By NAN Staff Writer, NewsAmericas Now
News Americas, MIAMI, FL, Mon. Aug. 10, 2026: Just days after NewsAmericasNow asked where the Haitian Trump supporters had gone as TPS expired and deportation flights ramped up, one has finally answered, on national television, and with real stakes attached.
Wilkinson “Ken” Sejour, who was born in the Bahamas to Haitian parents and the founder of Miami’s Chef Creole restaurant chain, told CBS Evening News he regrets voting for President Trump in 2024, after the end of Temporary Protected Status for Haitians cost him his entire management team across seven locations. He says he will likely have to shut down two of his restaurants as a result.
“The end of TPS means for me that my future in the hospitality business is almost gonna be nonexistent,” Sejour said. Asked directly whether he regretted his vote, he answered without hesitating: “Yes.”
“He sold to me that he is a businessman”
Sejour, who opened the first Chef Creole with his late brother, Jude Pierre in 1992, a takeout counter on NE 78th Street that grew into a genuine Little Haiti landmark, said he backed Trump because he believed a businessman-president would make sound business decisions. “He sold to me that he is a businessman and that he would be making business decisions,” Sejour said.
Instead, Sejour said ICE’s presence in the neighborhood, including an arrest made outside one of his own restaurants which is a longtime staple known for its Haitian and Bahamian comfort food, has scared away staff and customers alike, even as false rumors spread online that the restaurant itself had been raided. Foot traffic has dropped noticeably, and an annual back-to-school supply giveaway Sejour hosts in the neighborhood saw shorter lines than in past years. “People are staying home,” he said.
A rare public reversal
Sejour’s admission stands out precisely because it is so rare. As NewsAmericasNow reported last week, Haitian Trump supporters, including at least one in Springfield, Ohio, the city now facing expanded ICE enforcement, have largely stayed silent as the community they belong to absorbs the fallout of policies they helped elect. Sejour’s willingness to speak on camera, by name, with his own livelihood on the line, marks one of the first public breaks in that silence.
The Trump administration has maintained that Haiti no longer meets the conditions for TPS, despite the country’s ongoing crisis. Haiti remains under the State Department’s highest-level “Do Not Travel” advisory, the only Caribbean nation with that distinction, with gangs controlling an estimated 90% of Port-au-Prince as of earlier this year.
NewsAmericasNow will continue following the fallout from Haiti’s TPS expiration across South Florida’s Haitian community.