As violent gangs move to take full possession of Haiti's capital, Port-au-Prince, the U.S. is advising Americans not to travel to Haiti — prompting security experts to ask why the Trump administration is now planning to deport half a million Haitian migrants back into the country.
This week, the powerful gangs that control much of Haiti, including some 80% of the capital, killed another Kenyan police officer sent there as part of a multinational security support mission to aid the country's beleaguered national force.
It was just the latest indication that those criminal groups — who last year united in a confederation they call Viv Ansanm in Creole, or Live Together — are on the brink of absolute rule of Port-au-Prince, as well as expanded rule of Haiti's provinces.
"The situation is extremely desperate at the moment," Diego Da Rin, Haiti analyst for the nonprofit International Crisis Group, told WLRN from Port-au-Prince.
"The international community has to grasp very quickly that if the capital does fall completely to the gangs, as looks likely, it will be extremely difficult to reverse that situation."
As a result, the U.S. State Department has now issued its most serious, Level 4 warning not to travel to Haiti.
But Haiti experts like Da Rin argue that’s also why the Trump administration — which last month announced it is stripping some half a million Haitian migrants in the U.S. of their Temporary Protected Status, or TPS, which shielded them from deportation — should reconsider its plans to send those Haitians back into Haiti.
“It seems like a crazy and inhumane idea," Da Rin said.
"These people won’t have anywhere to live, no way to find food to eat, and they'll be forced to create new displacement camps."
More than a million Haitians have already been displaced from their homes by gangs — 60,000 in just the past month.
The Trump administration argues that it sees the possibility of "improvement in conditions" in Haiti, and that allowing those hundreds of thousands of Haitians with TPS to remain in the U.S. is "contrary to U.S. national interests."
But Guerline Jozef, executive director of the Haitian Bridge Alliance, a Haitian-American advocacy nonprofit, insisted, "It will place [Haitian migrants] in acute danger if they are forced to return to a country that is in the midst of an unprecedented economic and political crisis" that includes what appears to be imminent gang government.
Several South Florida lawmakers penned a letter earlier this month to Trump administration officials pleading that they reverse the decision to end TPS for Haitians.
"Gang violence has reached unprecedented levels, displacing families, disrupting daily life, and fueling a humanitarian emergency," wrote U.S. Rep. Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick, D-Miramar, along with U.S. Rep. Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, D-Weston, and U.S. Rep. Frederica Wilson, D-Miami Gardens.
READ MORE: Doctors Without Borders urges the world to 'step up the response' to gang sexual violence in Haiti
This week, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, during a visit to the Caribbean, met with Haitian Transitional Presidential Council (TPC's) President Fritz Alphonse Jean in Jamaica.
Rubio acknowledged the deteriorating security situation in Haiti and the need for augmenting the multinational security support mission. But he did not indicate if the U.S. would increase its aid or involvement. Critics say the current mission may be too little too late to seriously confront Haiti's heavily armed gang takeover.
Most of the gangs' weapons are trafficked from the U.S., particularly from Florida.
Haitians, meanwhile, have taken to the streets in Port-au-Prince this week to protest the TPC's ineffectiveness in restoring stability.
The TPC has said it wants to hold desperately needed new elections in Haiti by the end of this year. But observers like the International Crisis Group say that's highly unlikely if the gangs aren't first neutralized — which itself looks just as unlikely.
"In their campaign to take control of Port-au-Prince," Da Rin said, the gangs have moved deliberately, waiting to see how the international community would react as they took another step in that direction.
"And at each step they've been pleased to see there wasn't a very strong international reaction."
There has been talk, for example, of morphing the Kenya-led, U.S.-financed multinational support mission into a larger, U.N. peacekeeping force. But so far it has only been talk.
Meanwhile, the gang onslaught has all but torn down Haiti's healthcare and hospital infrastructure — a big reason the U.S. is warning travelers away from Haiti, where U.S. commercial airliners are still prohibited from flying to Port-au-Prince after gangs fired on incoming flights last fall.
The U.N. says Haiti's gangs were responsible for more than 5,600 murders last year, and more than 4,000 women and girls were victims of gang sexual violence.
If and when Port-au-Prince does fall utterly to Viv Ansanm forces, security experts like Da Rin speculate that the TPC, as well as Haiti's overwhelmed police command, may have to relocate the capital to another city, such as Cap-Haïtien, Haiti's second-largest city on the country's north coast, which has not yet been overrun by the gangs.
"Cap-Haïtien would be the best option if they do have to leave Port-au-Prince," Da Rin said. "It has an international port and airport."
It would also have the advantage, Da Rin notes, of not being the gang-paralyzed city Port-au-Prince now is.
