SPRINGFIELD, Ohio — Margery Koveleski didn’t know it at the time, but her life’s work began in 2018, when her former pastor asked the mother of six if she could interpret Sunday services for a group of recently arrived Haitians. Church services led to teaching English classes, which led to interpreting at a community health clinic, which led to opening an office in the back of a Haitian grocery store. There, for nearly five years now, Margery has helped Haitians settle into this midwestern city of 60,000 that became a flashpoint for the country’s immigration debate during the 2024 presidential campaign.
At first, a lot of Margery’s work revolved around setting things up: utilities, cell phones, health care. Then, as President Donald Trump escalated his immigration crackdown to unprecedented levels, her focus shifted to winding things down. Margery is now a lifeline for her Haitian neighbors as they fight to stay in a country where fewer and fewer legal pathways are available to them. Without a last-minute reprieve, the clock has likely run out on many of their American journeys.
Margery has called Springfield home since she moved here about 24 years ago from New York, where she was born and raised. She learned Haitian Creole as a child by translating for her maternal grandmother, who joined them in New York from Haiti. Now, she shares the language of her ancestors — and her calling — with her 27-year-old daughter, Laura Koveleski, who moved home to Ohio from Florida about three years ago.
Margery’s work, done from a desk in a closet-sized storeroom an arm’s length from where her daughter now sits, sometimes demands long hours, produces little income and isn’t the type of job you leave behind when you go home for the day. They know their clients are depending on them, now more than ever, and they’re willing to give them whatever they need most: a ride to court, a sympathetic ear, a call to an employer to negotiate family leave.
(Maddie McGarvey for The 19th)
Lately, supporting clients as they try to sort out their immigration cases takes up more and more of their time. Margery’s massive desk calendar notes the increasingly frequent all-day trips they make with Haitians to Ohio’s main immigration court in Cleveland, about a three-hour drive. On one such day last autumn, Margery’s alarm went off at 3 a.m. She made her way to the guest bedroom downstairs to make sure Laura was awake. Within the hour, they were out the door to pick up a man on Springfield’s south side, where most of the city’s Haitian immigrants live. A soft rain fell as Laura merged their rental car — picked up the night before, to spare their own from the wear-and-tear — east on I-70, then north on I-71, past the soggy corn and soybean fields that line the interstates most of the way to Cleveland.
Mother and daughter talked quietly as their client caught up on sleep in the back seat. They all knew they were making the journey, which clocks in at least nine hours from pick-up to drop-off, despite near certainty that the man’s asylum claim would be denied. During a prior court appearance, a judge gave him 30 days to produce proof of personal persecution in Haiti, with the type of evidence that is all but impossible to get in a country where armed gangs rule the capital and routine government services barely exist.
It’s a now-familiar predicament for so many in his community.
The man was one of some 330,000 Haitians in the United States under a program known as Temporary Protected Status, or TPS, which gives people from certain countries in conflict or facing natural disasters the ability to live and work in the United States for a set period of time. He was seeking asylum because barring action from the federal courts, TPS for Haitians ends February 3. Less than two weeks now remain for hundreds of thousands of Haitians to make an impossible choice: go back to an unstable, violent and desperately poor country where they fear they might die; leave and start again in another new country; or slip into the shadows in the United States, unable to work or live freely.
It all has Margery, a no-nonsense nurturer whom many clients call “manman” — Haitian Creole for “mother” — rethinking whether her city and country are the type of places where Haitians should try to put down roots and build lives.
“I went through a process of grief, but I’m now at acceptance,” Margery said.
Margery and Laura arrived back from the trip to Cleveland in the last light of the grey day. On the ride home, their client said he’d likely go to Mexico ahead of the TPS end date; other Haitians have told them they plan to leave for Brazil or Chile. After dropping him off at home, mother and daughter headed to Eat Greek and More, a favorite spot by the reservoir in Springfield’s northeast suburbs. They ordered at the counter, then slid into a booth. Their falafel arrived in plastic baskets lined with red-and-white checkered paper. Now that they’re regulars, the owner often makes eating there all the more enticing by sending over fries or dessert on the house. Margery first tried Greek food with Laura in Cincinnati, and she was thrilled to find such a good option a couple of miles from home. It’s become their go-to place to bring visitors, an introduction to their city that defies preconceived notions about small towns in red states far away from the country’s coasts.
It also serves as yet another reminder of the good that immigration has brought to Springfield at a time when the issue threatens to tear their city — and their country — apart.
I went through a process of grief, but I’m now at acceptance.”
