The first deportation flight to Haiti since the US supreme court upheld Donald Trump’s power to strip ۳۵۰,۰۰۰ Haitians – and others – of a key type of legal status in the US landed in the troubled nation on Thursday.
The flight was carrying more that ۱۶۰ Haitian nationals and landed in Cap-Haïtien, Haiti’s second-largest city, aboard an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) charter.
The arrival point was selected because the main international airport in the capital, Port-au-Prince, is considered too dangerous. The US government currently has a ban on US commercial flights to Haiti’s capital through early September because of ongoing gang violence.
The deportees were clad in white, and many covered their faces out of safety concerns as journalists filmed their arrival. Nearly all declined to talk with the media, with some indicating they fear being targeted by gangs that control an estimated ۷۰% of Port-au-Prince and swathes of land beyond.
The US Department of State’s travel advisory for US citizens is at the highest alert level, its website saying: “Do not travel to Haiti for any reason. US citizens are at risk due to crime, terrorism, kidnapping, unrest, and limited health care.”
The deportation flight was the first since the Trump administration ended Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for those Haitians living and working in the US with that protection, and comes after US officials warned Haitian authorities to expect an increase in removals.
ICE is believed to have carried out eight flights from the US to Haiti so far this year, including a flight on ۱۶ July carrying deportees with criminal records.
Jean Négot Bonheur Delva, director general of Haiti’s national office of migration, told the Miami Herald that the flight also included people who were born in Chile and the Dominican Republic, but were sent to Haiti because they had a Haitian parent.
The deportees from the US were reportedly given the equivalent of US$۷۶.۴۰ to get home – less than the price of a ticket to the Caribbean nation’s capital Port-au-Prince from Cap-Haïtien but enough to get through some gang-controlled roads.
The end of TPS status for Haitian nationals came earlier this month when Washington DC district judge Ana Reyes removed a stay on deportations, following a decision by the US supreme court backing the Trump administration’s efforts to end the program.
Enacted by Congress in ۱۹۹۰, TPS in theory protects people who are already in the US when a natural disaster, epidemic, armed conflict or other extraordinary and temporary circumstance affects their country of origin. The Trump administration has been stripping protections from nation after nation and the supreme court ruling gives little chance for redress.
Krish O’Mara Vignarajah, president and CEO of the immigrant-serving non-profit Global Refuge, said that it was a “stunning contradiction” that an administration that advises Americans against all travel to Haiti would “compel hundreds of thousands of Haitians into such dire circumstances is an unconscionable abdication of our moral responsibility”.
Overlooked also, say critics, are the contributions Haitian nationals under TPS make the the US. “We work hard, we pay our taxes, we give back to our communities and we are a big part of the engine that keeps the United States workforce in many essential industries moving,” Josiane Valsaint, a Haitian who had TPS, wrote for the Guardian. “We deserve to stay here, with our families and loved ones.”
But amid the Trump administration’s crackdown on immigration, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) secretary, Markwayne Mullin, said earlier this month: “These individuals can either self-deport or we’ll arrest you and send you back. It’s that simple.”
