The Death of a Young Haitian’s American Dream
The night before Pierre Damas Bel’s funeral, in early October, his father and stepmother held a wake at their home in Springfield, Ohio. They offered visitors sweet ginger tea, bread rolls, and hot chocolate. In the kitchen, his stepmother, Landy St. Juste, cooked tomtom ak kalalou, a southern-Haitian dish made with breadfruit and okra, as she recalled her twenty-year-old stepson’s final moments on the morning of August 31st.
She’d woken up early to prepare breakfast for the family. Bel liked eggs, so she boiled some for him, but when she called out that they were ready he didn’t answer. He’d left the house without saying goodbye, which was unlike him.
“Da would always tell you where he was going, even when it was just down the block,” she said, using a nickname for Bel.
At 8:03 A.M., Bel called his father, Pierre Ronal, on video and said he wasn’t feeling O.K. His father told him to come home so they could talk. A few hours later, highway-patrol officers arrived at the family’s front door, holding Bel’s driver’s license.
St. Juste recalled, “They asked if I knew who the license belonged to, and, when I said yes, they told me he was dead.”
He had walked into oncoming traffic on Interstate 70 and had been fatally struck by a tractor-trailer.
Bel left no apparent suicide note, but the family said it was confident about the source of his despair. Like his father, his stepmother, and his teen-age brother, Bradley, Bel had benefitted from Temporary Protected Status, fleeing gang violence and political instability in Haiti and living lawfully in the U.S. When the Trump Administration ended the program for Haitians, in July, they were among the approximately three hundred and fifty thousand Haitians left suddenly vulnerable to deportation. Bel had arrived in the United States from Haiti in 2024. His father and stepmother had come a few years before. After T.P.S. ended, only Bel received a letter from ICE asking him to report to the Cincinnati office, where ICE fitted him with an ankle monitor as part of its Alternatives to Detention program. The number of monitors actively used in immigration enforcement has increased more than seventy per cent in the past year, according to data made public by ICE. In a statement released by Bel’s father the day after Bel’s death, he said the stigma-laden device made his son feel “like an animal,” and that he’d been bullied by peers “telling him he’s a criminal.” A month before Bel’s death, he had written on Instagram that the ankle monitor left him “carrying a feeling of shame and humiliation that I never imagined I would experience.”
During the wake, a local artist, Nathan Conner, arrived on the front porch and delivered a commemorative painting. The central image showed Bel beaming in a bright-blue cap and gown. His hair was styled in the small twists that he commonly wore, and a stole decorated with Haitian and American flags was draped around his neck. Another image in the painting showed Bel in a khaki shirt and navy-blue slacks, the uniform of his school’s junior R.O.T.C. program, though after he lost T.P.S. he was not eligible to continue on to R.O.T.C. The canvas also included the logos of the Springfield Wildcats, Bel’s high-school soccer team, and the Wittenberg Tigers, the team of Wittenberg University, a private college that had recruited Bel to play. In the end he’d enrolled in the honors program at a public university, Wright State, where he’d planned to study physiology and neuroscience in hopes of becoming a doctor. Last Halloween, he dressed in scrubs and labelled an Instagram post from the day with the caption “Dr. Pierre.” In the end, he’d only completed a week of college classes.
Bel’s father took a long look at Conner’s painting, then let out a loud moan and wept.
“I can keep the painting?” he asked. The artist nodded, and Pierre Ronal said, “I will take it with me wherever I go.”
The next morning, the painting was propped on an easel in the lobby of St. John Missionary Baptist Church as guests arrived for Bel’s funeral. Across from the easel was a large picture frame displaying artifacts of Bel’s tragedy, including the crushed remains of a cellphone that he’d had on him when he died. An email dated July 29th was addressed to Wright State’s University Center for International Education: “I would like to understand what options I have to obtain F-1 student status while remaining in the United States,” Bel wrote. Another frame held printouts of letters of support for his immigration case that others had sent on Bel’s behalf. One of his managers at Texas Roadhouse, the restaurant where he worked, had written, “He is a wonderful young man who has a very bright future ahead of himself.” A teacher wrote that he had a “drive, motivation and passion for self-betterment that truly embodies the ‘American dream.’ ”
If you are having thoughts of suicide, call or text 988 or chat at 988Lifeline.org.
