Clark County Department of Job and Family Services Director Tom McGrath said Family and Children Services could see anywhere between zero and around 3,000 children in need if TPS ends and parents are detained or deported.
A large church, which McGrath declined to identify due to safety concerns, may serve as a place to house a large number of children if necessary, he said. Other churches may step in if the need becomes greater, McGrath said.
“Our Children Services building isn’t big enough, so, if we are to get a number of kids that come into it, we are going to utilize a large building to figure out who they are, find out if we can get them to their parents, a kinship, something along those lines,” McGrath said. “It’s just in preparation. There’s a possibility that none of the kids would go through us, but we also don’t want to be not prepared if we do get a large number of kids that come in our care.”
This could be a controversial practice; reunification with a child could get harder if a child is placed in foster care. Some Haitian parents have signed powers of attorney designating a legal guardian in an effort to keep their children out of the foster care system, Vilès Dorsainvil, Haitian Community Help and Support Center president previously told this newspaper.
McGrath encouraged parents to have emergency plans that identify guardians for their children.
The goal is to keep children with family or other loved ones, rather than become the responsibility of the government or housed in a group home environment.
“The best thing I would say is have a backup plan or a person that that child would know to go to, or have something in guardianship ... if somebody’s detained,” McGrath said.
When a child is found to be without guardians, McGrath said Children Services searches extensively for any emergency contacts, relatives or the parents, working to reunify the child with family whenever possible.
Representatives from the Ohio Department of Children and Youth are coming in to help, McGrath said, as Clark County Job and Family Services is “not really sure what we’re preparing for as far as numbers go.”
“There’s just so many variables and unknowns around this that we are just preparing as best we can,” McGrath said.
Other Ohio counties have offered help, particularly with respite, or short-term care, he said.
Clark County has 17 qualified families in the foster care program.
Planning ‘for any contingency’
St. Vincent de Paul Director Casey Rollins, who has been working to help immigrant families, both Haitian and Hispanic, obtain passports to avoid family separation, said in a recent advocacy webinar that they see children from four days old to 18 years old. Sometimes St. Vincent de Paul sees seven or eight families a day, she said.
“It’s just unbelievable that these children are not welcome by many people and they’re currently sort of in limbo because of all this, or they would be rendered in limbo if Americans weren’t going to fight for them.” Rollins said.
As of July 2025, there were more than 1,200 Haitian babies aged 0 to 4, and around 900 Hispanic babies in that same age group in Clark County, Rollins said. Children in public school number around 1,300.
St. Vincent de Paul has helped obtain passports for more than 250 children who were born in the U.S. to Haitian and Hispanic parents. Rollins said it costs about $195 per passport “if there’s no complication.”
According to U.S. Census data from 2022, around 18.4 million children under 18 had one or more parents who were more outside the U.S., with about 6.3 million in households where neither parent was a citizen. About 13% of those children were immigrants, with the vast majority being citizens.
A spokesman for Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine, Dan Tierney, said that with the court order halting the end of TPS, the state has no formal plans to manage a potential influx of children into the foster care system. However, the governor “has been meeting consistently with community leaders across Springfield and Clark County,” including Children Services, since 2024 when the Haitian community in Springfield first made national headlines.
“We always plan for any contingency,” Tierney said. “The state looks to be helpful in planning and things along those lines, so while there’s no firm action to take at this time, we will continue to have conversations with local officials on how we can be helpful, as we have over the past 18 months and will continue to do so.”
What’s happening with TPS?
Temporary Protected Status, the legal way in which many of Springfield’s estimated 10,000-15,000 Haitians are in the country, was previously set to end last week.
U.S. District Judge Ana Reyes in Washington paused the termination of TPS for Haitians while a lawsuit challenging the move proceeds. The ruling postpones the end of TPS for Haiti indefinitely while the case proceeds.
The Trump administration is seeking to stay the judge’s order in an effort to allow the termination to take effect as the case continues.
According to the United Nations, more than 1.4 million Haitians have been internally displaced due to gang violence and political instability. Haiti’s last elected president was assassinated in 2021 and the country is now being run by a transnational council, which is supposed to step down Saturday, a date selected in 2024 under the assumption the country would have held elections for a new president, according to the Associated Press.
Gangs control an estimated 90% of Port-au-Prince, Haiti’s capital, and they have seized swaths of land in the country’s central region.
More than 8,100 killings were reported across Haiti from January to November last year, “with figures likely underreported owing to limited access to gang-controlled areas,” according to the U.N. report.
Credit: AP
Credit: AP
Reporter London Bishop and The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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