The United States government sent about 50 Haitians back to their country on Thursday, authorities reported, marking the first deportation flight in several months to the Caribbean nation grappling with the increasing gang violence.
The Department of Homeland Security reported in a statement that it “will continue to implement United States laws and policies along the Straits of Florida and the Caribbean region, as well as on the southwest border. “The policy of the United States is to return noncitizens who do not establish a legal basis for remaining in the United States.”
Authorities did not offer details of the flight beyond how many deported Haitians were on board.
Thomas Cartwright of Witness at the Border, an advocacy group that monitors flight data, said a plane took off from Alexandria, Louisiana, a deportation operations center, and landed in Cap-Haïtien, Haiti, after a stop in Miami.
Marjorie Dorsaninvil, a U.S. citizen, said her Haitian fiancé, Gerson Joseph, called her crying from the Miami airport Thursday morning to tell her that he had been deported on a flight to Cap-Haïtien along with other Haitians and more people from other countries, including the Bahamas.
He promised to call her when he landed, but he hadn't done so by Thursday night.
Joseph lived in the United States for more than 20 years and has a 7-year-old daughter who has US citizenship with another woman. He had a deportation order dating back to 2005, after losing an asylum claim that his lawyer, Philip Issa, said had been the result of poor legal representation at the time. Although Joseph had not previously been deported, his attorney sought to have that order vacated.
Joseph was convicted of burglary and burglary and ordered to pay $270 in restitution, according to Issa. He had been detained 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 is gone,” she noted.
More than 33,000 people They fled the capital of Haiti in a period of less than two weeks when gangs began looting homes and attacking state institutions, according to a report published last month by the International Organization for Migration. Most of those displaced people traveled to southern Haiti, which is generally peaceful compared to Port-au-Prince, which has an estimated population of 3 million and is largely crippled by gang violence.
The Haitian National Police is understaffed and has been overwhelmed by gangs, which have powerful arsenals. Many hospitals suspended operations amid a shortage of medical supplies.
The United States operated one deportation flight per month to Haiti from December 2022 to January of this year, according to Witness at the Border. He noted that deportation flights were frequent after a camp of 16,000 migrants, most of them Haitians, gathered on riverbanks in Texas in September 2021, but became rare as fewer Haitians crossed the border illegally. border to the United States.
There were 286 arrests of Haitians after crossing the southern border of the United States during 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 United States legally since January 2023 under presidential powers to allow entry for humanitarian reasons, and many others arrived legally using an online appointment system at land crossings with Mexico called CBP One.
The Department of Homeland Security said Thursday that it was “monitoring the situation” in Haiti. The Coast Guard repatriated 65 Haitians who were detained at sea off the coast of the Bahamas last month.
Haitian Bridge Alliance, a migrant advocacy group, called for a suspension of deportation flights to Haiti, saying Thursday that the United States was “knowingly condemning the most vulnerable, who came to us in their time of need, to a imminent danger”.
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