PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — After the administration of President Joe Biden deported Maxin Orelien to Haiti in September 2021, he fled the country again the next month.
A construction worker, Orelien had spent about $3,000 traveling to the United States in search of what he called “a better life.” But it was the height of the pandemic, and the Biden administration was expelling new arrivals by the thousands, often in shackles.
It was weeks after the assassination of President Jovenel Moïse. Back in Haiti, Orelien, says, he learned that some returnees had been attacked, robbed or kidnapped.
His wife and four children were living in Port-au-Prince in 2024 when armed men attacked their concrete home. They escaped, he says, but the attackers burned the house down and destroyed their small food business.
The presidency remains vacant; the country hasn’t held elections in a decade. Powerful gangs, U.N. officials say, armed largely with weapons imported illegally from the United States, control as much as 90 percent of the capital.
Orelien, now 50 and living in Chile, is trying desperately to get his family to Chile, Brazil or the United States, if a legal pathway becomes available. For them, the Supreme Court decision allowing the Trump administration to end temporary humanitarian protections for hundreds of thousands of Haitians in the U.S. comes at exactly the wrong time.
“I don’t think Haiti is a place where people should be deported today,” Orelien said. “It’s hell.”
Many here agree. Mass deportations would cost the economy billions of dollars in remittances annually, analysts say, and mass arrivals could further destabilize a country already suffering record displacement.
Fear is spreading through Haitian communities in the United States. Within hours of the court decision, the San Diego-based Haitian Bridge Alliance received more than 250 calls to its hotline, executive director Guerline M. Jozef said. People wanted to know whether they could continue going to work, sending children to school or simply shopping for groceries.
The Obama administration granted temporary protected status to Haitian nationals in the United States in January 2010 after a 7.0-magnitude earthquake shook Port-au-Prince into rubble.
The designation has enabled more than 330,000 Haitians to stay and work in the U.S. regardless of their immigration status. It does not offer a pathway to permanent residence or citizenship.
TPS was extended by the Obama and Biden administrations as Haiti endured cascading crises, including a deadly cholera outbreak, destructive hurricanes, Moïse’s assassination and the spread of the gangs. The first Trump administration tried to end the protections but was blocked by the courts.
Last year, then-Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem determined that conditions in had “improved to the point where Haitians can return home in safety” and moved to end the protections. The U.S. State Department continues to warn Americans against traveling here, its strongest advisory level, because of “crime, terrorism, kidnapping, unrest and limited health care.”
The Supreme Court ruled last month that the courts did not have the authority to review the determinations on Haitians or Syrians. The administration may begin removing those who don’t otherwise have a right to stay in the country.
More than 2,300 people here have been killed in gang-related violence this year, U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk reported last month.
Kidnappings for ransom are rising. James Boyard, an inspector general of the Haitian National Police and chief of staff to the defense minister, was abducted with his wife and 6-year-old daughter in broad daylight last month in Port-au-Prince.
A U.N.-backed force arrived here this spring in the latest international effort to contain the armed groups, but insecurity continues to spread: Gang clashes in Cité Soleil have disrupted the distribution of fuel, major hospitals in Port-au-Prince remain closed, and organizations supporting survivors of sexual violence are struggling after funding cuts in U.S. foreign assistance.
Economists warn that any increase in deportations could carry consequences well beyond those directly affected. Money sent home by migrants, a critical source of income for many Haitian households, made up 16.3 percent of Haiti’s GDP in 2024, the World Bank estimates. The great majority of these remittances come from the United States.
Families receiving that money typically spend it on essentials: food, rent and children’s school fees.
“Nearly every pillar of the Haitian economy today has weakened except private transfers from the diaspora,” economist Enomy Germain said.
Haiti’s economy is expected to contract again this year, according to the International Monetary Fund. The World Bank estimates that 4.1 million Haitians, more than a third of the population, live on less than $3 a day, the international threshold for poverty.
