By Matt O’Brien

Pro­tes­tors against the depor­ta­tion of Haitians ask in front of the Fed­eral Build­ing at Oakland…

OAKLAND — Their num­bers in the Bay Area are small, but local Hait­ian activists joined oth­ers across the coun­try this week in ask­ing the Obama admin­is­tra­tion to pro­vide relief for thou­sands of undoc­u­mented Hait­ian immigrants.

Advo­cates want Obama to give Haitians who fled the country’s deadly hur­ri­canes last year a dis­tinc­tion called “tem­po­rary pro­tected sta­tus” that would allow them to remain in the United States with­out fear of deportation.

“A lot of peo­ple got dis­placed,” said Oak­land res­i­dent Maria LaBossiere of the Haiti Action Net­work. “The infra­struc­ture of the coun­try got destroyed. There are already no jobs there.”

Forc­ing thou­sands who fled to go home, she argued, would be “adding to the bur­den that’s already there.”

The pro­posal is a con­tro­ver­sial one because oppo­nents fear it could encour­age more ille­gal immi­gra­tion from the Caribbean nation.

Tem­po­rary pro­tected sta­tus is already offered to thou­sands of Sal­vado­rans, Nicaraguans and Hon­durans who faced nat­ural dis­as­ters in their home­lands many years ago, as well as peo­ple who fled armed con­flict in four trou­bled African nations.

The envi­ron­men­tal con­di­tions and polit­i­cal tur­moil that many dis­placed Haitians face today is com­pa­ra­ble, or worse, than in those coun­tries, their advo­cates say.

“Haiti is in much worse shape,” said Ger­ald Lenoir, pres­i­dent of Black Alliance for Just Immi­gra­tion, which orga­nized a small rally of about 30 peo­ple in downtown

Oak­land on Wednesday.

The tem­po­rary immi­gra­tion sta­tus would affect an esti­mated 30,000 undoc­u­mented Haitians, allow­ing them to live and work in the coun­try for an unde­ter­mined amount of time.

Lenoir said he believes that Obama would have con­sid­ered the sta­tus as part of a larger immi­gra­tion reform bill, but that has been pushed back until later this year or next year.

“He wants to pull it in as part of com­pre­hen­sive immi­gra­tion reform, but that has been delayed and Haitians are suf­fer­ing right now,” Lenoir said. “It can­not wait.”

The most recent cen­sus esti­mates show just about 3,000 Haitian-born immi­grants liv­ing in Cal­i­for­nia, a minus­cule num­ber com­pared with the thou­sands found in East Coast cities stretch­ing from Miami to Boston. In the Bay Area, the biggest pop­u­la­tion is cen­tered in Sonoma County, accord­ing to those estimates.

The num­bers might under­es­ti­mate the true amount, said activist Pierre LaBossiere, who came to the Bay Area from Haiti in 1970 and is Maria’s husband.

He said a wave of Hait­ian refugees were wel­comed into the East Bay in the early 1980s. Another group came after a coup d’etat in 1991.

Pierre LaBossiere said, “Some­times when I’m walk­ing through the store with my wife, some­body will ask, ‘Ayisyen?’”‰”

That term means the per­son rec­og­nizes the Hait­ian Cre­ole lan­guage the cou­ple was speak­ing, he said.

“Auto­mat­i­cally we’ll turn around and hug each other,” he said.