129 deported from US arrive in Haiti amid virus concerns
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — A plane carrying 129 migrants who were deported from the U.S. landed Thursday in Haiti amid concerns that the second such flight this month could strain the impoverished country’s limited resources as it fights the COVID-19 disease.
Authorities whisked the group away in buses and took the migrants to a hotel in the capital of Port-auPrince,
where they joined more than 60 other recent deportees already serving a two-week quarantine.
Three of the migrants who arrived in early April have tested positive for COVID-19, although none in the group that departed San Antonio, Texas, on Thursday had a temperature, said Jean Negot Bonheur Delva, director of Haiti’s migration office. The newest group includes 50 children from ages ranging 5 to 15, he said.
The World Health Organization
is providing Haiti with free testing kits, although the local government is paying for three meals a day and the deportees’ two-week stay at hotels, including one in the north coastal town of CapHaïtien, where nearly 400 migrants are under quarantine after being expelled from the nearby Turks & Caicos Islands.
Bonheur declined to say how much the situation is costing the government as a Miami-based Haitian rights advocacy group called on
President Jovenel Moise to stop accepting deportees and ask that President Donald Trump place a moratorium on deportations.
“These flights do not only put the deported individuals at risk, but they also threaten to spread the coronavirus in Haiti, a country as you know all too well is ill-equipped to deal with a pandemic,” wrote Marleine Bastien, executive director of the Family Action Network Movement.
Government officials in Haiti did not immediately respond to a request for comment. However, Prime Minister Joseph Jouthe said earlier this week that the country is caring for the deportees.
“They are Haitians. They are coming home. We have to receive them,” he said Monday on Radio Vision 2000.
Haiti has reported at least four deaths and 62 confirmed new coronavirus cases, according to a tally compiled by Johns Hopkins University from official government figures.