Chef Creole owner Wilkinson “Ken” Sejour said on national television that he regrets voting for Donald Trump, after the end of Temporary Protected Status for Haitians cost him his entire management team and put two of his Miami restaurants at risk of closing.Sejour made the admission during an August 5 CBS Evening News segment filmed in Little Haiti, where reporter Cristian Benevides was asking business owners how the policy was landing in the neighborhood. Sejour said Trump had sold himself to him as a businessman who would make business decisions. Asked directly whether he regretted the vote, he answered yes without hesitating.Temporary Protected Status, usually shortened to TPS, is a federal designation that lets people from countries considered too dangerous to return to live and work legally in the United States. It is not citizenship and it is not a green card. It is renewed in blocks of time by the Department of Homeland Security, and when it ends, the work permits attached to it end with it. For Haitians, that designation has been in place through years of gang violence, political collapse, and natural disaster. Many of the people covered by it have been in this country for a decade or longer, raising children, paying taxes, and holding down the jobs that keep South Florida’s kitchens, hotels, and hospitals running.The Supreme Court cleared the way in late June for Homeland Security to end that status for roughly 300,000 Haitians as of July 27. A federal judge had temporarily blocked the move, but on August 5 that judge lifted the order, leaving as many as 350,000 people exposed to arrest and deportation. Immigration experts have described the loss of legal status for a group that size as something the country has not seen in modern history.The Trump administration’s position is that Haiti no longer meets the standard for the designation. The conditions on the ground say otherwise. As of March, the United Nations reported that gangs controlled 90 percent of Port au Prince, Haiti’s capital. In July, Mike Waltz, the U.S. ambassador to the UN, described the city to the Security Council as a kill zone. The State Department currently has Haiti under a Level 4 advisory, its most severe, telling Americans not to travel there at all because of crime, kidnapping, terrorism, and unrest. Sejour has raised the obvious contradiction in that: the same government warning its own citizens to stay out of Haiti is preparing to send hundreds of thousands of people back into it.For the Chef Creole owner, the fallout started before the permits even expired. He has said his employees did not wait for the deadline. They told him they were not going to risk being treated like criminals in public and they walked. Four went early. Eventually the entire management layer across his locations was gone. Sejour has said his labor costs were budgeted at about 23 and a half percent and are headed toward 27 or 28 percent as he tries to rehire, which for a restaurant group is the difference between a thin margin and no margin at all.Then the fear reached the customers. On a recent Sunday, ICE agents detained a man riding a scooter just outside the Chef Creole location on Northwest 54th Street in Little Haiti. Someone recorded it near the drive thru area, and the video spread with the false claim that the restaurant itself had been raided. It had not been. The damage was done anyway. Sejour told Local 10 that the agents were taking key people while leaving everyone else with the impression that “it’s not even safe to come to my business.” Foot traffic dropped. At an annual back to school supply giveaway in the neighborhood that same week, the lines were noticeably shorter than in past years. People are staying home.The Chef Creole owner has said his future in the hospitality business is almost going to be nonexistent, and that he expects to shut down two stores. He has not said which ones or when.That is not a small thing to lose. Sejour and his late brother Jude Pierre opened the first Chef Creole in 1992, a takeout counter on Northeast 78th Street in Miami serving Haitian and Bahamian Creole food. Thirty four years later it grew into a small chain across the city and a genuine landmark of Black Miami. Anthony Bourdain filmed there in 2006 for the second season of No Reservations. Miami police honored Sejour for feeding people during a government shutdown. This is a business that has fed the city through hurricanes and recessions, and it is immigration policy that has it looking at closures.Sejour has stopped short of calling for the policy to be scrapped. What he has asked for is time, a chance to work the problem out without wrecking the broader economy in the process. Others are pushing harder. Miami Archbishop Thomas Wenski recently went to Washington to lobby senators on a House bill that would extend protections for Haitian nationals three more years, a bill that only made it out of the House through a discharge petition, which is the rarely successful maneuver members use to force a vote when leadership will not schedule one. Wenski left describing the odds in the Senate as slim.The Chef Creole story is getting the headlines because of the vote, and that is understandable. A man saying out loud that he helped elect the thing now dismantling his life’s work is a hard image to look away from. But he is one of a few hundred thousand, and he is among the very few with a camera pointed at him. CBS noted in the same segment that the effects will reach nursing, hotels, and industries well beyond restaurants. Most of the people losing their status this month do not own seven storefronts and never got a ballot at all. They are the ones who told their boss they would rather quit than be humiliated, and then disappeared from the neighborhood.
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