Thanks to a lack of planning and the absence of a rational and humane asylum policy, the United States now has 14,000 Haitians under a bridge, and a disastrously long backlog of newcomers to be processed.
On Sunday, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) started a massive deportation operation of Haitian migrants who had crossed the Rio Grande into the Texas town of Del Rio.
Within the past week, an estimated 14,000 Haitian migrants have congregated under the International Bridge in Del Rio. This increase apparently followed false rumors that U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents were allowing entry to so-called economic refugees and asylum-seekers.
The DHS has sent 400 US Customs and Border Protection agents to the area in order to swiftly remove the migrants and transport them, either into processing centers or to deport them back to Haiti.
News sources reported that three planes with about 145 passengers each left Texas over the weekend for Haiti’s capital Port-Au-Prince. The DHS indicated the number of these flights will accelerate during the week, possibly leading to America’s swiftest large-scale expulsion in modern history.
Title 42 is the basis for the majority of these deportations. Toward the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020, the Trump administration compelled the Centers for Disease Control to issue an order under Title 42 U.S.C. section 265 of the 1944 Public Health and Service Act that closed the border to migrants and asylum seekers.
Physicians for Human Rights argue that the Title 42 expulsions harm health and violate human rights. Nevertheless the Biden administration continued Title 42 deportations. The order denies the right to even apply for asylum to the vast majority of border-crossers.
On Sept. 16, 2021, the U.S. District Judge Emmet G. Sullivan ruled that the CDC’s authority to protect public health did not permit the extraordinary step of effectively closing the border to the majority of people seeking to exercise their right, enshrined in international law, to apply for asylum.
The judge gave the U.S. government two weeks to stop summarily expelling asylum seekers and migrants, a demand the Biden administration is appealing.
This ruling apparently has been used as another reason to ramp up the number of flights transporting migrants back to Haiti. Mexico refuses to accept expelled migrants from regions other than those of the Northern Triangle and Mexico.
However, the majority of Haitians arriving via Mexico are from Brazil, Chile and other South American countries, where they have been living and working for years.
The number of Haitians heading northward across the border that separates Colombia and Panama — often via the treacherous jungle known as the Darién Gap — also has surged in recent years, increasing from just 420 in 2018 to more than 42,300 through August of this year, according to the Panamanian government.
The Biden administration is sending Haitian migrants back to the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere.
Haiti faces a mounting humanitarian and political crisis following a devastating earthquake, the assassination of the country’s president Jovenel Moise in July, and the ensuing political destabilization and upsurge in deadly clashes between gangs in Port-au-Prince and other Haitian cities.
According to the United Nations, more than 5,000 people were displaced in Port-au-Prince in July. The category 7.2 earthquake on Aug. 14 resulted in more than 2,000 deaths and thousands of injuries, and impacted an estimated 1.2 million people.
For these reasons, more than 50 Democratic lawmakers sent a letter to Alejandro Mayorkas, secretary of Homeland Security, urging the administration to halt deportations to Haiti.
Haitian migrants represent what happens to “racially undesirable” people arriving in the U.S. Often, in contrast to other migrants, Black migrants are detained immediately, and then deported. That is the case for Haitians but also for Jamaican immigrants, and citizens from Cameroon, Sierra Leone, Mauritania and other African countries who have sought to enter the U.S.
At this point, Haiti is not able to provide for the thousands of Haitian citizens whom the administration plans to deport this week.
‘REFOULEMENT’: A LONG HISTORY
The U.S. has a long history of deporting Haitians. The so-called Haitian crisis in 1991 resulted from an influx of about 40,000 Haitians into the U.S., and was perhaps the largest U.S. refugee dilemma of the Clinton administration.
Washington began to forcibly return, without hearings, those refugees, and was criticized by the international humanitarian community for violating national and international prohibitions against refoulement [forced return] and selectively discriminating against Haitians.
(The U.S. government’s treatment of Haitians contrasts sharply with that accorded to Cubans, who for years have journeyed to the U.S. to escape communism and have been welcomed as political refugees by all administrations.)
Today the number of Haitians seeking to enter the U.S. is smaller, but it is rising. The New York Times reports that nearly 28,000 Haitians have been intercepted by the Border Patrol along the U.S.-Mexico border in this fiscal year, which ends on Sept. 30. That compares with 4,395 in 2020, and 2,046 in 2019.
America’s treatment of Haitians has been brutal, albeit inconsistent of late.
Seemingly sympathetic to the plight of Haitians, the Biden administration in May granted temporary humanitarian protection (TPS) for those Haitian citizens already residing in the US, allowing about 150,000 Haitians to work and live here.
The plight of Haitian migrants is an example of what happens to immigrants and asylum-seekers in a polarized America where policies are driven by opinion polls.
Even in less polarized times, immigration politics is a “Gordian Knot,” tangled by a complex network of interconnected economic, political and social principles and interests. In today’s highly fractured political system, meaningful immigration reform may not be possible.
Nevertheless, Biden’s first act as a President was to send a comprehensive immigration reform proposal, the U.S. Citizenship Act of 2021, to Congress. While many of us in the migration advocacy community held our breath in the hope that this act might symbolize change, we most likely were mistaken.
Apparently the administration was posturing, to keep the progressive wing of the Democrat party in line. The U.S. Citizenship Act of 2021 represents political theater.
The Biden administration, like the Democratic administrations of Obama and the Clinton, treats immigration as an after-thought. The current situation at the border is clearly the result of lack of planning and preparation.
By contrast, President Trump made immigration the center of his campaign and presidency. His administration’s carefully-planned and extremely inhumane policy intentionally produced huge bottlenecks in immigration processing and resulted in mass detentions, deportations, and family separations.
Had the Biden administration given the same attention to planning its immigration policy, the southern border would have seen a large influx of DHS and border patrol personnel— to provide appropriate border security and immigration control—as well as judges, healthcare and social workers, and nongovernmental agencies.
We need a consistent and humane immigration and asylum policy.
Morristown resident Barbara Franz, Ph.D., is a professor of political science at Rider University.
