The United States deports about 50 Haitians to a country plagued by gang violence, ending a months-long pause in flights

MIAMI (AP) — The Biden administration sent about 50 Haitians back to their country on Thursday, authorities said, organising the primary deportation flight in several months to a Caribbean nation grappling 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 region, as well as on the southwest border. It is U.S. policy to return non-citizens who fail to establish a legal basis to remain in the United States.”

Authorities didn’t provide any details of the flight aside from the variety of deported Haitians on board.

(*50*) Cartwright of the advocacy group Witness on the Border, which tracks flight data, said the plane left Alexandria, Louisiana, a deportation hub, and arrived in Cap-Haitien, Haiti, after a stopover in Miami.

Marjorie Dorsaninvil, a U.S. citizen, said her Haitian fiancé, Gerson Joseph, called from the Miami airport in tears on Thursday morning and said he was being deported by plane to Cap-Haitien together with other Haitians and a few nationals of other countries. countries, including the Bahamas.

He promised to call when he arrived, but he didn’t until early evening.

Joseph has lived in the US for over 20 years and has a 7-year-old daughter, a US citizen, with one other woman. He received a deportation order in 2005 after losing his asylum bid, which his lawyer Philip Issa said was due to poor legal representation on the time. Although Joseph had not been deported before, his lawyer asked for the order to be lifted.

Issa said Joseph was convicted of theft and burglary and was ordered to pay $270 in restitution. He has been in custody since last 12 months.

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Dorsaninvil said her fiancé “has no one” in Haiti. “It’s devastating to me. We were planning a wedding and now it’s gone,” she said.

More than 33,000 people fled the Haitian capital in lower than two weeks as gangs ransacked homes and attacked state institutions, according to a report by the UN’s International Organization for Migration. Most of the displaced people went to Haiti’s southern region, which is mostly peaceful compared to Port-au-Prince, which has an estimated population of three million and is essentially paralyzed by gang violence.

Haiti is understaffed and overwhelmed by gangs with massive arsenals. Many hospitals ceased operations due to lack of medical supplies.

According to Witness on the Border, the United States operated one deportation flight to Haiti from December 2022 through January of last 12 months. It said deportation flights were common after a camp of 16,000 mostly Haitian migrants gathered on the banks of the Del Rio River in Texas in September 2021, but have turn out to be rare as fewer Haitians illegally crossed the border from Mexico.

Haitians were arrested crossing the Mexican border 286 times in the primary three months of the 12 months, representing lower than 0.1% of the greater than 400,000 arrests amongst all nationalities. Since January 2023, greater than 150,000 people have entered the United States legally under the president’s humanitarian entry authority, and lots of more have arrived legally using a web-based land crossing appointment system with Mexico called CBP One.

The Department of Homeland Security said Thursday it was “monitoring the situation” in Haiti. The U.S. Coast Guard last month repatriated 65 Haitians who were detained at sea off the Bahamas.

The Haitian Bridge Alliance, a migrant advocacy group, called for a halt to deportation flights to Haiti, saying Thursday that the United States “consciously condemns the most vulnerable people who have come to us in their time of need, in imminent danger.”

As Republicans have taken up the problem in an election 12 months, the Biden administration has placed an emphasis on enforcement, especially through a failed effort to enact the law after a record high variety of border arrests in December. Arrests for illegal border crossings fell by half in January and have remained regular since then, as Mexico tightened enforcement south of the U.S. border. Biden says he’s considering executive motion to halt asylum on the border during times when illegal border crossings reach a certain threshold.