“It’s really cruel to be deporting these women, children, and families knowing that you’re sending some people to be killed,” said the Executive Director of Haitian Women for Haitian Refugees Ninaj Raoul. 

The deportation of migrants under Title 42 is not new. More than 104,000 people have been deported under Title 42 since March 2021.

On June 30, Physicians for Human Rights wrote a letter to President Biden demanding he stop using Title 42 to deport families, citing the 3,250 documented cases of kidnappings, rapes, and other attacks against people deported or detained at the U.S.-Mexico border since taking office.

Despite efforts like PHR’s letter and the injunction against Title 42 by U.S. District Court Judge Emmet Sullivan, deportations of families will continue.

Outrage ensued after the image of a border patrol agent on horseback allegedly whipping a Haitian migrant at an encampment near the Del Rio International bridge was released, and coverage of the 14,000 migrants who gathered under the bridge situated at the Texas-Mexico border in September began. 

Since Sunday, Sept. 19, over 6,000 migrants have been deported from the U.S. to Haiti, said Laurent Duvillier, the Regional Chief of Communication for Latin America and the Caribbean at UNICEF.

“Haiti is not just facing one crisis, it’s a combination of crises from political instability, but also increased gang violence over the past few months,” said Duvillier.

Various United Nations agencies have warned against deporting migrants to Haiti given the country’s instability in the wake of the assassination of President Jovenal Moisie and “dire” circumstances as a result of a 7.2 magnitude earthquake, according to a report by CNBC.

Duvillier has been on the ground in Haiti providing humanitarian aid to the deportees. According to recent data Duvillier received, 49 percent of migrants expelled to Haiti are women and children.

These women and children, Duvillier said, are “extremely vulnerable” to the uptick in violence in recent months.

According to the United Nations Integrated Office in Haiti, between January and August 31, there have been “944 intentional homicides, 124 abductions, and 78 cases of sexual and gender-based violence…with at least 159 people killed as a result of gang violence, including a four-month-old infant.”

Raoul said the situation in Haiti is especially dangerous for women, who are at risk of gender-based violence.

“There’s a lot of kidnapping and rapes going on right now,” said Raoul. “It’s like a rape epidemic.”

Raoul has been working at HWHR for 29 years, and in her time at the organization, she said she has never seen the kinds of numbers of deportations that have occurred over the past two weeks.

“We’re at record numbers of deportations here, including women and children, small children in particular,” said Raoul.

Over 40 children with non-Haitian passports have been deported to Haiti. These children do not have Haitian passports because many of the Haitian migrants at the Texas-Mexican border came from countries in South and Central America, where they had lived, worked and raised their families for years prior.

“Many of the children below the age of 10 were born either in Chile or in Brazil,” said Duvillier. “And they don’t speak Creole, they speak Spanish or Portuguese because their parents wanted them to get integrated in Chile or Brazil. So, we have a situation where we have many kids arriving in Haiti, in a country that they don’t know, not speaking the language, which makes them increasingly vulnerable to gang violence, but also to smuggling and human trafficking.”

Raoul said she was not surprised that there were thousands of Haitian migrants at the border, as “it’s basically what’s been going on for the past five years.”

She  explained that many Haitians left the country after the 2010 earthquake and were welcomed by countries like Brazil who offered humanitarian assistance and jobs. 

In 2015, however, Brazil faced an economic and political crisis and “started pushing the Haitians out, we don’t need them anymore,” said Raoul. “And people started heading north. They walked through nine or 10 countries, mostly by land and sea to get to the Mexican border and started coming up here in 2016. So that’s when we started seeing a large surge.”

The journey to the border was arduous for all migrants, but especially for women, many of whom were raped along the way. 

“These people are survivors,” said Duvillier.“They’ve witnessed extortion, smuggling, violence, rape and then reaching the U.S., they were expelled.”

Raoul said migrants are often deported because they are denied credible fear interviews which would determine if they are eligible for asylum. She worked as a translator with the Department of Justice at Guantanamo Bay during the Haitian refugee crisis in the 1990s where she conducted credible fear interviews with Haitian refugees. 

