The Days She Spent in Silence

What the curtains held

SPRINGFIELD, OHIO, UNITED STATES · NOVEMBER 2026

Michaelle Louis’s feet and legs ached. Twenty-three miles into a forty-five-mile march from Springfield to Ohio’s statehouse in Columbus, she could barely walk. Cornfields lined the route; a highway hummed in the distance. She was one of dozens of activists demanding better rights for Haitian immigrants.

These details were reported by Stephen Starr for The Guardian from Springfield on 1 November 2026. This Field Note is a secondary editorial account of that reporting — not an original interview.

Five days without daylight power

Louis grew up in Port-au-Prince. In December 2018 a gang murdered her thirty-one-year-old brother. She left Haiti three months later under gang threats and entered the United States legally through the southern border, arriving in Springfield in 2021. Haitians had begun filling blue-collar openings in the struggling town of about sixty thousand some eight years earlier.

In July 2026 a Supreme Court ruling allowed the Trump administration to end temporary protected status for more than 350,000 Haitian nationals. Within days, ICE agents descended on Springfield. In September, homeland security secretary Markwayne Mullin said 380 people had been detained there. In August, Louis spent five days huddling with her daughter and brother in the basement of her Springfield home. The family went without electricity during daylight hours so officers would not know anyone was inside.

We spent our days in silence.

What the march asks

“I closed the curtains. I didn’t want anyone to know there was people living in our house,” she told Starr. The three-day march she joined asked authorities to end ICE detention and ankle monitors, to remove agents from Springfield, and to open a permanent residency pathway for Haitians who have worked and contributed in the United States. On day two, as an Amazon warehouse that once employed dozens of Haitians came into view, she spoke of a Haitian woman whose husband had been deported: the couple had bought a house; now the family was preparing to follow him back to Haiti.

Louis said a false campaign claim in September 2024 — that Springfield immigrants ate pets — shook her more than anything else. Until then she had gone to work and come home, helping Americans facing domestic violence. “I was sleeping and now I woke up for my community,” she said.

What remains open

Starr’s November 2026 reporting settles the basement days, the detention count cited by Mullin, and the march’s demands. It does not settle whether agents leave Springfield, whether a residency pathway opens, or who keeps a household standing when the person who signed the mortgage is removed first.