“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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Katherine Franke is a Sulzbacher Professor of Law, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Columbia University. She’s considered to be one of the “nation’s leading scholars writing on law, religion, and rights” and has written books on topics such as abolition and reparations. Now, Franke is joining a different distinguished group of Americans, she and her partner have decided to sponsor an asylum seeker, a young trans woman from El Salvador. They will take her in and be responsible for her until she is given permission to permanently reside in the country.

The woman, Ana, not her real name,  was being held in Tijuana when Franke met her. She was with a group of Columbia students volunteering with Al Otro Lado, an organization the provides legal assistance to migrants on both sides of the border when she met Ana and heard her story.  Ana told Franke about severe abuse she fled in El Salvador and then endured in Tijuana when she was sent there by the U.S. government. She says she was beaten and terrorized by drug cartels and the Mexican Federal Police.

“She had been into the clinic a couple of times, one of the other lawyers there had done an intake with her and had just been completely flattened by the story,” Franke explained. “We sort of took her under our wing when we were there, and get her ready as possible before she was put into detention.”

Sponsoring asylum seekers is not an answer to the number of people who are trying to enter the country, but it has been a method of welcoming refugees from into the U.S. from other parts of the world in times of crisis. Traditionally, sponsors were not private citizens like Franke – it was religious groups. According to a report from the Catholic church, they resettled 1.1 million refugees in the United States between 1987 and 2016.

Under a Trump administration policy (“Remain in Mexico”) that started in late January, Central American migrants from Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador, are sent back to Mexico once they reach the U.S. border, to wait while their asylum claims are processed. In March, when Franke met Ana, it was projected that nearly 100,000 people  tried to cross to the U.S. – Mexico border just in the month of March.

Sponsoring asylum seekers is not an answer to the number of people who are trying to enter the country, but it has been a method of welcoming refugees from into the U.S. from other parts of the world in times of crisis. Traditionally, sponsors were not private citizens like Franke – it was religious groups. According to a report from the Catholic church, they resettled 1.1 million refugees in the United States between 1987 and 2016.

Franke did not become a sponsor through a religious organization, but instead through a non profit called Showing Up For Racial Justice. The group runs a program that supports “folks on the caravan by connecting them with volunteer sponsors in the U.S. in order to give them a chance to get out of detention and plead their case for asylum,” according to their website.

It was clear to Franke that Ana was facing incredible odds, and Franke was reminded  of the case of Roxana Hernandez, another trans woman who died in ICE custody in 2018. After weeks in Tijuana, Ana’s number was called – she would be moved to the San Ysidro, San Diego, CA., Customs, and Border Protection processing and detention facility – the same facility that held Hernandez before her death.

Franke decided to become Ana’s sponsor, responsible for her legal resettlement in the U.S. – she filled out the paperwork and will be responsible for everything from finding her a place to stay, to help with medical care, and bringing her to court appointments. When Ana entered detention she had Franke as a sponsor and a man named Jose Campos as her attorney. Campos spent the first week of Hernandez’s detention trying to find a way to get in contact with Ana. They hoped that because Ana had what so many did not – representation and sponsorship – that she would be processed and released quickly. Instead, she has been detained since she was taken from Tijuana.

“The biggest reason why we want to get them out of there is that they’re not being recognized as trans women, they are being put in with the men,” said Meredith Vina over the phone.

Vina is a trans woman living in San Diego. She and her wife Eleanor are both retired, and they have been able to visit Ana in detention.

“For example, we went to see Ana* today and she was in a room with five other men. Now, fortunately for her, we talked to her and we said: ‘Are you okay? Do you feel safe?’ And she said that the men were respecting her and actually respecting her pronouns so far.”

Vina not only visits Ana in detention – she is also sponsoring a trans woman seeking asylum from Central America.

“The way I got involved – It was just all these caravans coming up to Tijuana, and having friends getting involved in going down there and bringing supplies,” Vina said. . “Getting to the point where we said ‘How can we get these people to the United States?’”

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Eighty-one-year-old Liu, or “Grandpa Liu”, as other tenants call him, has been living here for two months. He shares a cubicle with another man and pays $195 per month for rent. For him, moving around is the norm.

“We either don’t speak English, or are undocumented, so we cannot sign leases,” said Liu. “When I first came here, I found a place on Delancey Street, eight of us shared a one-bedroom apartment. I lived there for two years, and then the person who signed the lease was gone. All of us had to move out. It’s like this every time.”

Chinese are the second most undocumented immigrants in the country.

Mae Lee, the executive director of Chinese Progressive Association, said that many of the houses in Chinatown actually don’t have leases because the landlords never offer them one.

Mae Lee, the executive director of Chinese Progressive Association, said that many of the houses in Chinatown actually don’t have leases because the landlords never offer. Photo by Ellie Miao

“There is a language barrier of course, but many of the migrants also don’t know their rights and don’t know about leases. Especially those who are undocumented, they are more vulnerable,” said Lee. “ I’ve heard cases in which the landlords threatened to turn in the undocumented tenants to the government.”
Liu has moved so many times over the years that he couldn’t name every one of them. He remembers living in three places on Broome Street, the longest stay was seven years, and the shortest was two weeks.

“Rent should be one third of your income, that is the national standard of how you can live comfortably. But in Chinatown the rent is roughly the same as the median household income, which is $2700,” said Lee. “For many migrants, Chinatown is the first place where they come to live. They have nothing and they are paid poorly, but there is just not enough affordable housing in here.”

According to the Asian American Federation of New York Census Information Center’s research, almost one third of the Chinese in New York City live below the poverty line, many do not speak English and have never finished high school. This contributes to living conditions like at 81 Bowery.

No private bathroom, no kitchen and no stove make daily life very hard in 81 Bowery. Liu only cooks once a day and saves the food in the tiny fridge for the rest of the day.

Liu has lived in New York City for 17 years. He grew up in Southern China’s Fujian Province, which is where most Chinese migrants in New York are from. His son was the first one in the family who immigrated to America, followed by his two daughters. Liu and his ex wife, whom he divorced 35 years ago, were the last to come.

“Seventeen years ago, I was still strong enough to work,” said Liu. “Now I’m too old.”
He worked in a nail salon owned by a guy he knew back in Fujian, until five years ago. Now he has a green card, the government gives him $500 per month’s subsidy.

“I have no family here in New York. My son and daughters are in Connecticut,” said Liu. But he would rather stay in New York than living with them in Connecticut. “They all have their own families now.”
Liu is proud of his families. “My biggest grandson is a college graduate,” he said. “He is an engineer and he makes decent money; unlike me, I’m illiterate, I never went to school.” However, Liu said he hadn’t talked to him for years, not even over the phone.

Liu’s best friend in 81 Bowery is Jiang, a 37-year-old construction worker. Jiang has been here for seven years, and never got married. “I live here because it’s cheap,” said Jiang, “I’m still paying back my stowaway fee to the ‘snakehead’.”

Snakehead refers to the infamous Chinese gangsters in New York City who help people enter America illegally. Most of the money Jiang made over the years has been paid to his snakehead, so he has no savings. He lives in a cubicle by himself and pays $250 per month.

Liu is moving out again in late February, to temporarily stay with his friend in Flushing, Queens before going back to China for a visit. He has no idea where to live when he comes back to New York.

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