In her office, Ninaj Raoul holds a copy of Newsweek magazine from February 1, 1982 that depicts a Haitian refugee at Krome detention center. Photo by Annie Jonas.

“The credible fear interviews that we were translating for are pretty much identical to the same credible fear interviews that are supposed to be given at the border right now,” said Raoul. “I feel like we’ve gone full circle with the situations 29 years ago today.”

The road to asylum and resettlement in the U.S. is not an easy one, even for migrants who are granted asylum based on their credible fear interviews.

Raoul said the court systems that review migrants for asylum is just deporting them.

“So that means they’re going to go before a judge,” she said. “They’re going to be given a date to go before a judge, and the judge is going to say ‘why should I not deport you?’”

To ensure asylum seekers show up to their court dates, courts require seekers to wear electronic ankle monitors similar to those used on people who are incarcerated or on probation.

The monitors are known to negatively impact asylum seekers physically and emotionally. 

“For us Black people, it reminds us of slavery,” Raoul said. “We call them ‘electronic shackles.’”

She  said the use of electronic ankle monitors is part of the criminalization of Black immigrants, who are more likely to be deported than other immigrants, according to a report by the Black Alliance for Just Immigration.

Both Haitian migrants deported back to Haiti and those granted asylum in the U.S. face an uncertain future.

“These families, children, and individuals are basically looking for life, they are migrating for survival,” said Raoul.

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Both federal and city governments have asked the organization to initiate a resettlement project to support the growing influx of Haitian immigrants, according to HAUP’s Executive Director Elsie Saint-Louis.

 “HAUP was founded because of a crisis just like this,” said Saint-Louis. “We would need additional funding to do that; we absolutely cannot do it without additional funding.”

Haitian Americans United for Progress has been serving the New York City immigrant community for 46 years. It began in 1975 as a volunteer-based organization responding to the needs of those derided as “boat people”: Haitian refugees.

“What prompted the formation of this organization was the first wave of Haitian refugees,” said Herold Dasque, Community Liaison for HAUP. “They called Haitians the boat people, and they were not received well.And now in 2021.We still have political unrest, economic trouble, and bad policies from Haiti’s government and from the US.”

 In response to this turmoil, HAUP provides completely free immigration, education, training, medical and special needs services to those in its community. 

Herold Dasque, right, explains the process of applying for TPS and receiving a social security card to Stanley, an undocumented Haitian immigrant. Photo by Annie Iezzi

Yesterday, at HAUP’s Brooklyn office in Little Haiti, Dasque aided several undocumented immigrants requesting Temporary Protected Status, switching fluently between Haitian Creole and English.

 Smiling and gesticulating, he explained to a young man, Stanley, how the process would work. He needed to sign off on his demographic information, which Dasque would seal and file with the dozens of other TPS forms awaiting mailing. HAUP covers all legal fees for its immigration services, but it cannot cover the $545 governmental price for each immigrant between the ages of 14 and 65 that it aids in application.

 This poses a significant price barrier to many Haitian immigrants, who are fleeing, among other conditions, extreme poverty in their home country. Eventually, Dasque told him, Stanley will receive a social security card and the full governmental services that are benefits of TPS.

 In May of 2021, the Secretary of Homeland Security announced an 18-month designation of TPS for Haitian Nationals, citing “serious security concerns, social unrest, and an increase in human rights abuses, crippling poverty, and lack of basic resources.”

 Now, those problems have only been exacerbated by a 7.2 magnitude earthquake that devastated the small country on August 14th, decimating homes, churches, and businesses. This blow followed the July assassination of Jovenel Moïse, Haiti’s president, which caused massive social unrest.

 But according to the Homeland Security website, immigrants to the United States who left Haiti after May 21, 2021 are not eligible for TPS and are at risk of repatriation. According to UNICEF, more than two in three Haitian migrants that have been repatriated are women and children.

 “When you have crisis upon political crisis that is creating insecurity, then you have natural disasters, a big storm, a big cyclone and within a decade two major earthquakes that destroy your country, this is expected,” said Dasque, shaking his head.

