The Biden administration sent about 50 Haitians back to their country on Thursday, authorities said, marking the first deportation flight in several months to the Caribbean nation struggling with surging gang violence.
The Homeland Security Department said in a statement that it “will continue to enforce U.S. laws and policy throughout the Florida Straits and and the Caribbean region, as well as at the southwest border. U.S. policy is to return noncitizens who do not establish a legal basis to remain in the United States.”
Authorities didn’t offer details of the flight beyond how many deported Haitians were aboard.
Thomas Cartwright of Witness at the Border, an advocacy group that tracks flight data, said a plane left Alexandria, Louisiana, a hub for deportation operations, and arrived in Cap-Haïtien, Haiti, after a stop in Miami.
Marjorie Dorsaninvil, a U.S. citizen, said her Haitian fiancé, Gerson Joseph, called in tears from the Miami airport Thursday morning to say he was being deported on a flight to Cap-Haïtien with other Haitians and some from other countries, including the Bahamas.
Joseph lived in the U.S. more than 20 years and has a 7-year-old U.S. citizen daughter with another woman. He had a deportation order dating from 2005 after losing an asylum bid that his attorney, Philip Issa, said was a result of poor legal representation at the time. Though Joseph wasn’t deported previously, his lawyer was seeking to have that order overturned.
Joseph was convicted of theft and burglary, and ordered to pay restitution of $270, Issa said. He has been detained since last year.
Dorsaninvil said her fiancé has “nobody” in Haiti. “It is devastating for me. We were planning a wedding and now he is gone,” she said.
More than 33,000 people fled Haiti’s capital in a span of less than two weeks as gangs pillaged homes and attacked state institutions, according to a report last month from the U.N.’s International Organization for Migration. The majority…
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