PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — The United States is preparing to nearly double the number of Haitians being deported to this Caribbean state starting Wednesday, raising alarm that thousands of cash-strapped migrants will add a new dimension to the humanitarian crisis in a country torn apart by violence, natural disaster and political strife.
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The Western Hemisphere’s poorest nation is already dealing with a convergence of crises — including the aftermath of a presidential assassination, a deadly earthquake, worsening food insecurity and rising social anarchy amid a grab for territory by gang warlords. So limited are resources to aid returning deportees — some of whom are returning to their country for the first time in years — that they are essentially leaving the airport with little more than a hot meal, basic hygiene kits, a medical assessment and a small cash handout before setting out into a capital reeling from a wave of kidnappings and killings without the promise of transportation or shelter.
On Sunday and Monday, several hundred migrants per day arrived on up to three flights to Port-au-Prince, with four flights scheduled for Tuesday. But international agencies have been told that the U.S. will begin ramping up “to six to seven” flights daily, to Port-au-Prince as well as Haiti’s second largest city, Cap-Ha？tien, starting Wednesday.
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“We’re talking about potentially up to 1,000 people per day,” said Giuseppe Loprete, Haiti mission chief for the International Organization for Migration. “This is our understanding, this is our challenge.”
A spokesperson for DHS said the department could not confirm the flight plans, citing operational and security factors.
However, one U.S. official confirmed that the flights would increase to six or seven per day, split between the two Haitian cities. The official spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the plan.
A second U.S. official confirmed the plan to boost flights starting on Wednesday, but did not know the exact number or destinations.
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Jean Negot Bonheur Delva, head of Haiti’s migration office, said the government did not “have the means” to provide housing or other assistance for so many new arrivals.
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“The precarity and the insecurity will increase exponentially,” he said. “It’s one crisis too many.”
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Bonheur Delva said he has “personally” called for a moratorium to the flights, but that he was unaware of whether Haiti’s interim government had made any official request. Haiti’s embattled interim Prime Minister Ariel Henry is clinging to power in part because of his backing from the United States.
Bonheur Delva suggested Henry — who did not respond to a request for comment — was in no position ask the Americans to halt the flights, even though Haiti could not cope with the escalating numbers of returnees.
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“We do not see much from his office,” Bonheur Delva said of the prime minister. “We need to understand that this is a relationship between a big and a small country.”
The State Department said Monday that Secretary？Antony J.？Blinken？had spoken with Henry about？“cooperation to repatriate Haitian migrants on the Southern border of the United States,” and had shared his appreciation to the Haiti government “for assisting to repatriate Haitian citizens safely and expeditiously.”
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“The United States and Haiti share a mutual concern for the safety of Haitian citizens and discussed the dangers of irregular migration, which puts individuals at great risk and often requires migrants and their families to incur crippling debt,” the State Department said.
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In a telephone interview, Foreign Minister Claude Joseph said Haitian officials were seeking to work with “our American friends” as well as Mexico, Chile and Brazil to try to “work to together in a more structural way” to resolve the problem of the deportees.
Many of the Haitian migrants have lived for years in Chile and Brazil before venturing north in recent weeks and months. Some Haitian parents are being deported with children who have Chilean and Brazilian passports, and many say they would prefer to go back to those countries now but lack the financial means to get there.
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Asked if Haiti would or had officially requested a halt to the flights, Joseph replied: “They are our fellow Haitians. If they have to come back, we have to receive them, and try to do our best to accommodate them.”
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“It’s not going to be easy for us,” he said. “But they are Haitians and we need to do our best to welcome them.”
The deportees are arriving in a country where U.N. agencies are making emergency appeals to fend off a mounting food crisis, thousands have fled their homes in the capital to escape takeovers by violent gangs allegedly linked to politicians, and where the weak and corrupt police force has essentially been overwhelmed.
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Some of the deportees hailed from Haiti’s now devastated south. More than a month after the deadly earthquake struck that region and killed more than 2,200 people, more than half of those in need have yet to receive aid, according to the United Nations. More than 137,000 homes were damaged or destroyed; 212,000 people have lost access to safe drinking water.