 He asserted  that the surge of Haitian refugees at the border is one that has been years in the making.

 “Everyone knew they were flying to Chile, Brazil, Ecuador, Venezuela, Panama, you name it,” Dasque said. “And they end up travelling from Chile all the way to the border of the US.”

 Those arriving in the U.S. have been camping under the international bridge that connects Del Rio in the United States to Mexico. While these migrants have not yet reached New York, HAUP has already seen an uptick in TPS applications. Dasque sees himself in some of the migrants who come in search of legal aid, both Haitians and non-Haitians alike.

 “I came involuntarily,” he said. “I was very young and didn’t want to leave under the dictatorship. For four years I was here without papers…I always feel a connection with those who are undocumented. In 1994, I became a citizen; that’s a personal choice. At that time, a lot of Haitians didn’t want to become citizens because there is a mentality that they ‘don’t want to be Black twice,’ not in this country.”

 The inhumane treatment of Haitian migrants at the border prompts some at HAUP to be skeptical of the White House’s statement that President Biden is working to develop a “humane immigration system.”

 “We have been fighting forever for a path to citizenship and a path to legalization,” said Saint-Louis. “I wouldn’t mind putting all of my efforts into a real move toward immigration reform, but I just don’t see it. I’m honestly not sure what humane immigration would look like.”

 Now, as it has since its founding, HAUP strives to provide comprehensive services to the community of primarily Haitians that it supports. In addition to delivering crucial immigration aid, HAUP has been organizing vaccine drives and boosting information about the Excluded Workers Fund to help community members thrive.

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 Behind their community-facing smiles, processing the brutalization of Haitians already fleeing a country in distress weighs heavily on the leadership.

“The luxury lacked by people like myself is the time to process things,” said Saint-Louis.

 I have an institution to run. There is no time for me to process how I feel. How do we prepare? What resources do we have? What resources do we need? What is our game plan?”

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Children sponsored by the Restevek Freedom Alliance. Credit: Restevek Freedom Alliance.

There are currently 350,000 child slaves living in Haiti, according to U.N. estimates. The Haitian Creole term for these children is Retseveks.

Resteveks are sent away by parents who cannot afford to take care of them, to live with other more well off families. The families are then supposed to provide the children with a good home and an education in exchange for help with household chores. However, that’s not always the case.

“I would say that the preponderance of the homes of the treatment of [resteveks] is not good at all and a good percentage are abusive,” said Ellen Donahue, the U.S. Director of the Restevek Freedom Alliance, a non-profit organization based in Windham, Conn., “A very small percent might be okay.”

Haiti ranks second on the 2013 Global Slavery Index of countries where human trafficking is an issue. Child slavery is a significant part of the problem.

Ruthly Cadestein, 22, is a Haitian-American from Union, N.J. She plans to visit Haiti someday with the intention of advocating for Resteveks and other victims of human trafficking,

“My goal is to go to law school and get my JD and MBA and work with certain cases connected with human trafficking,” she said, “I want to speak for people who can’t speak for themselves.”

Donahue also said that Resteveks suffer from emotional, physical, and sexual abuse at the hands of their patrons and don’t get the opportunity to go to school or do things that a regular child would get to do.

“Many of them have no freedom to just be a kid,” she said.

Resteveks work as “house slaves” doing a variety of different types of labor. They are expected to work in the fields, go to the market to get food, clean the house, as well as get up early in the morning to fetch water from the common water supply in the villages.

“They’re often dragging huge, heavy pails of water,” Donahue said.

Cadestein finds all this quite ironic, since Haiti was the first colony to abolish slavery, yet it still exists there.

“I always say that Toussaint Louverture would probably be turning in his grave if he saw what was going on on the soil of Haiti,” she said, referring to a Haitian military general who fought for Haiti’s freedom and to eradicate slavery.

The devastating poverty in Haiti forces many parents to send their children away, because they simply can’t afford to keep them. Cadestein thinks that these parents should not be condemned for making the choice to send their children away.

