A Haitian pastor who received a brief reprieve from deportation after he was abruptly removed from a flight to Haiti last week was returned to the country on Thursday.

Molis Augustave was deported to Haiti along with dozens of other people despite several legal efforts to halt his removal and reverse a decision by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services denying his application for permanent residence filed by his wife, who is a U.S. citizen.

Augustave, who was arrested on Sept. 4 while driving for DoorDash, has become an example of the growing uncertainty facing Haitians in the U.S. following the end of their humanitarian protections.

After the Supreme Court cleared the way this summer for the Trump administration to revoke Haiti’s Temporary Protected Status designation despite ongoing litigation in federal courts, immigration advocates say they are seeing an increase in people with pending immigration claims — including through marriage and other family-based adjustments — being detained and deported.

“Before, it used to be if someone got taken by ICE we had a few weeks, a few months to get an attorney and see what kind of bond or legal relief we could get them,” said Guerline Jozef, executive director of the Haitian Bridge Alliance, one of the groups that that advocated for Augustave’s release. “But now within a couple of days from being taken by ICE, they are being sent either to their country or a third country. Now they have completely removed any access to due process, and they are targeting and attacking people who have very strong possibilities of an adjustment of status.”

Augustave, who entered the U.S. in 2016 and had his asylum application denied, had been issued a final order of removal before applying for TPS, which protected him from deportation.

Days after his arrest, his wife received word that her petition filed on his behalf to begin the process of getting him permanent residence had been approved. But shortly after application for a green card was denied.

When he landed back in Haiti on Thursday, a motion to reopen his removal proceedings was pending before the Board of Immigration Appeals along with a pending habeas corpus petition before a federal court in Louisiana.

An immigrant rights organizer, Augustave walked off the aircraft in Haiti on Thursday wearing a red T-shirt with the logo of his organization, We Are CASA, turned inward, and sporting a beard. He did not give interviews and said he first wanted to change his clothes.

In an opinion piece he wrote before leaving the U.S., Augustave wrote: “I now understand something I did not understand before I was detained: For every person whose name becomes known, there are so many others whose names we never hear. People knew my name. Reporters told my story. Advocates fought for me. My wife fought for me. My community prayed for me. People I had never met cared about whether I would be put on that plane. That is a blessing I will never forget.

“But what about the other 89” who were on the first deportation plane he had been scheduled to be on? he wrote. “Who knows their names?”

Jossie Flor Sapunar, national communications director of We Are CASA, said: “The Trump administration deported a shepherd.”

She added: “The federal government feared a Black man from Haiti who loved his wife, cared for his children, pastored a congregation, and made a people-powered movement...They evicted him and so many other Black immigrants from this country. But they cannot deport a legacy. The love he poured into his family, his church, and his community spread throughout the United States, despite the hate that the Trump administration spews.”

Ama Frimpong, chief of services and legal advocacy at We Are CASA said that in denying Augustave’s green card application, the Trump administration rubber-stamped a predetermined decision to deport him.

“This is what happens when a government decides that due process is a privilege it can revoke at will,” she said.

Not the only one

Johnny Jules, another detained Haitian, also showed up on the manifest for Thursday’s deportation flight, even though he too had been pursuing an adjustment of his immigration status through his U.S.-citizen wife.

Jules was arrested on Sept. 15 in Columbus, Ohio, after reporting for a mandatory ICE check-in, his wife said. On Thursday, she was desperately trying to determine whether he was aboard the deportation charter flight, which originated in Alexandria, Louisiana, stopped in Miami and arrived in Cap-Haïtien at 2:25 p.m.

Jules had been transferred to Louisiana and called his wife Wednesday evening. But the call abruptly ended, she said. Soon, his information disappeared from ICE’s online detainee locator.

“He said, ‘Hello, how are you’ and then the call dropped,” Lourdes Miya Dorsonne said. “I tried calling him back, and I couldn’t get him.”

The couple married in 2024 after being together for years. They have two children, a 1-year-old son and a 3-year-old daughter.

“I am suffering,” Dorsonne said. “We’ve just been suffering since all this happened.”

Jules came to the U.S. after nearly drowning at sea, his wife said, after a boat carrying him and dozens of other Haitian migrants capsized in 2022 in the Mona Passage off Puerto Rico. Eleven women died. Jules was detained after surviving the wreck, and eventually released. As part of his release, he had to periodically report to ICE.

When Haiti was redesignated for TPS by the Biden administration, Jules applied, Dorsonne said. He began working as a truck driver but remained subject to ICE’s check-ins.

In 2025, Dorsonne said, she petitioned to have his status adjusted through marriage. They brought the documents along, she said, when Jules reported for his ICE appointment this month.

“Even though we showed it to them, they still held him,” Dorsonne said. “The children keep asking where their father was. The minute they hear the garage door open, they run thinking it’s him.”

Dorsonne said she never imagined that complying with an ICE requirement would lead to her husband’s detention – or that she would spend the week after his arrest desperately trying to locate him in the detention system.

“He followed the law and did everything they asked. This is why he’s in this situation, because he went to his appointment,” Dorsonne said.

Pompano Beach mother of seven detained

When TPS ended in late July, Haitians went back to the status they had held before the designation. In the face of the Trump administration’s mass deportation campaign, that has meant being vulnerable to deportation to Haiti based on final order of removals they had prior to getting TPS.

As Thursday’s flight prepared to depart Miami, a group of immigration advocates with the advocacy groups Faith In Action and Faith In Florida were trying to stop the deportation of another Haitian with U.S.-born children, and who once had a green card, according to her family.

Sirena Prosper, a longtime Pompano Beach resident and mother of seven, was arrested by ICE on Sept. 14 in front of her kids and is currently being held at the South Louisiana ICE Processing Center, a facility where advocates say there were two deaths this summer.

Like the others, Prosper has U.S.-born children, three of whom are minors aged 14, 12 and 10. She also had legal residency, her family said. The case has caused indignation in South Florida.

Prosper’s family and advocates note that she owns a beauty salon in Pompano Beach after having turned her life around. A prayer vigil was held on Tuesday outside her Royal Hands Salon to call for her release and a pause on her deportation.

Marie Prosper, her niece, told the Miami Herald that her aunt was born in The Bahamas in the late 70s and came to the United States six months later.

In a statement to the Herald, an ICE spokesperson pointed to her criminal history, which it said includes convictions for burglary of a residence and larceny.

“Prosper entered the country legally and adjusted, but on Jan. 9, 2002, was issued a final order of removal by an immigration judge. She will remain in ICE custody pending her removal from the country,” the ICE spokesperson said.

Prosper’s family says that she had served her time for the decades-old convictions and checked in with ICE for years.

One of her children died by suicide during COVID, said Marie Prosper, and now the rest of the siblings are navigating the uncertainty of their mother’s potential deportation. The family is worried that her immigration records may incorrectly say she was born in Haiti, Marie Prosper said.

“She’s never been to Haiti.”

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