More than 450 Haitians have been deported by the United States back to dangerous conditions in Haiti since the Trump administration ended Temporary Protected Status for them in July.
According to Human Rights Watch, many of the deported Haitians had lived legally in the United States for years, and many have family members who are U.S. citizens. The non-governmental organization issued a report that calls on the administration to halt the removals.
Human Rights Watch says the U.S. is putting the lives of those returned at risk by sending them back to an island nation with rising poverty and crime and gangs that have even taken over the airport in the country’s capital Port-au-Prince.
“The United States is returning people, some with pending asylum claims, to a country that doesn’t have the capacity to protect them from violence, let alone help them find food and shelter,” said Nathalye Cotrino, senior Americas researcher at Human Rights Watch.
The NGO says deportation flights to the northern Haitian city of Cap-Haïtien have increased to weekly — from monthly — because the capital’s airport is unreachable.
Human Rights Watch says staff visited Cap-Haïtien last month and interviewed 44 Haitian deportees who arrived on some of the first deportation flights after TPS was ended.
TPS was lifted on July 27 after the U.S. Supreme Court in June upheld a ruling to terminate the process for an estimated 330,000 Haitians.
Many interviewed by the NGO said they left Haiti following the deadly 2010 earthquake and because of the country’s longstanding security and humanitarian crisis, as well as political instability following the 2021 assassination of President Jovenel Moïse.
The deportees were met at the Cap-Haïtien airport by officials from Haiti’s National Office for Migration, local police, the Haitian Red Cross and International Organization for Migration staff where they were registered and documented, and each received about 10,000 Haitian gourdes, which is the equivalent of $77 in U.S. cash.
The NGO says there are limited shelter and healthcare organizations or transportation for those sent back to Haiti.
“After registering, deportees were left to fend for themselves, and many did not know what to do or where to go next,” Human Rights Watch said in its report.
The U.S. State Department currently lists Haiti as a Level 4 “Do Not Travel” destination “due to the risk of crime, kidnapping, terrorism, unrest, and limited health care.”
Officials from the Institute of Social Welfare and Research (Institut du Bien-Être Social et de Recherches) told Human Rights Watch that when children are deported to Haiti, they verify whether the children arrive with a parent or guardian and try to reunify unaccompanied children with relatives, arranging temporary accommodation through private partner shelters when necessary.
However, they said the agency had no space to conduct private interviews with children and lacked a shelter of its own or a mechanism to monitor children after reunification, according to the agency’s report.