COMMENTARY King Herod — a monstrous Biblical ruler who in the Christmas story forced Jesus' family to flee their country — has plenty of modern heirs driving our hemisphere's migrant crisis today.
And he rose and took the child and his mother by night, and departed to Egypt, and remained there until the death of Herod. - Matthew 2:14-15
It’s the week before Christmas, which means my second annual Herod of the Hemisphere awards.
It’s the holiday moment when we pick five leaders most responsible for the immigration crisis and cruelty convulsing the Americas — the sort of migrant misery and refugee wretchedness that King Herod heaped on the infant Jesus and his family.
You’ll recall, in the Bible, how monstrous Herod the Great, a ruler imposed on Israel by the Romans, forced Jesus, Mary and Joseph to flee to Egypt. It was a template for the way, say, Haiti’s monstrous gang chieftains drive holy infants and their kin into displacement camps today.
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So without further ado, we’ll award this year’s Herod of the Hemisphere first-place prize to last year’s vile runner-up:
Haiti’s de facto head of state, gang confederation leader Jimmy “Barbecue” Cherizier.
It’s hard to imagine that Cherizier and his gang alliance — which calls itself, appallingly, Viv Ansanm, or “Live Together” in Creole — could have topped their 2024 atrocities, which included more than 5,600 murders and a 1,000% increase in sexual violence crimes against minors.
But having won control of 90% of Haiti’s capital, Port-au-Prince, Viv Ansanm spent much of this year conquering the rest of the country.
The most evil facet of Haiti’s “Barbecue” rule is the strangulation of childhood — a kind of massacre of the innocents worthy of Herod the Biblical baby killer.
That meant more, and more vicious, murdering, burning, hijacking, kidnapping and raping — resulting in a 36% rise in the number of Haitians made refugees or migrants by gang violence, which now stands at 1.4 million.
Arguably the most evil facet of Haiti’s “Barbecue” rule is the strangulation of childhood — a kind of massacre of the innocents worthy of Herod the Biblical baby killer.
Forcibly recruited minors now make up half of the country’s heavily armed gang membership. In May a 6-year-old girl displaced by gang invasion died after suffering the sort of sexual assault that’s become a sickeningly commonplace “Live Together” weapon.
Eviscerated values
You’d think those Mad Max conditions in Haiti would make a U.S. president pause before ordering half a million migrants to go back and live in them.
Well, maybe if you're a woke snowflake. But not President Donald Trump — this year’s No. 2 Hemispheric Herod, up from No. 5 last year.
As part of his crusade to show the MAGA voter base how many brown- and black-skinned people he can boot from U.S. soil, Trump cancelled the Temporary Protected Status (TPS) that has shielded hundreds of thousands of Haitians from deportation.
Ditto TPS for more than half a million Venezuelans who now face return to a brutal dystopia ruled by our No. 4 Herod (see below).
I’ll be — and have been — the first to argue the U.S. should enforce its immigration laws. But the hateful, community-breaking cruelty of Trump’s deportation campaign — for starters, falsely accusing migrants of gang affiliation and flying them with no due process to a hellhole in El Salvador — is just rank immigrant demonization that eviscerates America’s core, e pluribus unum values.
It instead exalts Herodic values.
And so does the performance of our No. 3 Hemispheric Herod:
The Cuban regime.
Almost a fifth of Cuba’s population has left the communist island in this decade. That trend only continued in 2025: countries like Brazil, Uruguay and Costa Rica registered spikes in the number of Cubans requesting asylum. And the chief reason is that Raúl Castro and the nonagenarian dictatorship he still heads doubled down on their Marxist political repression and economic lunacy.
Another left-wing lunatic and last year’s No. 1 Hemispheric Herod, Venezuelan Dictator-President Nicolás Maduro, drops to No. 4 this year — though he’s still the criminal thug who’s pushed almost a quarter of Venezuela’s population to flee their country.
Trump and the U.S. military may dislodge Maduro from power. If they do, let’s make him trek through the Darien jungle to find refuge.
And speaking of ousted leaders, No. 5 is former Peruvian President Dina Boluarte, who was impeached and removed in October after three disastrously authoritarian years in power — which led to Peru’s highest emigration rates in almost half a century.
Congratulations to all. History — and Christmas — will no doubt remember you as unkindly as they remember King Herod.
