policy is “humiliating,” serving as an ever-present reminder of the threat of deportation to a place still so overrun by gangs that the U.S. State Department lists it as a “do not travel” country, its highest warning level, “due to the risk of crime, kidnapping, terrorism, unrest, and limited health care.”
Fleurijean said the letters and ankle monitors are having a devastating toll on the community, but they somehow persevere.
“That’s what keeps me going,” he said.
The post The loss of TPS brings another humiliation for Haitians — ankle monitors appeared first on MS NOW.