Any large-scale deportation from the United States to Haiti would be a “fatal blow to a population and an economy already under extraordinary strain,” said Germain, who studies development and public policy. “It would accelerate impoverishment in Haiti.”
Roughly half of Haiti’s 12 million people are experiencing acute food insecurity or worse, according to the U.N. World Food Program.
“Those returning from the United States would arrive in conditions of poverty, without realistic employment prospects,” Germain said. “That would amount to exporting poverty into Haiti and feeding crises that already exist.”
Lalanne Rose Bethiabé, 19, lives in the coastal town of Jérémie. She receives $100 to $200 from time to time from an uncle who migrated to the U.S. under a humanitarian parole program opened to Haitians during the Biden administration in 2023.
Her uncle survives through temporary jobs, she said, living largely out of public view to avoid drawing attention.
Yet his support is paying for her first year of law school — about $400 — along with groceries and household expenses for her sister, mother, aunt and grandmother.
“Deporting my uncle would amount to amputating us from a key member of the family,” she said. “I would have to leave university.”
The country is already absorbing thousands of returnees a month from the Dominican Republic, which has cracked down on Haitian migrants; the Bahamas; Turks and Caicos; Jamaica; and the United States.
More than 823,000 have been forcibly returned to the country since 2023, according to the International Organization for Migration.
Many have been unable to return to their homes: Roads are blocked, or their neighborhoods have been overrun by armed groups or destroyed. Some have been kidnapped or killed.
A record 1.5 million have been displaced by violence, according to the IOM.
“The Haitian government should request a moratorium because Haiti is not prepared to receive deportations today,” said Katia Bonté, coordinator of the Support Group for Returnees and Refugees. “There are camps everywhere and people living in the streets. Receiving thousands more Haitians deported from the United States right now would be catastrophic.”
Jozef said migrants fear Haiti is ill-prepared to safely receive them. ”We have what amounts to a quasi-government that is unable to protect its people,” she said.
U.S. policy, she said, “is one of the reasons the country is in its current state.” The U.S. occupied Haiti militarily from 1915 to 1934; initially supported the murderous kleptocrats François “Papa Doc” Duvalier and his son, Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier; and continues to be the main source of the gangs’ weapons.
The Supreme Court ruling has reminded some Haitians of the conditions that drove them to leave.
Wilfrid Vallon was watering his banana garden in Morisseau one morning in April 2024 when he saw a convoy of heavily armed men on motorcycles and in vehicles headed toward his neighborhood.
The 48-year-old farmer took cover, called his wife in Jumelle and ordered her to gather their two children at home, 6 and 8, and flee their two-bedroom house.
They escaped, but lost nearly everything. Members of Gran Grif, one of Haiti’s most powerful armed groups, destroyed 22 acres of rice, beans, vegetables and fruit, and Love, the restaurant Vallon had named for his wife. They looted his beverage store and stole 25 goats, eight head of cattle and valuable family possessions.
A cousin was riddled with bullets, he said. He survived, but a dozen neighbors were killed. Much of the area was set ablaze.
Vallon fled to the U.S. through the humanitarian parole program. His wife and children remain in Haiti, moving from place to place, sleeping wherever they can. They have not returned home.
Vallon now works as a restaurant cook in West Palm Beach, Florida. The court decision, he said, left him feeling “shock” and “desolation.”
He blames the U.S. for the level of violence back home. More than 80 percent of firearms recovered at crime scenes in Haiti and submitted to the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives for tracing in 2021, the last year for which data is available, were linked back to the United States.
”They could stop the flow if they truly wanted to,” Vallon said. “If lawless criminals were not making our lives impossible, we could return home without a problem.”
Life in the U.S. has been far harder than he expected.
After more than a year out of work, he now earns about $2,000 a month — barely enough to cover his expenses and send money back to his family.
His businesses in Haiti generated between $4,600 and $9,200 a month.
“Without insecurity,” he said, “my country is a paradise.”
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