On Monday, the Trump administration ended Temporary Protected Status, or TPS, for some 350,000 Haitians in the U.S., many who’ve lived here for more than a decade.
Now, as it looks set to start mass deporting them — at least a thousand a month — a new question has arisen among Haitian civic leaders and international rights groups:
Would those deportations constitute a human rights violation, since it would mean sending people back to the horrific violence of gang rule in Haiti?
The situation on the ground remains alarming, as this month's gang massacre of 61 people in the Port-au-Prince suburb of Kenscoff underlined.
In Port-au-Prince, Haiti's capital, and in provinces like Artibonite, the U.N. says the country's powerful gangs have killed some 2,500 people this year alone — while gang rule has sent a million and a half Haitians into hastily improvised refugee camps.
Given that burden, it’s little surprise Haiti’s threadbare interim government has no plan in place for receiving or reintegrating hundreds of thousands of deportees from the U.S. to insulate them from the gang threat.
READ MORE: The murder of Bazelais: Haiti's gang terror deepens as it broadens
"Where would these people go to?" asked Monique Clesca, a pro-democracy activist in Port-au-Prince, which is almost 90% controlled by the gangs.
“Haitians here will of course try to welcome them back as best as we can because we are a resilient people — but the reality is, everyone here is terrified," Clesca told WLRN.
"We are living under an occupation of gangs. People are hiding practically at home because you can’t go out.
"Just days ago, the gangs killed those 60 people in Kenscoff, which is about 15 minutes from where I live. Rice fields are being burned; women — children — are being gang raped.”
Clesca — author of a memoir, Silence and Resilience, about her childhood under Haiti’s brutal 20th-century Duvalier dictatorship — is one of several civic leaders inside Haiti WLRN spoke with in recent days.
She is part of the Montana Accord movement, which strongly refutes the interim government’s assertion that a new general election can be safely held in Haiti this year — and she just as strongly rejects the notion that deportees can be safely welcomed back there.
“I really believe these deportations are unsustainable,” she said.
"You have a country that already has 1.5 million refugees in the streets and in makeshift camps, and you’re going to add another 350,000? It’s a nightmare.”Haitian civic leader Louis-Henri Mars
The U.S. State Department itself this month warned people against traveling to Haiti, citing risks like wanton kidnappings, sexual assault and “being struck by stray bullets.”
Organizations such as Human Rights Watch insist, as a result, that it's unconscionable to deport Haitian TPS holders in the U.S. into that cauldron.
"Mass deportations would put these people in grave danger and exacerbate Haiti’s humanitarian crisis," Bill Frelick, HRW's director of refugee and migrant rights, wrote last week.
"Many would be compelled to rejoin families living in dangerous areas," if not in the squalid displacement camps.
Rights advocates fear the U.S. plans to deport Haitians are a violation of non-refoulement, the international law principle that prohibits forcing refugees back to a place they’ll likely be harmed if not killed.
Past administrations have deported Haitians as well; but after Haiti's cataclysmic 2010 earthquake, and as the gang crisis has exploded, they also introduced and regularly extended the TPS protection from deportation to Haitians.
Heritage of terror
Which is why Clesca likens the current pending deportations to sending dissidents back to the clutches of the murderous Duvalier regime. She in fact sees the gangs as a 21st-century version of the dictatorship's paramilitary terrorists, known as the Tonton Macoute.
"They are continuing that heritage," Clesca said.
"The gangs are a state within a state, and they are controlling us with their own terror — making us pay tolls and taxes, for example, if we want access to the roads out of or into Port-au-Prince."
The Trump administration argues that a multinational, mostly U.S.-funded police support effort — the Gang Suppression Force, or GSF — will neutralize that terror. But the GSF is still barely established in Haiti.
“I understand there’s about a thousand of them in place now in country, but they have not really started any operations," said former Haitian entrepreneur Louis Henri Mars, a senior adviser to the nonprofit Institute for Research and Action for Peace in Port-au-Prince.
Like most civic leaders in Haiti, Mars says it’s wiser and more humane for the U.S. to wait to see if the GSF actually subdues the gangs before sending them more vulnerable victims.
Mars also questions the Trump administration’s belief that the money and business expertise Haitian TPS holders earned in the U.S. can alleviate the poverty that helps spawn the gangs.
“There is a potential for that," Mars said.
"But if you invest where your investment is not guaranteed because there’s no security for it, you have a 99.9% chance of losing your investment.
"So they’re not going to do that — if they have actually learned something about business in the U.S.”
What’s more, Mars adds, the fact that many Haitian TPS holders did have businesses and good-paying jobs in places like South Florida makes them even bigger targets for the often deadly ransom kidnappings Haiti’s gangs are notorious for.
Mars, who in the past has conducted dialogue between gang leaders and civil society, said bringing the gangs to heel will require a two-pronged approach: on the one hand, making them face “a stronger physical threat to their lives and freedom,” and on the other “a non-violent way out offered also” — not as an amnesty, he said, but to allow gang members to see hope of an alternative to criminal life to get by in Haiti.
"And that will take a lot more attention to structural reform of the country than the international community has paid up to now," Mars said, "instead of pursuing the same aid strategies that don't work."
Either way, he concluded, for now deporting Haitians back, "doesn’t really make sense."
"It’s a tremendous ask," he said. "You have a country that already has 1.5 million refugees in the streets and in makeshift camps, and then to say that you’re going to add another 350,000 — it’s a … it’s a nightmare.”
A potential nightmare, anyway — on top of the nightmare that already exists there.
