A massacre of 47 people in Haiti last weekend is a grisly reminder of just how violent and lawless the Caribbean island remains — and how much a U.N.-backed international mission to restore stability is struggling a year after being approved. This is the situation to which Haitians living in the United States are being forcibly returned.
Last Sunday’s killings occurred in the once-peaceful town of Kenscoff in the hills above the violence-wracked capital, Port-au-Prince. Kenscoff is next to Pétion-Ville, the relatively affluent suburb that is home to upscale hotels, the beleaguered government and what remains of the diplomatic community. Some 22 innocent civilians were slaughtered in a church. Houses were burned and women were raped, authorities said. About 50 people were taken as hostages.
The message from Haiti’s gangs: No one, anywhere, is beyond their reach.
Last September, the U.N. Security Council approved a U.S.-sponsored plan to send a 5,550-member Gang Suppression Force to restore order and prop up the country’s fledgling government. These peacekeepers were supposed to replace the hapless Kenyan-led police force, which struggled from the start with inadequate personnel and weapons and with navigating rules of engagement that required them to mostly provide backup to outgunned local police.
The U.N.-backed entity came with a more forceful mandate to take the fight to the gangs and disarm them. But the force has been underfunded and numbered only about 1,000 as of last month.
Haiti’s government, led by Prime Minister Alix Didier Fils-Aimé, has made limited tactical gains against gangs in the central part of the capital. That’s mostly thanks to drone strikes carried out by the private security company Vectus Global, led by Erik Prince.
But the criminal gangs still control about 70 percent of Port-au-Prince and are expanding their reach into the countryside. Gangs have raided agricultural land and killed farmers in the breadbasket region of Artibonite and the south around Séguin. More than 1,400 people were killed between April and June, according to the U.N., and 1.5 million people across Haiti are displaced.
It’s into this maelstrom that the U.S. is flying Haitian migrants who were stripped of their temporary protected status, known as TPS. The Trump administration insists the island is safe enough to receive the approximately 350,000 Haitians the U.S. wants to deport. These are people who have been legally living and working in the U.S. under TPS. Many work in health care and home care.
Commercial flights from the U.S. to Haiti have been blocked amid reports of aircraft being struck by gunfire. But the Trump administration is sending planes of Haitians back to the island on deportation flights. The latest arrived Thursday, carrying about 70 people, including children.
President Joe Biden deserves some blame for his rapid overexpansion of the TPS program from about 400,000 beneficiaries to about 1.3 million people from 17 countries. Biden, in effect, created a backdoor immigration system that was always going to become politically untenable. The TPS program was meant to be “temporary,” as its name suggests.
President Donald Trump and U.N. Ambassador Mike Waltz deserve credit, along with co-sponsor Panama, for pushing the gang suppression force through the Security Council. Last fall, Waltz said that, after years of failing the island, “the international community is sharing the burden, and living up to its promise to help Haiti turn the tide.” Alas, the tide has not turned, and Haiti is drowning.
The U.N. force lacks the money and people needed to succeed. With guarantees of U.S. funding and equipment, more countries might be persuaded to contribute to a security force. With sustained, high-level attention, Haiti could be pulled back from the abyss. That would make sending home the 350,000 TPS recipients morally defensible.
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