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.’ ”
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.
