As ICE Closes In on Springfield, Here's How Faith Groups Have Prepared

Church-supervised hubs to house and care for children separated from their parents. Phone chains to activate citizen networks if federal immigration agents are spotted in the community. Volunteers to deliver food to hungry neighbors from their own cars instead of food pantry trucks. Training on what to do if agents breach one of the churches planning to provide sanctuary to immigrant families. 

These are just some of the preparations that residents of Springfield, Ohio, have made in recent days as the country barrels toward the end of an immigration program that has allowed some 330,000 Haitians to legally live and work in the United States because of the rampant violence and political volatility in Haiti. Though conditions there have not improved — and perhaps only worsened — Temporary Protected Status, or TPS, ends for Haitians on February 3. There are as many as 15,000 immigrants in the Springfield area, many of them Haitian, and the city of about 60,000 is ramping up efforts to try to protect their community from the type of chaotic, violent assault by federal immigration agents that claimed two lives in Minneapolis in recent weeks.