US DEPORTS 50 REFUGEES TO HAITI

The United States has sent 50 Haitians back to their country on Thursday, authorities said, marking the first deportation flight in several months to the Caribbean nation hit with growing gang violence.

The Homeland Security Department said in a statement that it “will continue to enforce US laws and policy throughout the Florida Straits and the Caribbean region, as well as at the southwest border.

“US policy is to return noncitizens who do not establish a legal basis to remain in the United States.”

Authorities did not provide details of the flight beyond how many deported Haitians were aboard.

Thomas Cartwright of Witness at the Border, an advocacy group that tracks flight data, said a plane left Alexandria, Louisiana, a hub for deportation operations, and arrived in Cap-Haitien, Haiti, after a stop in Miami.

Marjorie Dorsaninvil, a US citizen, said her Haitian fiancé, Gerson Joseph, called in tears from the Miami airport Thursday morning to say he was being deported on a flight to Cap-Haitien with other Haitians and some from other countries, including the Bahamas.

He promised to call when he arrived but had not done so by early evening.

Joseph has lived in the US for more than 20 years and has a 7-year-old US citizen daughter with another woman.

He was deported in 2005 after losing an asylum bid that his attorney, Philip Issa, said was a result of poor legal representation at the time.

Issa has been trying to reopen the case. Joseph was convicted of theft and burglary and ordered to pay restitution of $270, Issa said.

He has been detained since last year.

The majority of those displaced traveled to Haiti’s southern region, which is generally peaceful compared with Port-au-Prince, which has an estimated population of 3 million and is largely paralyzed by gang violence.

Haiti’s National Police is understaffed and overwhelmed by gangs with powerful weapons.

The US operated one deportation flight a month to Haiti from December 2022 through last January, according to Witness at the Border.

Haitians were arrested crossing the border from Mexico 286 times during the first three months of the year, less than 0.1 percent of the more than 400,000 arrests among all nationalities.

More than 150,000 people have entered the US legally since January 2023, under presidential powers to grant entry for humanitarian reasons.

Many others came legally using an online appointment system at land crossings with Mexico called CBP One.

Homeland Security said on Thursday that it was “monitoring the situation” in Haiti.

The US Coast Guard repatriated 65 Haitians who were stopped at sea off the Bahamas coast last month.

Haitian Bridge Alliance, a migrant advocacy group, urged a halt in deportation flights to Haiti, saying Thursday that the US was “knowingly condemning the most vulnerable, who came to us in their time of need, to imminent danger.”

Arrests for illegal crossings dropped by half in January and have since then after Mexico stepped up enforcement south of the US border.