Outside a local home improvement store, groups of men stand and sit in the shade of a cluster of nearby trees.
A few stand in the parking lot, dodging instructions from the store’s security guards to move to public property as they ask people leaving the store if they need help loading supplies or installing their recent purchases.
One man receives a few bills for helping to load lumber into the back of a car.
The sight is nothing new in San Diego, but in recent years the demographics have changed.
In the past, these men were mostly immigrants from Mexico and other Spanish-speaking countries.
Now, many are recent arrivals from Haiti.
As the Trump administration moves to change rules for many who entered the country during former President Joe Biden’s time in office, Haitian day laborers in San Diego are left feeling confused and afraid.
The administration has moved up the end date for temporary protected status for Haitians, and it has rescinded the temporary permissions that many received to enter the country.
But most of all, Haitian day laborers told me, the daily struggle to find enough work to feed and house themselves and their families occupies most of their attention and worry.
I spent some time standing with a group of them in a parking lot recently to try to understand what their experiences have been like under the Trump administration.
None wanted their names to be published out of fear of making waves with a government that seems determined to get rid of them.
“I’m not sure what’s going on with the new government,” one man told me in the Spanish he learned during his time in Chile prior to coming to the United States.
“I need an attorney because I don’t speak English.”
He said he doesn’t earn enough money to hire a lawyer.
He was trying to support himself, his wife, and two teenage children on the income he made from the occasional jobs offered to him in the home improvement store parking lot.
He crossed the border with his family at a port of entry using the CBP One application that used to allow asylum seekers to make appointments to enter the United States, he said.
His next immigration court hearing isn’t until 2026, he said, but he wasn’t able to explain exactly what was happening in his case.
“A Haitian who comes here isn’t looking for problems,” he said.
“It’s hard to be a migrant.”
He said he was willing to do any kind of work — including painting, cleaning, and landscaping — and he had dreams of going to school.
When I spoke with him, it had been two weeks since he’d last gotten a day laborer gig.
“The house is a lot of money.
Food is a lot of money,” he said.
“It’s very difficult.”
Another man standing with the father of two said he’d left his family in Haiti when he came to the United States in 2023.
He has to earn money to survive in San Diego while sending enough back home for his wife and children.
He said he hopes to be able to bring his family here once he has the means.
He said he has a work permit and that he has tried to apply for jobs around town, but no one has hired him.
“Haitians like work.
Any work, we’ll do,” he said in broken Spanish.
“We don’t have fear of any work.
We’re looking for a life here, not looking for problems.”
The president’s decisions would bring many problems, he said, but he wasn’t able to articulate exactly what he knew about what had happened.
He said he would be interested in having a Know Your Rights presentation in Haitian Creole — several local nonprofits do Know Your Rights outreach to day laborers and other vulnerable groups — but he had never heard of anyone offering it.
In Other News
Disappearing aid: Tijuana shelters, including Casa Del Migrante, are finding themselves in financial trouble after USAID program cuts, according to Gustavo Solis at KPBS.
Andrea Castillo at the Los Angeles Times reported on the hopelessness many in Tijuana are feeling following changes in border policy under the Trump administration.
Worksite raid: Immigration and Customs Enforcement raided an El Cajon paint business at the end of March, Solis reported.
I spoke with the wife of one of the men detained during the raid for Beyond the Border News.
The path to ending asylum: For Prism, I wrote about how “metering,” a policy that started under the Obama administration, under which border officials turned asylum seekers away from ports of entry instead of processing them, paved the way for the Trump administration’s shut down of asylum.
A lawsuit against the policy has resulted in judges at the district and appellate level saying that it’s illegal to turn asylum seekers away who are in the process of arriving in the United States, but the reality is that still happens at the border every day.
Meanwhile, plaintiffs in the case have remade their lives, as many in the current lawsuits against new Trump policies will likely do as well.
No to more legal help: Alexandra Mendoza reported for The San Diego Union-Tribune that the County Board of Supervisors did not pass a recent proposal to expand its immigration legal defense program run through the public defender’s office.
Surveilling remittances: The Trump administration announced that it will require names, addresses, and social security numbers from anyone wiring $200 or more to other countries from the border region, Solis reported.
The previous threshold was $10,000.
Wanted on both sides: The U.S. government is offering a $35,000 reward for the capture of a man who escaped a Central California courthouse to Tijuana and later allegedly killed a Mexican police officer, according to Mendoza.
More wall: The Department of Homeland Security issued an environmental waiver to allow for more border wall construction in the San Diego area, particularly in Jacumba.
image source from：https://voiceofsandiego.org/2025/04/14/border-report-deportation-threat-looms-over-haitian-immigrants/