Margery Koveleski
Springfield has been on edge since the final months of the 2024 presidential election, when now-President Trump and Vice President JD Vance, who was then one of Ohio’s U.S. senators, spread the lie that Haitians in Springfield were eating their neighbors’ pets — a convenient internet fable that bolstered their ticket’s call for mass deportations. Vance grew up just an hour’s drive away, in similarly sized Middletown, Ohio, which did not take the same steps to welcome Haitian immigrants as Springfield did and has also not experienced a recent economic resurgence. When CNN’s Dana Bash confronted Vance about his role spreading the pet-eating lie, he said that it was OK to “create stories” that drew attention to issues his constituents cared about, like immigration.
But much of the attention directed at Springfield was negative and laced with violence. Neo-Nazi and white nationalist groups like Blood Tribe and Patriot Front disrupted community events and protested in front of City Hall. Phoned-in bomb threats forced the temporary closure of schools. Local charity leaders helping Haitians were doxxed; business owners employing Haitian workers were threatened. To many in Springfield, it started to feel like their community, where leaders had taken great lengths to help Haitians assimilate by amping up translation services and securing training systems for new drivers, was starting to come apart at the seams.
It wasn’t that Springfield absorbed the estimated 12,000 to 15,000 immigrants that arrived in Ohio’s Clark County in recent years without issue. Though Haitians began immigrating to the area more than a decade ago, their numbers increased during the early years of the COVID-19 pandemic, when staffing agencies recruited them for jobs that paid as much as $20 an hour — jobs that employers couldn’t seem to fill. The rapid influx stressed local resources, particularly housing, because Haitian workers often rented bedrooms in shared homes and could therefore collectively pay higher rents than many longtime local families. It created some resentment.
Tensions worsened in August 2023 when a Haitian immigrant driving without an Ohio license crashed into a school bus, killing an 11-year-old boy on the first day of school. The next year, a jury convicted the driver of aggravated vehicular homicide and involuntary manslaughter. Trump and Vance seized on the tragedy as further evidence that Haitians were criminals, cherry-picking crime statistics to present Springfield as a city under siege. The student’s devastated parents pleaded at city meetings for people to stop invoking their son’s death to justify anti-immigrant hatred.
What the vitriol obscured, according to Margery and many other longtime Springfield residents, were the improvements that followed the most recent wave of Haitian arrivals: formerly boarded-up houses were renovated and filled, employers expanded in the region thanks to a reliable workforce, and small businesses like restaurants and grocery stores opened to serve Haitians nostalgic for home.
Springfield’s Republican mayor worked to dispel the pet-eating myth. Ohio’s GOP governor, Mike DeWine, also tried to turn down the temperature, promising to send more resources to the city where he was born. DeWine was familiar with conditions on the ground in Haiti: He had made dozens of trips there over the years to visit a school named for a daughter who died in a car accident when she was 22; the school was forced to close in early 2024 due to worsening violence. “Haitians are — culturally, my wife, Fran, and I have seen this when we’ve been down in Haiti — education is prized,” DeWine told ABC’s “This Week.” “So when you look at all of these things, people who want to work, people who value their kids, who value education, you know, these are positive influences on our community in Springfield.”
Trump’s second administration has attempted to move up the TPS end date for Haitians (the effort was blocked by the courts) and cut off other avenues for Haitians to obtain different types of legal immigration statuses. Over his first year in office, Haitians have become less visible on Springfield’s streets and foot traffic is down at businesses serving Haitian immigrants, like the grocery store that hosts Margery’s office. As scenes of armed and masked immigration agents breaking down doors in Minneapolis homes began to unfold on smartphone screens in Springfield in recent weeks, Haitians — and their American neighbors — grew more and more afraid. Charities and churches have developed meal-delivery systems so Haitians do not need to leave their houses.
(Maddie McGarvey for The 19th)
DeWine, who has privately told local charities that his hands are tied when it comes to federal immigration policy, recently warned that if there is no reprieve on TPS, it could jeopardize Springfield’s recent economic upswing, which also boosted fortunes in the larger rural region.
Sometimes, Margery wonders whether it’s time to close up shop.
“Is it worth it to fight to stay in America, now? That’s a question I ask myself,” she said as she and Laura finished their dinner of falafel and owner-proffered fries. “If our government is changing, if more than half of the population is okay with what’s happening, is it really worth it?”
“Changing drastically, so as far as deportations, could be good news, bad news, who knows,” Laura added.
“I used to live in fear of all this mistreatment,” said Margery, “and I’m seeing what’s happening, and because I believe in God, and I know that God is sovereign, if they’re deporting them, who’s to know that is not the best thing?”
Is it worth it to fight to stay in America, now? That’s a question I ask myself.”
Margery Koveleski
Margery’s faith in God is what drew her to Springfield in the first place.
When the Koveleskis were living in New York City, they would travel the country in their motor home, visiting other congregations affiliated with their own conservative, majority-Black Christian church, including one in Springfield. On September 11, 2001, Margery’s husband was at work when two planes flew into the World Trade Center; they couldn’t reach each other for hours. Their fear compelled them to move their young family to safety. A church friend who had hosted them during their Christmastime trips asked, “Why not Springfield?” They moved the next year.
