“I’m Walking Through the Streets… Carrying Shame and Humiliation”

Pierre Damas Bel attends Springfield High School's Marine Corps Junior Reserve Officers' Training Corps award ceremony. Springfield City School District via CNN Get your news from a source that’s not owned and controlled by oligarchs. Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily. The family of Pierre Damas Bel, a 20-year-old Haitian immigrant in Springfield Ohio, says he died by suicide August 31 after losing Temporary Protected Status. Bel, an avid soccer player and JROTC member, was beginning his freshman year as an honors neuroscience student at Wright State University. But in July, Bel became one of about 340,000 Haitians in the US whose Temporary Protected Status expired, after the Supreme Court ruled not to intervene. In late July, Immigrations and Customs Enforcement fitted Bel with an electronic ankle monitor, one of the ways the agency tracks people who it may soon deport. As the device interfered with and stigmatized his day-to-day life, Bel’s family says he became withdrawn. “After my son was outfitted with this ankle monitor, he felt like he was treated like an animal,” Bel’s father, Pierre Ronal Bel, wrote in a statement. Pierre Damas Bel uploaded a picture of the ankle monitor on Instagram in late July. “I came to this country to pursue my education. I didn’t come here to commit a crime or hurt anyone,” he wrote in the caption. “Yet now I’m walking through the streets of the United States with a GPS monitor on my leg, carrying a feeling of shame and humiliation that I never imagined I would experience.” “I came here to study, to build my future, and to live a better [life] not to be treated like criminal,” he wrote. “So now, how am I supposed play college sports with a GPS monitor on my leg?” Bel’s next asylum court hearing was scheduled for October. Vilés Dorsainvil, executive director of the Haitian Support Center in Springfield, is working to support the family. As Dorsainvil told Mother Jones in June, deportation to Haiti can be a matter of “life and death.” The State Department maintains a “do not travel” advisory for risk of kidnappings, sexual assault, and robbery in Haiti. Haitians will face the same dangers if deported back, Dorsainvil said: “There is no safe place in Haiti.” “No one is required to stay in the United States illegally and wear a monitor,” an ICE spokesperson said. “Any attempts to blame ICE for the death of Pierre Damas Bel are false.” “These policies are what caused his untimely death,” Guerline Jozef of the Haitian Bridge Alliance, an Ohio legal aid nonprofit, told The Washington Post. Ohio’s Republican governor, Mike DeWine, called Bel’s death a “horrible, horrible tragedy” and said that ending TPS for Haitian residents was “misguided and wrong,” Capital B reported. The Trump administration has sent two deportation flights to Haiti since TPS for Haitians was canceled. Meanwhile, another large group of TPS-holders may see their protected status expire in the coming week: About 180,000 people from El Salvador have held TPS status since 2001, but that could end on Sept. 9. The Department of Homeland Security has not yet announced whether that designation will be extended or terminated.