After a migrant pause, 114 Haitians arrive in Keys on overloaded boat
An overloaded migrant sailboat with more than
100 people from Haiti on board arrived Thursday in the Florida Keys.
The vessel came near shore in the Upper Keys community of Tavernier, between Key Largo and Islamorada, according to law-enforcement sources.
The group is the first large migrant group to arrive in U.S. territorial waters in weeks following a state and federal effort to try to stop boats at sea before they reach the island chain.
Walter Slosar, chief patrol agent with the U.S. Border Patrol’s Miami operations, said in a statement released on Twitter that 114 people were on the boat. Sources say the group was mostly men, but there were some women and children.
OFF TURKS AND CAICOS
On Sunday, a 35-foot light blue sailboat from
Haiti with 69 undocumented migrants was intercepted by officers of the Marine Branch of the Royal Turks and Caicos Islands Police Force during the early hours. In a statement, the police said the vessel’s captain initially refused to adhere to instructions from police officers to stop. Officers were forced to engage in a number of tactical maneuvers to force the boat to stop.
The vessel was subsequently towed to a marine shipyard. The 69 migrants were handed over to the Immigration Task Force for deportation to Haiti. The interception was the sixth of the year, police spokeswoman Denyse Renne said in a statement.
The British dependent territory is about 90 miles off Haiti’s northern coast, and authorities report that the island chain, which also detained 67 Haitian migrants on the island of West Caicos on Sunday and another 21 on Monday, is seeing its highest number of Haitian migrants arriving by boat in a long time. The surge is significant, a lawenforcement source told the Miami Herald. The territory last month issued a sixmonth ban on all visas for Haitians seeking to visit the Turks and Caicos.
NEW RULES
Last month, the Biden administration announced new border rules. Asylumseekers need to seek preauthorization to enter the United States via a Customs and Border Protection App and people from Haiti, Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela can apply from their home countries if they have a U.S.-based financial sponsor, pass health and background checks and arrange their own air travel.
Department of Homeland Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, who visited Miami last month to tout the program, warned that Haitians and Cubans who arrive in the United States by boat will not be eligible to apply for the parole process. They also face a five-year ban from the United States.
Despite the program’s announcement, there have been at least two boatloads of Haitians who have made it into U.S. territorial waters in recent weeks.
This latest arrival of Haitians coincides with a visit by United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk to Haiti for a two-day visit.
Türk arrived in Port-auPrince on Wednesday, where he met with Prime Minister Ariel Henry and members of civil society to discuss the gang violence and deteriorating humanrights conditions in the country. He plans to travel to Haiti’s northeast border with the Dominican Republic to look at the migration crisis unfolding there. Türk has been a vocal critic of deportations to Haiti, and
late last year called for them to stop.
“Unremitting armed violence and systematic human rights violations in Haiti do not currently allow for the safe, dignified and sustainable return of Haitians to the country,” he said in November. “I reiterate my call to all countries in the region, including the Dominican Republic, to halt the deportation of Haitians.”
Along with the Biden
administration’s stepped-up efforts to prevent migrants from reaching U.S. shores, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis issued an executive order in January activating the National Guard and sending officers from state lawenforcement agencies to the Keys to patrol the air and water.
The combined effort worked, and arrivals of small Cuban migrant vessels have gone from several a day to days going by before
a boat makes landfall. But, some are still getting through. The Border Patrol said 26 Cuban migrants arrived Wednesday on a homemade vessel on a beach in the Marquesas, a group of uninhabited islands west of Key West.