By the time Haitians were arriving in Springfield in earnest, Margery had soured on her church. There was a sex scandal involving a pastor in a neighboring state, and then reports of financial improprieties in another congregation. The church embraced divine healing — the belief that you can recover from illness and injury through the healing power of God without medical intervention — around the same time that Margery needed life-saving caesarean sections to deliver her two youngest children. That, she said, was when she finally “lost the faith.” She now describes herself as spiritual but not religious.
Still, in 2018, when her former pastor asked if she would put differences aside and step up to interpret Sunday services for a group of Haitian congregants, she did not hesitate. She also started teaching them English in the evening.
“I remember the first night they saw snow,” Margery recalled. “They were laughing and opening their mouths, and they were praising God, seeing snow for the first time in their life; this was magical for them.”
One of the students was an older man named Moses. “He had a t-shirt on, and it was snowing, and I said, ‘Moses, you have no coat, aren’t you cold? You should wear a sweater.” She remembered him responding: “No, I’m in America. I’m in America. I’m gonna learn to be content. I’m gonna train my body to be grateful and happy, and so if I’m cold, I’m not going to complain. I’m going to give God thanks because I’m able to be in America, I’m able to work, and I have security, I have a church. What else do I need?”
Margery knew that Moses would nevertheless need a coat to get through Ohio’s winter. She asked the congregation if they could collect cold-weather apparel one Sunday for their Haitian worshippers and was disappointed when church leaders said they would need to hold a special meeting to discuss what seemed like a routine effort, and one they’d done before for other groups in need.
But, she said, God found another way. The principal at her younger son’s school, where she volunteered, overheard her talking about working with the Haitians at church and wrote a no-strings-attached $1,000 check. Margery and her husband used it to buy dozens of coats, gloves and hats, and distributed them to the Haitians after a Sunday service. It was like Christmas arrived early, she said.
Then came her breaking point.
At the end of another church service, when congregants had the opportunity to talk about something God had done in their lives, a debate erupted over whether the Haitians, who were dutifully and enthusiastically paying their tithes, were truly full congregants and able to offer testimony. One American congregant, she said, asked if the Haitians attending church alongside them were “legal.”
When it was Margery’s turn to testify about God’s work in her life, she took the microphone and walked her fellow congregants through passages of the Bible related to persecution and forced migration, and she talked to them about the Underground Railroad.
“I burnt the church with my tongue,” she recalled. “I rebuked the church and the minister, everybody, and I didn’t come back after that.”
But it didn’t take her long to find other ways to continue what had become her own ministry.
For several months, after she and her husband were forced to shutter their high-end furniture store during the pandemic, Margery interpreted for Haitian Creole-speaking patients at a community health care center. Then, a friend from church who knew about her work with the Haitian community called to tell her she’d seen a small grocery store on the city’s south side with a Haitian flag displayed in its window.
Margery wrote down the address, then went to check it out. The owner was a Haitian American with a green card who had recently moved to Springfield from New York, sensing a business opportunity when he heard that Haitian workers were settling in the city. She introduced herself; he said she could help his customers set up their phones and utilities and figure out their dates in immigration court from his grocery.
Margery started out at a little table, set up among the bins of cassava and coolers of Cola Couronne, an amber-colored Haitian soda that tastes like an effervescent fruit punch and is fondly called “Caribbean champagne.” At first, she worked entirely for free. Then, she started accepting small payments to cover supplies like stamps and envelopes. It became clear that her work would require its own designated space — to keep the aisles clear in the grocery store, but also for privacy. Many of Margery’s clients had traveled the harrowing migration route through the Darién Gap, the remote, dense rain forest that links Colombia and Panama. It was not uncommon for their stories to include details of their own sexual assaults or the family members they lost to sickness or injury along the way. They needed a quiet space to unburden themselves. They needed a quiet space to pray.
(Maddie McGarvey for The 19th)
Now, a slightly larger storage room in the rear of the grocery acts as a waiting area for Margery’s clients until it is their turn to take a seat in the closet-sized storeroom office she shares with Laura. Clients got to know Laura from the small trinkets and jewelry she gifted them, like sheets of earrings from the budget mall shop Claire’s. The gifts helped inject a little joy into the otherwise dreary experience of dealing with the U.S. immigration system.
Laura learned Haitian Creole by listening to clients’ migration stories. Some, she memorialized in paint. One painting, above Margery’s desk, depicts a father and young son holding hands as they face the jungle; the client’s wife and the son’s mother did not survive the trip. The painting above Laura’s own desk shows Haiti’s La Citadelle, a 19th century fortress honoring the successful slave rebellion that led to the country’s independence from France. In the painting, a young boy stands with his mother at the base of the winding, uphill road that leads to Haitian independence, with earthquakes and other obstacles along the way.
