Human rights group decries deportation to ‘chaos’ in Haiti

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico (AP):

Human Rights Watch released a report Thursday demanding the US and other countries stop deporting Haitians to their homeland, calling it “unconscionable” and warning that they are putting people’s lives in danger.

More than 25,700 people have been deported to Haiti from January 2021 to February 2022, with 79 per cent of them alone expelled by the US, according to the International Organization for Migration.

“Haitians and their children, many born abroad, are being returned to a country in chaos,” said César Muñoz, senior Americas researcher with Human Rights Watch, a non-profit organisation based in New York.

Haiti’s turmoil deepened significantly in the past year with inflation, kidnappings and violence spiking as the country tries to recover from the July 7 assassination of President Jovenel Moïse and a 7.2 magnitude earthquake that struck in mid-August, killing more than 2,200 people and destroying or damaging tens of thousands of homes. Jobs also have become even scarcer in a country of more than 11 million people where 60 per cent of the population makes less than US$2 a day.

GANGS MORE POWERFUL

In addition, gangs have grown more powerful amid ongoing political instability, with reported kidnappings soaring by 180 per cent and homicides by 17 per cent in the past year, according to a report by the United Nations Security Council. An estimated 19,000 people have lost their homes due to gang violence, and many are still living in temporary shelters in extremely unhygienic conditions.

“Port-au-Prince is now hell,” said Cassandra Petit, a 39-year-old mother of two whose partner was killed last year when he went back to the home they had fled amid ongoing gang violence to retrieve clothes and school backpacks for their children. “He never returned.”

She is now staying with her former partner’s cousin and tries to make some money by selling used clothes, but “it’s not every day that you make a sale”.

“When I come back, I don’t know what the kids will eat in the evening,” she said. “I start to cry before I make it to the house.”

The UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization recently reported that some 4.5 million people across Haiti require urgent assistance given a severe lack of food.

Muñoz said no one should be deporting people to Haiti given those conditions.

“It is unconscionable that any government would send people to Haiti while it experiences such a deterioration in security and a heightened risk to everyone’s life and physical integrity,” he said.

He also decried a public health law known as Title 42 created under former US President Donald Trump that the administration of US President Joe Biden has used to quickly expel Haitians and fly them to their homeland, barring them from trying to seek asylum in the US. Most of the Haitian migrants detained in recent months along the US-Mexico border in Texas have been deported under that law.