US deports about 50 Haitians, ending monthslong pause in flights

MIAMI (AP) — The Biden administration sent about 50 Haitians back to their country on Thursday, authorities said, marking the first deportation flight in several months to the Caribbean nation struggling with surging 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 didn't offer 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 hadn't done so by early evening.

Joseph lived in the US more than 20 years and has a 7-year-old US citizen daughter with another woman. He had a deportation order dating from 2005 after losing an asylum bid that his attorney, Philip Issa, said was a result of poor legal representation at the time. Though Joseph wasn't deported previously, his lawyer was seeking to have that order overturned.

Joseph was convicted of theft and burglary, and ordered to pay restitution of $270, Issa said. He has been detained since last year.

Dorsaninvil said her fiancé has "nobody" in Haiti. "It is devastating for me. We were planning a wedding and now he is gone," she said.

More than 33,000 people fled Haiti's capital in a span of less than two weeks as gangs pillaged homes and attacked state institutions, according to a report last month from the UN's International Organization for Migration.

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

Haiti's National Police is understaffed and overwhelmed by gangs with powerful arsenals. Many hospitals ceased operations amid a shortage of medical supplies.

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

It said deportation flights were frequent after a camp of 16,000 largely Haitian migrants assembled on the riverbanks of Del Rio, Texas, in September 2021 but became rare as fewer Haitians crossed the border illegally from Mexico.

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