“We hear a lot of stories of what it took for people to get here. People who walk from Chile, people who walk from Brazil, people who maybe took a flight from Haiti to Nicaragua, but walk from Nicaragua. All of those people, walking up to the U.S.-Mexico border, hoping to get some sort of permission to enter the country,” Laura said. “During that route, you’re walking through the jungle with your family. A lot of people don’t make it. People fell from mountains. People drown in rivers. If you break a leg, you can’t keep walking, and you can’t have somebody carry you the whole way through, so you hope something will take you out.”
We may need to lose everything in order to be put back together again.”
Margery Koveleski
Margery and Laura now work out of their grocery-store office three or four days a week. Each day brings a little bit of everything. A sign in Haitian Creole hanging in the waiting area clarifies what the women can — and cannot — do for their clients.
Laura translated the words as Margery gently corrected her grammar: “I’m not a lawyer; I’m not an immigration officer; I’m not a U.S.C.I.S. officer; I’m not a judge; I can’t make any decision on your case or process your case; I can’t call or check your status without you; I can’t call immigration without you; I can’t guarantee the results; I can assist you, I can help you with your application, I can write a letter, I can help you get information; I can’t do a miracle, only Jesus can.”
(Maddie McGarvey for The 19th)
On a chilly day in December, the task at hand was wedding planning. Laura had already gone with the client to weigh in on the dress — intricate lacing, dramatic back, short train — and was now ordering a suit for the bride’s infant son on Amazon. While the client had the money to pay for the suit, she did not have a credit card, so Laura used theirs for the purchase. Once the suit was ordered, they started brainstorming beautiful and free indoor spots in Columbus for wedding photos. Several feet away, another mother met with Margery because she needed help asking her employer for time off work after giving birth.
A couple of months earlier, on a sunny day in October, most of the people who stopped by had questions about a new immigration fee that the Trump administration had announced without explaining how people should pay it. Haitians wanted to comply with the new rule to improve their chances of staying in the country, so they waited in folding chairs against shelves of cassava bread, coconut milk and cases of mango-strawberry juice. Among them was a man with a red folder of documents and a woman bouncing a baby on her knee.
Margery’s cell phone did not stop ringing.
“Alo,” she answered in Haitian Creole. “Yes, you’ll see a Haitian flag in the window,” she said once it was clear that the man on the other end of the line spoke fluent English.
Soon, a master sergeant in his U.S. Army fatigues poked his head into the office to make sure he was in the right place. He held his elderly mother’s purse as she and her husband, dressed in their Sunday best, settled into chairs in the waiting area. His mother and stepfather had called him the night before, he explained, ahead of a court appearance that day because they needed his help interpreting. He drove more than 15 hours overnight from Louisiana to meet them at court in Columbus, only to find out family members could not act as interpreters; the interviews would need to be rescheduled. A lawyer overheard the exchange and shared Margery’s phone number, so the master sergeant, his mother and stepfather got back the car and drove the hour-plus to see her in Springfield.
“They’re frantic right now,” the master sergeant assured Margery, gesturing to the prim and stoic elderly couple sitting outside her office door.
It only took minutes — the master sergeant didn’t even sit down — for them to work out that Margery would assist his mother and stepfather at their rescheduled interview. The master sergeant bought a Couronne, then took his parents to lunch. He would take a short nap before driving back to Louisiana.
“You’re a good son,” Margery said, then turned back to help the new mother.
Margery and Laura’s work navigating the morass of the U.S. court and immigration systems has only become more essential in recent weeks as the TPS end date looms for Haitians. They said that many are hoping that a federal court intervenes and extends the program. Clients are banking on a judge ruling that since TPS was created to protect people who cannot safely return to their home countries, they cannot be sent back to Haiti — where many of them do want to return someday — until conditions improve.
Margery said she can’t help but think sometimes about one of her favorite musicals, “Fiddler on the Roof.” In it, Tevye is a poor Jewish milkman living in early 1900s Russia. He and his family decide to flee anti-Semitic pogroms in their Jewish village of Anatevka, and the final scene shows them on a ship headed to safety in New York. In Margery’s present-day reimagining, Springfield is Anatevka, Haitians are the persecuted people and the United States is the country they must consider leaving to find safety.
Margery is trying to accept that the country that offered her own parents safe harbor in the 1960s, then the city that offered her own growing family refuge after 9/11, are no longer the beacons to newcomers that they once were. She is trying to make peace with what that means — for her clients, for herself, for her country.
“We’ve made so many enemies in the world. If the world is turning away from America, who could know the consequences that America is going to reap?” Margery asked.
“We may need to lose everything,” she added, “in order to be put back together again.”