U.S. Restarts Deportation Flights to Haiti
The Biden administration had paused deportations of Haitian migrants in recent months as their home country was wracked by violence.
April 18, 2024
Immigration officials sent dozens of Haitians back to their home country on Thursday, according to three government officials, in the first deportation flight conducted by the United States government in months to the country, which has been gripped by widespread violence.
Deportation flights are generally viewed as a way to deter migrants from crossing the southern border without authorization. The United States has been concerned about migration from Haiti after a gang takeover of its capital, Port-au-Prince, this year led to the planned resignation of the prime minister, Ariel Henry.
The deportation flight, the first since January, comes as the Biden administration continues to turn toward tougher measures at the southern border as a way to bring down the number of migrants entering the country without authorization. President Biden has faced intense scrutiny from Republicans about the border, and immigration has become a key issue in the election campaign.
In recent months, however, migrants are crossing the border at lower rates than before.
Still, the deportation flight on Thursday caught many immigrant advocacy groups by surprise. The U.S. government itself advises Americans not to visit Haiti, citing “kidnapping, crime, civil unrest, and poor health care infrastructure,” and has previously told family members of American officials in Haiti to leave.
“This is not only morally wrong and in violation of U.S. and international law, it is simply bad foreign policy,” said Guerline Jozef, the head of the Haitian Bridge Alliance, an advocacy group in San Diego.
The Department of Homeland Security said in a statement that it had “conducted a repatriation flight of around 50 Haitian nationals to Haiti.”
Associated Press
The United States Welcomes Establishment of Haiti’s Transitional Presidential Council
U.S. Department of State
Statement by Matthew Miller, Spokesperson
April 12, 2024
The United States welcomes today’s establishment of a Transitional Presidential Council (TPC) in Haiti. The result of months of discussion among diverse Haitian stakeholders, this Council helps pave the way for free and fair elections and the expedited deployment of a Multinational Security Support mission. We applaud Haitians for their commitment to move forward in a spirit of reconciliation and national dialogue. We remain committed to working with CARICOM and international partners to support the TPC’s mission to work for and improve the lives of all Haitians.
The security situation in Haiti remains untenable due to the violence caused by gangs that claim to represent the Haitian people but thrive on violence and misery. Gangs have shut down key infrastructure and economic sites that are lifelines for fuel, humanitarian aid, and other vital supplies, and continue to strip Haitians of their rights to food, education, and healthcare. The United States is surging support for the Haitian security forces to bolster their capabilities as they fight to defend their country.
We commend Haitian leaders for making tough compromises to move toward democratic governance via free and fair elections. Much work lies ahead, and the United States remains committed to supporting the people of Haiti.
National Center of Haitian Apostolate
FOURTH SUNDAY OF EASTER – YEAR B - April 21, 2024
Acts 4, 8-12; Psalm 118; 1 John 3, 1-2; John 10, 11-18.
Msgr. Pierre André Pierre
The fourth Sunday of Easter is traditionally called “Good Shepherd Sunday.” The entire Church dedicates this day to prayers for vocations. It is The World Day of Prayer for Vocations to the priesthood. In this time of joy for the resurrection, the Church reminds us that we all have a model in Christ. Jesus describes himself as the good shepherd who knows his sheep by name, gives his life for them, and holds fast to them so that they do not perish. They are like a treasure to Him. His authority over them comes from the Father. That of a shepherd is a mission of service to lead us, the sheep, to the owner of the flock: our Father God.
In the first reading, Peter, chosen shepherd by Christ to strengthen his brothers, filled with the Holy Spirit, testifies and speaks of Jesus, the good shepherd, who gives his life for his sheep. “Christ, whom you killed, rose again.” The stone they rejected has become the cornerstone of the building of faith. God’s plan moves forward. There is no salvation outside of Jesus Christ. There is no other name under heaven given to the human race by which we are to be saved."
The reference to shepherds, lambs, and sheep may sound strange nowadays. But in biblical times, they were very familiar. Sheep provided meat, milk, cheese, and wool. They were also used in the liturgy of the Temple. However, these precious animals cannot find their way to food and water and are helpless when attacked by predatory animals such as wolves. Therefore, sheep are known as animals that desperately need good shepherds in order to survive.
This is also our case when it comes to spiritual nourishment, words of wisdom, strength of character, and virtues. When it comes to God's grace, we desperately need Shepherds. Jesus is the Head Shepherd who guides us and nourishes us. He gave his life for us and granted eternal life to those who follow him.
The second reading invites us to contemplate the image of our relationship with God in Christ. We have to live that relationship with confidence since those of us who are baptized are forever beloved children of God. Christ gave us an example in his life. If we are all brothers and sisters, we must be shepherds of each other, helping each other to live our faith authentically.
The Lord calls also shepherds to care for his people. The Church needs priests who act in the name of Jesus and with his same power; to guide the sheep along the path of eternal life through preaching, pastoral care, and the Sacraments, mainly the Eucharist and the forgiveness of sin: “Do this in memory of me.” The Sunday of the Good Shepherd reminds us that we must pray continually so that many young people may receive the call to the Priestly ministry and exercise it with humility, prayer, and zeal.
Social disorder. Prisons emptied of violent criminals by gangs looking to rebuild their ranks. Schools, hospitals, and pharmacies targeted for looting and frequently burned. Corpses left rotting in the streets for fear of succumbing to the same...
Amitabh Sharma
Opinion Editor
Editor - Arts and Education
The Gleaner Co. (Media) Ltd.
