Deported Haitians return to dystopian homeland
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — Deported from the United States, Pierre Charles landed recently in Port-au-Prince, a capital more dangerous and dystopian than the one he’d left four years before. Unable to reach his family, he left the airport alone, on foot.
Charles was unsure how to make his way to the Carrefour neighborhood through a city shrouded in smoke and dust, often tolling with gunfire from gangs and police.
“I know there are barricades and shootings,” Charles said, “but I have nowhere else to go.”
At least 2,853 Haitians deported from Texas have landed here with $15-$100 in cash handouts and a “good luck out there” from migration officials — many setting foot in the country for the first time in years, even decades.
More than a city, Port-auPrince it is an archipelago of gang-controlled islands in a sea of despair. Some neighborhoods are abandoned. Others are barricaded behind fires, destroyed cars and piles of garbage, occupied by heavily armed men.
On Saturday, a local newspaper reported 10 kidnappings in the previous 24 hours including a journalist, a singer’s mother and a couple driving with their toddler, who was left behind in the car.
Even before the assassination of President Jovenel Moise in July, the government was weak — the Palace of Justice inactive, congress disbanded by Moise and the legislative building pocked by bullets.
Now, although there is a prime minister, it is absent.
Most of the population of Port-au-Prince has no access to basic public services, no drinking water, electricity or garbage collection.
The deportees join thousands
of fellow Haitians who have been displaced from their homes, pushed out by violence to take up residence in crowded schools, churches, sports centers and makeshift camps among ruins.
Many of these people are out of reach even for humanitarian organizations.
This is the Port-au-Prince that awaits the deportees.
The main road in Martissant is a strategic artery that connects the Haitian capital with the south of the country. The gang wanted control. They had surrounded the neighborhood that lies between mountains and the sea in a well-planned occupation, and were firing on the police station.
Martissant has become one of the disconnected islands in the capital. Buses carrying people and merchandise from Port-auPrince to the south of the country form convoys to
travel through Martissant, often waiting for hours and sometimes overnight until they pay the gang members for clearance to travel, according to drivers.
Doctors Without Borders was forced to shut down its hospital in Martissant, where the agency had provided care for the last 15 years.
Seidina Ousseni, Head of the mission, describes the situation on the ground of Port-au-Prince in two words: “Urban warfare.”
Most of the city “in different degrees is facing the same circumstances,” Ousseni said. “Residents organize themselves to defend their neighborhoods and when they are not capable of doing it, they have to abandon the place.”
Gunmen recently laid siege to an encampment called La Piste along the coast north of the capital, a neighborhood of deaf and disabled Haitians relocated
there by the International Red Cross after the 2010 earthquake leveled the capital.
But this time it was the police leading an assault at dusk, according to residents and a United Nations account.
“My son was playing cards outside when I heard the gunshots,” said Marie Jaquesmel, 70. “The police entered from different directions and started firing tear gas and shooting, we could only run.”
With 139 houses set fire behind her, she lost track of her 28-year-old son, who is deaf and cannot speak. “I don´t know if he is dead or alive, the only thing I saw is that those men were policemen.”
Now she is twice displaced, this time without her son to help provide food. She shares a cramped school with 315 families from La Piste, living in despair.
Justin Pierre June, 31, an
articulate law student who arrived in Port-au-Prince on the first deportee flight this month stood up to the IOM officers receiving them at the airport.
“This is not the right moment to deport us to Haiti. Haiti is not ready to receive deportees because its situation is chaotic,” he shouted. “This country is in a political, social, security and economic crisis, we are surrounded by gangs from all sides . ... We should have been allowed to apply to become refugees”
More than 100 fellow deportees clapped in support. His sentiments were seconded days later by Philipo Grandi, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, who questioned the U.S. “mass expulsions of individuals ... without screening for protection needs.” Grandi said that international law forbids the return of individuals to a country in such dangerous chaos.
The U.S. has had a checkered history with the nation since Haitians freed themselves from slavery and French colonial rule at the start of the 19th century. Americans occupied Haiti for nearly two decades in the 20th century. Since then, through coups and earthquakes, U.S. leaders and the international community have both contributed to chaos and tried unsuccessfully to rebuild the country.
All the while, Haitian immigrants made their way to US shores by sea to Florida or through Mexico to Texas.
On Thursday, the U.S. Special Envoy to Haiti, Dan Foote, resigned, saying he could not defend a policy of deporting Haitians back to “a country where American officials are confined to secure compounds because of the danger posed by armed gangs to daily life.” The policy will backfire, he said: “Surging migration to our borders will only grow as we add to Haiti’s unacceptable misery.”
There could be as many as 100 gangs in Port-au-Prince; no one has an exact count and allegiances often are violently fluid.
Gangs control access to and from the port — and, therefore, 80% of everything consumed in the island nation, according to port and business leaders. The city’s main food market, Croix des Bosalles, extends from the southern entrance of the port to the parliament, on ground where enslaved people were sold before independence. To enter the market today, one must walk through a gang gauntlet.
The floor of the market itself is thick with decomposing trash and, in some places, small fires of burning trash.
Jean Baptiste Nevelson, 49, a spokesperson for the neighborhood Bel Air, has a prediction for the future: “The future will be bad, chaotic, violent.”