For more than five decades, New York and Miami had been the cities of choice for Haitian immigrants, who have gone on to win political offices, head powerful organizations and become leading voices on both their homeland’s turmoil, and U.S. immigration policies.

But in a shifting landscape that speaks both to the community’s changing immigration patterns and focus, another area of the country is quickly emerging as part of that expanding narrative: the Midwest.

“I was in Miami in this Uber and this guy’s like, ‘I’m moving next week to Indiana’ and he’s telling me the reason why,” Yolette Williams, the chief executive director of the community-based Haitian American Alliance of New York, recalled. “Even in my work, a lot of the people who came, the asylum-seekers, were all moving to the Midwest, to cities like Indiana.”

That is why Williams and the other organizers of a summit focused on empowering the Haitian community in the United States said they chose Indianapolis, Indiana, as the backdrop of their conversations aimed at building bridges in the community for collaborative empowerment. First launched four years ago in New York during the COVID-19 epidemic, the gathering will take place over three days, Thursday to Saturday, at Indy’s Global Village, with the goal of creating a road map to strengthen the community’s bond and platform in the United States.

Participants will include representatives of South Florida social-service organizations, along with others from New York that have spent decades trying to address the Haitian community’s needs. There will also be new faces, especially from some of the emerging communities, including advocates from nearby Springfield, Ohio, and Houston. The latter were among the first to respond four years ago when thousands of Haitian-asylum seekers crossed at the U.S.-Mexico border in Del Rio, Texas, an incident that also gave birth to the idea of taking the summit out of traditional Haitian enclaves, Williams said.

“It’s really about coming together and seeing as a community — nationally, how do we work together? How do we strengthen our positions in the United States? Because we are Haitian Americans,” she said. “We are already four generations living in the United States.”

Haitians, organizers say, need to find ways to respond to what has essentially emerged as a moment of crisis in the community. This is especially true in the current climate in which the community found itself thrust into the national spotlight last year after Donald Trump and his running mate JD Vance falsely accused Haitians in Springfield of eating their neighbors’ pets.

In office, both men are focused on carrying out their campaign promise of mass deportations, and Haitians find themselves targeted after the Department of Homeland and Security earlier this year threw out deportation protections.

“We find ourselves overnight … having a million people undocumented,” said Garry Pierre-Pierre, the founder and publisher of the Haitian Times, an English-language publication that serves the Haitian diaspora. “These kinds of radical positions demand sophistication. We know we have the Haitian American Lawyers Association, but they need to build capacity to help respond to this moment. So that’s why we want to sit down and talk. We want to talk to the lawyers, to the doctors, and ask, what they are doing? What is the agenda? Where do we want to go? What’s the mission?”

Immigration will only be part of the conversation. Most of the focus will be on creating infrastructure to support the community’s growth along with building wealth, fostering deeper community ties and strengthening political influence.

“The Haitian community has done wonderfully well since it started coming in large numbers” in the 1960s and ‘70s, said Pierre-Pierre. “We’ve grown. We have had a lot of individual successes. But the community success remains to be seen. There are a lot of smart, intelligent, devoted people, but I don’t think that we have a road map of how we actually build communities.

“You look at other communities that have come before us, or at the same time with us, and the way that they have developed is through community organization, institutional building; we don’t have any of that; we have a lot of people duplicating efforts, many times over,” he said.

The lack of organization and a unified voice in the U.S. has repeatedly come up in conversations about U.S. efforts to address the crisis in Haiti, and bringing about progress in the volatile Caribbean nation, where the population is facing record levels of hunger and gang violence. But unlike other gatherings, in which Haiti and its unprecedented gang crisis are usually the focus, Pierre-Pierre and Williams said the Haitian Community Summit will prioritize other discussions.

“We’re not going to focus on Haiti because every conference focuses on Haiti,” Pierre-Pierre said. “We need to understand and build these connections with our counterparts in Haiti. But before you can do anything, you have to know what you want to do. You have to assess your capacity. You have to know what your limits are and we don’t know that.”

Still, organizers say they had hoped to broach the subject by extending an invitation to former Haiti Prime Minister Garry Conille, who was abruptly fired by the country’s ruling Transitional Presidential Council last fall after less than six months at the helm.

“Here is a person who has been prime minister twice, and failed twice. Why? What is it about him that made him so unsuccessful?” Pierre-Pierre said about Conille, who declined the invite. “His reality for me was going to show the reality of Haiti, and if we’re talking about Haiti, we need to understand, why is it that someone who sort of represents a diaspora, and on paper is highly competent and qualified to do the job, but in reality, couldn’t?”

Still, it’s hard to escape the Haiti question, as evidenced by a report the Haitian Times, a sponsor of the summit, recently published that is being used as a blueprint for several of the breakout workshops.

Last year, as Pierre-Pierre and his staff at the Haitian Times embarked on a listening tour across nine states to better understand the Haitian community’s aspirations and challenges, they asked a series of open-ended questions.

One question: “What keeps you up awake at night about Haiti?”

“The Haiti question often elicits tears. What’s happening in Haiti,” he said.

The report, “Voices of the Haitian Diaspora,” he said, provides a peek into the psyche of the community, not just when it comes to their homeland and the narrative surrounding it, but the community in the U.S.

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If you go: Thursday, May 1, to Saturday, May 3, 2025. Registration is $250 for three days or $100 a day. To register, click here or contact info@Haitiantimes.com.

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