Haitian Asylum-Seekers Suffer in Border Encampment
Haitians seeking asylum in the US say that their country’s political crisis and natural disasters have left their country uninhabitable.
US expels thousands of Haitian migrants from Texas town on Mexico border.
Mounted US Border Patrol agents have been photographed using their horse reins like whips to round up Haitian asylum-seekers along the Texas-Mexico border. In the photos, the agents are shown charging at migrants carrying food and water as they waded across the Rio Grande near Del Rio, in Val Verde County, on Sunday, September 19, 2021.
The Biden administration has faced intense criticism, and legal action, for its use of a public health provision known as Title 42 to fast-track deportations during the Covid-19 pandemic. The administration deported more than 300,000 people in its first 100 days, largely under Title 42.
Even as the Biden administration announced that it would seek to resettle 125,000 refugees in the next 12 months, Haitians in the border camp spoke of desperate needs today.
“We don’t have money, we don’t have anything. We spent two months getting here on foot,” Charles Edirame, who was in the camp with his wife and daughter, told the El Paso Times. “In Haiti, we don’t have a president. There was just an earthquake. How can I go back to Haiti? If I go back, I could die the next day.”
“Sanitary products, there aren’t any. Food, there isn’t any either. They don’t give you anything,” said a man who gave only his first name, Nicolas.
Haitians say that their country’s political crisis and natural disasters have left their country uninhabitable.
When informed of the Biden administration expulsions, Nicolas, who traveled from Haiti to South America then across all of Central America and Mexico to reach the US border, told Al Jazeera that “what kills me… is that everyone knows what we Haitians are going through. There’s no president. Crime is high. Students can’t go to school. There’s no work. The economy’s down. People cannot put up with that. Deportation is not good for us.”
Rep. Mondaire Jones (D-NY) decried the “unfathomable cruelty” in the photos, while Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) tweeted, “These are human rights abuses, plain and simple. Cruel, inhumane, and a violation of domestic and international law. This needs a course correction and the issuance of a clear directive on how to humanely process asylum-seekers at our border.”
“It doesn’t matter if a Democrat or Republican is president, our immigration system is designed for cruelty towards and dehumanization of immigrants,” tweeted Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY). “Immigration should not be a crime, and its criminalization is a relatively recent invention. This is a stain on our country.”
Guerline Jozef, co-founder and executive director of the California-based Haitian Bridge Alliance, told Democracy Now! that the photos show “the horrific reality that we are living right now.”
Jozef continued:
“The pictures you are seeing with this officer on his horse and literally whipping… the Haitian migrants, the Black bodies, that is not a new picture in America. That is the picture of the system, of the anti-Black racism that the system is based upon.
“As a Black woman, as an American woman, as a Haitian woman, I am horrified by that picture. I am horrified that today, in 2021, we, as the United States of America, are behaving in such a way, where we literally do not even consider the humanity of a person, so that the world is watching, and that is the picture they are seeing. The picture they are seeing is of men on horseback whipping Black bodies. That is what the world is seeing in America right now.”
In May, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security designated Haiti for Temporary Protected Status (TPS)—which permits recipients to live and work in the United States for a given period without risk of deportation—for 18 months. According to DHS, the May designation “enables Haitian nationals… currently residing in the United States as of May 21, 2021 to file initial applications for TPS, so long as they meet eligibility requirements.”
Following the assassination of former President Jovenel Moïse in July, DHS expanded Haiti’s TPS through February 3, 2023 to include Haitians living in the US as of July 29, 2021. Although the TPS designation could protect up to 150,000 Haitians from deportation, potentially thousands of Haitian immigrants entered the US after the July 29 deadline. Those who make it to the US are at risk of expulsion, with no opportunity to request asylum, under Title 42.
Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas—whose own family fled revolutionary Cuba for the U.S. in the 1960s—drew ire in July after he announced that Cuban and Haitian refugees who flee their countries by boat were not welcome in the United States. Mayorkas stated that Haitian migrants who attempted to travel to the US via boat would be intercepted by the Coast Guard and either turned back or sent to a third country for resettlement.
“Seeking asylum and protection is a human right protected by international and domestic laws,” said Efrén C. Olivares, deputy legal director for immigrant justice at the Southern Poverty Law Center. “It is disappointing to see Secretary Mayorkas, himself the son of Cuban refugees, attempting to foreclose that right for Cuban and Haitian nationals when they most need it. His office should instead be figuring out ways for those asylum seekers to safely apply for asylum.”
While the Biden administration has continued deporting hundreds of thousands of individuals, including Haitians, under Title 42, a federal judge has ordered the White House to end its use of the public health provision following a lawsuit filed by human rights groups.