“I always say it’s not good to judge at all, because you never know what someone else is going through”, she said, “When you’re forced to think about which child you’re going to give away, that’s unbelievable.”

The Restevek Freedom Alliance is working to make a change little by little, so parents won’t have to resort to these measures. The organization has so far raised $50,000 to build homes and schools for former Resteveks and children who are at risk. The money is also used to provide the children with a variety of other things such as school uniforms and supplies, field trips, bikes to get to school and back as well as toys.

“I think we’re a probably a tiny drop in a big bucket,” Donahue said. “However, for our 32 children, their lives are improving.”

Donahue travels to Haiti every few months to and gets a chance to spend time with some of these children. She and other members of the organization play with the children, work on projects together as well as take part in educational activities.

“I think they’re able to be kids,” Donahue said, “It’s not like we shower them with gifts. We just allow them to play, which I don’t believe that the children who served as Resteveks were able to do at all.”

Cadestein on the other hand has never been to Haiti, but still feels a strong connection to the country and is passionate about this issue. She is thankful that her family immigrated to the U.S., that she was given so many opportunities and wants the same for children living in Haiti.

“I am happy that we’re here, but at the end of the day, it is your mother home and when your mother home is suffering and crying, you feel that pain too,” she said, “Those people, they’re your brothers and sisters. They come from the same baseline as you.”

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Phenia Michel, who was born in Haiti, cries out about the absence of aid for the Haitian people. Hundreds gathered Saturday to call attention to the millions of Haitians still suffering in the wake of January's devastating earthquake. Photo by Ryan Chavis

Amid a sea of flags and hand-made signs, hundreds gathered Saturday to call for immediate help for the people of Haiti.

“Where is the money?” they chanted.

The Haiti Solidarity Network of the North East organized the rally in front of the Haitian Consulate at 271 Madison Ave. on Sept. 25. Participants wanted to put a spotlight on the lack of aid for the struggling residents in Haiti — many who still live in slum-like “tent cities” in the aftermath of the disastrous earthquake that shook the nation more than eight months ago.

“All the money they collected on behalf of Haiti, what happened to the money?” said Ener Ve, 42.

Organizers held the protest in front of the consulate in hopes that the delegates who work in the building would hear their pleas for change.

“Many are still homeless. They live with rats, and there is not enough food, “ said Judy Reilley, a representative of HSNNE.  Reilley explained that sexual assault is also an issue for women and children in camps because of the lack of proper security.

Reilley spoke to protesters about poor sanitation throughout the area. The living conditions in Port au Prince continue to deteriorate as residents are forced to navigate through mud and feces as the result of heavy rainfall, she said.

“No child of God should have to live like this,” Reilley said.

Around 11 a.m., protesters and organizers marched to Dag Hammarskjold Plaza near the United Nations to continue their call for action.

“Since the earthquake, the mission has been budgeted for $380 million from July 1 to December 31 this year, and we know that most of that money goes to pay UN personnel,” said Rev. Gene Squeo, from HSNNE. “We’re here today to say that it’s not only the Haitian government that’s mired in inaction, but that the international community is complicit with the Haitian community.”

More than $11 billion has was made available for rebuilding after the disaster, yet the people affected by it are still left to live in an unsafe environment, Squeo said.

“Indifference cannot continue. Inaction cannot continue. The people are suffering,” he said.

Organizers placed emphasis on demanding accountability from various government organizations and officials. Amadi Amajou, of the December 12 Movement and Friday Haiti Relief Coalition, non-governmental organizations that represent Africans and their human rights, spoke about misuse of funds from various donors earmarked for the Haitians.

“The French, the United States, the western European nations — all are putting in billions of dollars that support their own NGOs — not the Haitian people,” Amajou said. “We need to understand that Haiti is a victim of international imperialism and has been for a long time.”

For one protester, the situation boils down to the importance of basic human rights.

“It is not fair,” said Phenia Michel, who is originally from Haiti. For most of the protest, Michel stood under the solitude of a large Haitian flag, often chanting to rally her fellow protesters.

“All of them are human beings, and we want them to be treated like human beings. That’s all we want,” Michel said.

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