The Obama administration is trying to figure out what to do with the 30,000 Haitians slated for removal from the United States. Plans to deport them are under review, according to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton—and they should be, as Haiti is unprepared for an influx of arrivals.
Already the poorest, least-developed country in the hemisphere, Haiti was pummeled by four devastating storms last August and September. Several hundred people died, a million more were made homeless, and $1 billion was drained from the already feeble economy.
With only five months in office, the Obama administration already has plenty on its plate, so it’s no surprise the Haitian migration question is not yet resolved.
It is worth pointing out, however, that the action the administration has taken thus far invites the worst possible outcome. Haitians are being deported back home at a rate of more than 100 per month, at a time when the U.S.-funded program charged with helping them resettle is on hold.
The four-month hiatus that halted deportations immediately following last summer’s hurricanes and tropical storms ended late last year, and deportees began to arrive in Port-au-Prince on commercial flights in December. In the first four months of 2009, 91 undocumented immigrants arrived back on Haitian shores. In April, 175 persons—most of whom were convicted of non-violent crimes in the United States—were flown in on Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) flights.
More than 300 Haitians have already been returned so far this year and Washington has no plans to shelve the biweekly ICE flights.
According to a study released by a Haitian human rights organization, most criminal deportees left Haiti before the age of eight and lived in the United States for 20 to 40 years. Many no longer have close relations in Haiti and do note speak Creole, the national language. Deportees often consider themselves to be more American than Haitian, and most were legal residents in the United States.
Haitian criminals may deserve little sympathy, but their forced return can cause great problems for themselves, their families, and their communities. Criminal deportees (even after non-violent convictions) are stigmatized in Haiti and face huge hurdles in seeking employment and housing.
Some wind up on the streets, some develop drug and alcohol problems, some return to lives of crime, and many, unable to find work, become burdens on their families still in the United States.
This vicious cycled has not gone unnoticed by international bodies. The United Nations Development Program funded a pilot program within the International Organization for Migration (IOM) to help deportees resettle in Haiti in 2006. Later, the U.S. State Department assumed financial responsibility for the IOM program, under which new arrivals would be registered and offered counseling, education, and employment assistance. More than 1,000 people were served by the program; some now have their own businesses.
But funding to help new arrivals was provided only through March 2009. One month later, ICE flights had resumed, and deportee support had dried up. IOM officials in Haiti say they are hoping for more funding to assist the hundreds of people they expect to arrive this year. As of now, however, there are no plans to redirect money back to the program, a State Department spokeswoman said.
Meanwhile, there are some unlikely people doing what they can to help those without support: former criminal deportees themselves.
Welcome Home
On April 15, some 45 new arrivals filed into a police station in Haiti that processes deportees. The repatriated Haitians found five young men peering at them through slatted windows and calling out to them in English: “Yo, any of you guys homeless, man? Don’t have no peoples coming over?” The young men were members of a deportee association called CARDH, the French acronym for the Center for Support and Reintegration of Haitian Deportees. Equipped with clipboards, business cards and sign-up sheets, they had taken a bus to the station. But when police turned them away, saying they weren’t authorized to enter, so the volunteer welcome group conducted outreach from outside.
At the end of the day, CARDH members brought a deportee named Frank Killick home with them. Killick’s story illustrates some of the painful ironies in these deportations. He was born in the Bahamas to Haitian parents, and raised in Florida. Although he had never set foot in Haiti, he sent money to needy relatives there while working in the United States.
On his first night in Haiti, Killick stayed at the home of CARDH’s founder, while other members called around seeking donations to feed him, until Killick’s half-brother, Lynri, came by bus from Gonaives, a city ravaged by last summer’s storms, to pick him up.
With some of Gonaives still under water—and much of it caked in mud and closed for business—many of its residents have fled in recent months, crossing the border into the Dominican Republic or taking to the seas in the hopes of reaching Miami. Lynri, an emaciated, unemployed farmer, says he lost everything in the floods. He used to call Killick in the United States to ask for money. Now the tables have turned: Lynri must house and support him.
CARDH members would like to help people like Killick on a long-term basis but lack the necessary funds to do so. Other deportee associations provide various services but say it’s a constant struggle. The oldest such group, Foundation for Families of Haitian Returnees, conducts outreach to deportees living on the streets, holds Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous meetings, and advocates for wrongly jailed deportees. But all the funding comes from the director’s family in Boston—and it isn’t enough to meet the need. The IOM program used to provide some assistance to the organization. Not anymore.
By resuming deportations without restoring funding to help deportees in Haiti, the U.S. government is creating a situation in which reform has no reward and, often, the best chances for survival lie in criminality or boarding a boat to try to return back, illegally, to American shores.
Amy Bracken is a freelance print and radio journalist based in Boston who writes for The New York Times, The Boston Globe, and The Christian Science Monitor among other publications. She reported out of Haiti for two years and now focuses on immigrant and refugee issues.