People gathered outside the Cincinnati ICE field office Sunday for a vigil and to show solidarity with Haitian immigrants being summoned to meetings with federal officials.

The current federal régime has officially ended Temporary Protected Status for Haitians, marking the latest attack on a group of people the state has persecuted in various ways for over 200 years. The ending of TPS comes in spite of the fact that Haiti is currently listed by the U.S. State Department as a “Do Not Travel” country due to extreme violence and instability—the reason TPS was extended to Haitians in the first place.

At the ICE offices in Blue Ash, Ohio, immigrants and neighbors showed up in solidarity as Haitians were called in on a Sunday morning to update their status, the first step in deportation proceedings. One attendee, Bethany Rogers, said she “came to bear witness to a great wrong.”

Viles Dorsainvil, executive director of the Springfield Haitian Support Center, said: “The American people have to know that if we are here, it is because the foreign policies of those big countries have failed our country and make it a hell for us not to be able to live in there. If you put my house on fire, you would have expected that I would come to your yard. That’s the reality.”

(Taken from an email sent to me by Never Again Action.)