Social disorder. Prisons emptied of violent criminals by gangs looking to rebuild their ranks. Schools, hospitals, and pharmacies targeted for looting and frequently burned. Corpses left rotting in the streets for fear of succumbing to the same fate by attempts to remove them. The capital’s port was captured and ransacked, with famine threatening. Meanwhile, on Haiti’s northern coast, cruise ships still disgorge foreign tourists to the protected (with no shortage of irony) “Columbus Cove Beach.”
There’s no sugarcoating it — the collapse of order in Haiti and the activities by gangs in recent months to capitalize on the situation is bad.
Just as with the Middle East, we hear the refrain that Haiti “has always been like this.” Except it hasn’t. Haiti’s history has been both storied and challenged. Reasonably educated persons often juxtapose Haiti to the comparatively thriving Dominican Republic (DR), the neighboring country with which Haiti shares an island. The comparison hints at a defect of the former relative to its better-off neighbor. Yet a long view of Haiti reveals its current poverty relative to the neighboring DR has been anything but constant — it only emerged in the past four decades.
No doubt a wide gap has opened up between the economic performance of Haiti and the DR. The latter’s per-capita GDP last year was roughly 700 percent larger than Haiti’s. But going back to 1960, the year where quality data on GDP for the two countries became available, Haiti’s per-capita GDP was (inflation-adjusted) $1,716, 25 percent more than the DR’s, then at $1,374.
Indeed, Haiti’s per-capita GDP in 1960 was even a hefty 67 percent larger than today’s rich South Korea, and far from the poorest country in the Americas. This was no one-off performance. The trend, which predated 1960, differed little up to 1980; the DR was then posting per-capita numbers 29 percent greater than Haiti’s, which still placed them in the same ballpark.
Rather than Haiti “always” being this way, it was 1981 that marked the start of its rapid decline. The DR maintained and even slightly accelerated its steady economic growth that had until then been at rough parity with neighboring Haiti. By contrast, Haiti’s precipitously dropped.
Why? One reason was the 1970s oil shock, which increased the price of black gold by tenfold that decade. Needing to recycle cash from windfall sales of oil deposited with them, banks extended loans to all comers. Haiti’s dictator, Jean-Claude (“Baby Doc”) Duvalier, gorged himself on loans, while investing too little of this cash to develop Haiti’s economy.
Meanwhile, the United States ended its inflation in 1980 with Federal Reserve chair Paul Volcker’s monetary shock. This cured America’s inflation problem, but massively drove up the repayment costs of those 1970s loans around the world that had to be paid back in the now-inflated dollar.
Duvalier then made a series of lazy and disastrous bets for Haiti’s economy. He went hat in hand collecting foreign aid as cheap foreign credit evaporated, but this tranche of cash did little for Haiti’s economy. Next, he slashed taxes on export earnings and invited foreign companies to employ Haiti’s cheap labor for assembly factories. The model earned plaudits from the United States — but it did not provide much benefit to Haiti, as nearly all inputs came from abroad, tax receipts from the foreign investment were negligible, and wages were kept at subsistence levels.
Then, fearing a new swine flu, in 1986 the US Agency for International Development (USAID) in 1986 instructed Duvalier to slaughter Haiti’s chief source of protein: pigs. A small, hearty variety, Haiti’s pigs were perfectly suited to low-input peasant production. USAID tried replacing them with a large US variety requiring housing conditions many peasants might envy; these new pigs died. Absent their traditional source of protein, desperate Haitian peasants turned to felling trees to sell for charcoal, thus producing the now tragically familiar images of Haiti’s deforestation.
Political upheaval followed as Haitians worked to end their twenty-eight-year-old dictatorship. The United States sought to guide this process, forcibly at points, demanding a veto power over policy in Haiti.
In 1995, US president Bill Clinton instructed Haiti to drop its tariff on US rice (subsidized and chiefly grown in Arkansas) from 50 percent to 3 percent. Haiti’s rice production subsequently collapsed. Two decades later, Clinton apologized to Haiti for advancing this disastrous policy.
This coup de grâce to Haitian agriculture led peasants in the hundreds of thousands to decamp from the countryside to Port-au-Prince. Impoverished and desperate, peasants built housing from cinder blocks in the capital. When Haiti’s big 2010 earthquake hit, these cinder-block dwellings were destroyed. Official estimates put deaths at over two hundred thousand and injuries at three hundred thousand, with another 1.3 million displaced and widespread disease following the collapse of infrastructure, from which Haiti has yet to recover.
The above is to say that it indeed has not “always been this way” in Haiti, which once economically rivaled the now-successful DR. Yet it would be too easy to blame all Haiti’s misfortunes the past half century solely on the United States — Haitian elites have made their share of errors.
On March 25, James B. Foley, the US ambassador to Haiti from 2003 to 2007, published an op-ed in the Washington Post asserting “Haiti’s dysfunction is a permanent condition” and calling for yet another military intervention. If there has been any “permanent condition” in Haiti, it has been foreign interventions, and not the despair currently being experienced in the country.
The Caribbean nations, particularly those that are members of the Commonwealth, are fiercely independent in their foreign policies vis-à-vis the United States, as many of their politicians are major intellectual figures. Their stance on Haiti comes from a position of concern; they acknowledge a shared history of resistance to imperialism. Yet today, one still cannot discount the observation made in February 1907 by Dantès Bellegarde, arguably Haiti’s best-known diplomat and one of its most influential intellectuals of the twentieth century: “The US is too close and God is too far.”
https://jacobin.com/2024/04/haiti-disorder-poverty-us-intervention?fbclid=IwAR31T2169D3-p2YPMPEe5kl-bSVBZzASX39EgfXhANPub842p3DdWbPDdkQ_aem_AbFZO3pEdITIrIH2i3ksYkQZ35ngNPiVIL47u8lYVxEUmLU72pKSElSoyxkxJSIrkG6Lt8XfBexNcA5DSWSxjdXw