Inside the church, Bel’s photo-printed casket bore a large-scale reproduction of his graduation photo. Ohio’s Republican governor, Mike DeWine, and his wife, Fran, came to pay their respects. (DeWine has called the ending of T.P.S. for Haitians a “mistake”; he also lost a twentysomething daughter decades ago, in a car crash, and told the Bels, “We have some idea how you feel.”) Springfield’s mayor, Rob Rue, was present in a dual capacity as a civic leader and a co-owner of Littleton & Rue Funeral Home and Crematory, which helped arrange the service. I expected the church to be packed, but many rows were empty. Springfield is home to an estimated twelve thousand to fifteen thousand Haitians, who have helped revitalize the struggling post-industrial city even as Donald Trump and J. D. Vance have characterized them as dangerous interlopers who eat their neighbors’ pets. Since T.P.S. ended, ICE has been conducting regular sweeps in the city, and dozens have been detained, including three pastors. (One has since been released.) Others have been forced to turn in their passports and wear ankle monitors, which many see as a way of encouraging self-deportation, or at least making them easier to round up in the future. The atmosphere is one of terror and dread. “People are afraid to leave their homes,” Vilès Dorsainvil, the co-founder and executive director of the Haitian Community Help and Support Center, who helped plan Bel’s service, told me. “They can’t drive because their driver’s licenses are no longer valid. Unless someone takes them, they can’t go food shopping or to their immigration hearings or to their medical appointments or to take their kids to school or go to church, and when they do go out they worry about running into ICE and being taken.” He recalled a dentist calling the center to tell him to urge people not to come to him, because the dentist had seen ICE pick up three people in his parking lot.
In opening remarks at the funeral, the pastor Carl Ruby compared Bel’s death to that of Emmett Till. Both “died under the weight of a racialized system that did not provide him with equal liberty and equal justice,” Ruby said. He paraphrased Till’s mother’s famous words, “Let the world see what they did to my boy.” Guerline Jozef, the executive director of the immigrant-advocacy group Haitian Bridge Alliance, explained that Bel’s ankle monitor could be uncomfortably hot against his skin. He managed to put a sock between the device and his skin, but, according to Jozef, when he went to the ICE office for a check-in in early August, he was told that the fact that the sock fit meant the ankle monitor was too loose. Then an agent tightened it even more.
“Our dear friend and brother might have died by suicide, but he was killed by the system,” Jozef said. What might also have killed Bel was watching the future he’d imagined for himself thrown abruptly into uncertainty. In another Instagram video from July 30th, the day after he was fitted with the monitor, he is sitting on the grass watching his soccer teammates practice while rocking his shackled ankle. “I’ve got practice today, and I can’t even practice with that shit on my leg,” he says. According to Jozef, the monitor would beep if the ball hit his ankle too hard. Off the field, Bel began to wear baggy pants to hide the device. Yola Lamarre, a community advocate who befriended Bel after he reached out on social media, told me that, just a few days before he died, Bel had seen a widely circulated video, posted by the Department of Homeland Security, showing Haitian men in shackles being led onto a deportation flight in the rain. (An ICE spokesperson told The New Yorker in a statement, “Any attempt to blame ICE for the death of Pierre Damas Bel are FALSE,” and added, “No one is required to stay in the United States illegally and wear a GPS monitor.”)
The funeral program said that Bel’s brother Bradley would read remarks prepared by their parents, but, when the time came, Bradley was too overcome with emotion to speak, so Rose-Thamar Joseph, the co-founder of the Haitian Community Help and Support Center, stepped in. “I feel like I lost everything,” the words from Bel’s father began. “Whenever someone opens the front door, I have the sense that it is him coming home.”
“He was my personal interpreter. . . . He was everywhere with me,” his stepmother’s statement read. “Damas left me with this emptiness.”
Later, at the grave site, under the dense canopy of a large maple tree, Pierre Ronal took a slow and final walk around his son’s coffin. Then he bent down, grabbed a handful of dirt, and sprinkled it on the casket. Before the coffin was lowered into the ground, he tied a hand towel that he had been using to wipe his tears on one of the brackets near the image of his son’s head.
A few hours after Bel was buried, President Trump held a rally at a high school in the nearby town of Vandalia for the U.S. Senate candidate Jon Husted and the gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy. Trump read the crowd song lyrics that he’s recited many times in the past, Oscar Brown, Jr.,’s “The Snake,” inspired by an Aesop fable, about a woman who nurses a frozen snake back to health only to have it attack her. Applying this story’s lesson to what he referred to as a once idyllic Springfield, Trump said, seemingly in reference to the city’s Haitians, “It didn’t work out too well for them, and they’re being removed. They’re all being brought back to their country.”
In Bel’s home, his bedroom was a hangout spot for Bradley and a younger sibling, another boy, the only member of the household born in Ohio. Now the room has become a kind of shrine, with an unmade bed and a crisply ironed white shirt and tie laid near a brightly lit window, as his family, along with thousands of other Haitian immigrants, await what comes next. ♦