US deports about 50 Haitians to nation hit with gang violence, ending monthslong pause in flights
MIAMI– The Biden administration sent about 50 Haitians back to their country on Thursday, authorities said, marking the first deportation flight in several months to the Caribbean country that has struggled with rising gang violence.
The Department of Homeland Security said in a statement that it “will continue to enforce U.S. laws and policies in the Straits of Florida and the Caribbean, as well as at the southwest border. U.S. policy is to return noncitizens who have no legal basis to remain in the United States.”
Authorities provided no details about the flight, other than the number of deported Haitians on board.
Thomas Cartwright of Witness at the Border, an advocacy group that tracks flight records, said a plane left Alexandria, Louisiana, a hub for deportation operations, and arrived in Cap-Haïtien, Haiti, after a stop in Miami.
Marjorie Dorsaninvil, a U.S. citizen, said her Haitian fiancé, Gerson Joseph, called in tears from the Miami airport Thursday morning to say he was being deported on a flight to Cap-Haïtien with other Haitians and some from other countries, including the Bahamas.
He promised to call when he arrived, but had not done so by early evening.
Joseph has lived in the US for more than twenty years and has a seven-year-old American daughter with another wife. He was deported in 2005 after losing an asylum claim that his lawyer, Philip Issa, said at the time was the result of poor legal representation. Issa has tried to reopen the case.
Joseph was convicted of theft and burglary and ordered to pay $270 in restitution, Issa said. He has been in custody since last year.
Dorsaninvil said her fiancé has “no one” in Haiti. “It’s devastating for me. We were planning a wedding and now he’s gone,” she said.
More than 33,000 people fled Haiti’s capital in less than two weeks as gangs looted homes and attacked state institutions, according to a report by the UN’s International Organization for Migration. The majority of those displaced traveled to Haiti’s southern region, which is generally peaceful compared to Port-au-Prince, which has an estimated population of 3 million and is largely crippled by gang violence.
Haiti’s National Police is understaffed and overwhelmed by gangs with powerful arsenals. Many hospitals ceased operations due to a shortage of medical supplies.
According to Witness at the Border, the US conducted one deportation flight per month to Haiti from December 2022 until last January. It said deportation flights became frequent after a camp of 16,000 mostly Haitian migrants gathered on the shores of Del Rio, Texas, in September 2021, but became rare as fewer Haitians illegally crossed the border from Mexico.
Haitians were arrested 286 times crossing the border from Mexico in the first three months of the year, less than 0.1% of the more than 400,000 arrests among all nationalities. More than 150,000 people have entered the US legally since January 2023 under presidential powers to grant entry for humanitarian reasons, and many others entered legally through an online appointment system at land crossings with Mexico called CBP One.
Homeland Security said Thursday it was “monitoring the situation in Haiti.” The U.S. Coast Guard repatriated 65 Haitians stopped at sea off the coast of the Bahamas last month.
Haitian Bridge Alliance, a migrant advocacy group, urged a halt to deportation flights to Haiti, saying Thursday that the U.S. “knowingly condemned the most vulnerable, who came to us in their time of need, to imminent danger.”
As Republicans have taken up the issue in an election year, the Biden administration has emphasized enforcement, especially through a failed attempt at legislation, following record high border arrests in December. Arrests for illegal crossings fell by half in January and have remained relatively stable since then, after Mexico stepped up enforcement south of the U.S. border. Biden says he is considering executive action to halt asylum at the border at a time when illegal crossings are reaching certain thresholds.
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Spagat reported from Berkeley, California.