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“These people will create a new crisis for the country; some of these people will not have a place to stay,” said Pierre Esperance, director of Haiti’s National Human Rights Defense Network. “We don’t know their situations. What if some of their families were killed by the gangs or by the authorities, and now, they are just being sent back? Each family has their own situation and that’s why the international law requires someone to listen to them. We already have a political crisis, a humanitarian crisis, we don’t have rule law. I don’t understand why the Biden administration is adding another problem.”
Several deportees said at the airport that they would try to reach family or friends for temporary shelter. Others said they were left without immediate options as they sought to reach family outside of the capital.
Kettelene Stama, 31, got off a U.S. deportation flight on Monday, still dazed after realizing she had arrived back in Haiti. She had lived in Chile for six years before trying to seek a “better life” in the United States, she said. She was with her 5-year old son, who was born in Chile and had a Chilean passport.
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“But my papers are expired,” she said. “And I have no money left. I have no idea how I’ll get back to Chile.”
She had no idea, also, where she would spend that night, and no cellphone to call family. She had a sick mother in Gonave, a Haitian island off the central coast.
“Boats only leave in the morning,” she said. “I don’t know how much the ticket costs. I don’t know where my son and I will sleep. But I know my mother cannot support us. I don’t know what we will do.”
The Biden administration is not conducting the flights as formal deportations, but relying instead on an emergency provision of the U.S. public health code known as Title 42 that allows authorities to bypass normal immigration proceedings. It generally does not allow asylum seekers a chance to request humanitarian protection in the United States.
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A federal judge last week ordered the Biden administration to halt the use of Title 42 for migrant families, but he stayed the ruling until the end of the month. Biden officials have been returning both single adults and family groups to Haiti.
Roughly 8,000 of the 11,000 migrants who remain in the Del Rio camp in Texas have arrived as part of a family group, according to a U.S. agent stationed there who was not authorized to disclose the figures.
Amid a growing outcry from some Democrats — particularly after widely published images on Monday of mounted Border Patrol agents attempting to grab migrants and using their horses to push them back toward Mexico — the administration has sought to defend the mass deportations.
DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas has said that damage from the recent earthquake had been “rather geographically limited” and that an analysis of the situation on the ground had determined that “country conditions” allowed for the repatriations. On Monday, White House spokeswoman Jen Psaki told reporters, “we’re trying to protect people. We’re conveying this is not the time to come.”
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Loprete said that the U.S. government had offered initial funding to provide reception assistance landing, including the hygiene kits, medical consultations and one-time cash gifts equal to about $100. But he said concern was rising about the ability of the agency and the Haitian government to handle “up to 14,000 migrants, potentially in three to four weeks.”
“That would be a challenge even in a developed country with a solid economy, without stability issues and an earthquake six weeks ago, without gangs who are well established even in the airport area,” he said. “So yes, we acknowledge this is going to be a challenge.”
He added that the assistance provided so far was too limited to prevent the emergence of a longer term crisis, as thousands of desperate deportees return, some of them with no homes to go back to.
“It’s simply to help them so they can have some clothes, or they can wash, help they would need for their first hours in Haiti,” he said. “The idea of reintegrating them or helping them start over with a new life, that is a further step that is absolutely necessary but it that is the next phase which is not yet funded.”
Asked if it was “safe” to deport migrants back to Haiti, he said, “nobody can say it’s a safe place to come back to. Nobody can say it’s safe place to live.”
He said he feared many of the returnees would simply join a new exodus of Haitians already leaving its shores in the aftermath of the August earthquake and rising violence.
“Our fear is that we will see people come back only to risk their lives again to leave,” he said.
In the aftermath of the earthquake, more Haitians appear to be fleeing the nation by dangerous means, by sea to nearby Caribbean islands or over irregular land crossings to the Dominican Republic.
Some of the new deportees said they would immediately join the new wave leaving Haiti.
Erick Monazare, 27, who was deported from the Texas border on Monday, said at the Port-au-Prince airport that he was planning on heading to the border with the Dominican Republic that night. He had no passport, but said he would “find a way” to cross.
“Haiti cannot help us,” he said. “All I can do is leave again.”
Faiola reported from Miami and Miroff from Washington.
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