Deported migrants face challenge of survival

When Reynold Joseph was deported from the US to Haiti after five years in South America, he was unprepared for just how bad things had become in his homeland.

Outside a ramshackle guesthouse close to the centre of Port-au-Prince, where he and a dozen other deportees are staying, some goats were grazing on burning piles of rubbish, while drivers honked and cursed in a queue for petrol that snaked round the block. Each night, Joseph’s three-year-old son stirs in the sweltering heat, and gunfire rings out in the distance.

“It’s no secret that Haiti is poor and unsafe,” said Joseph, who along with thousands of his countrymen was detained in southern Texas last month before being shackled and flown to Port-au-Prince. “But I didn’t know it had gotten this bad.”

Violent gangs rule the streets, kidnapping residents rich and poor for ransom every day. Shortages of fuel and basic goods are common, and public services are practically nonexistent. When President Jovenel Moïse was assassinated in his home on 7 July in circumstances that remain murky, the situation only worsened. An earthquake in August added to Haiti’s misery, killing at least 2,200 people and leaving tens of thousands homeless.

The US advised its embassy staff to stay in the compound, and its citizens to avoid travel to the country. After the earthquake, the Biden administration extended “temporary protected status” for thousands of Haitian migrants and refugees in the US to live and work legally. Just a few weeks later, thousands of desperate Haitians who had been detained on the Texas border were deported.

Many recent deportees fled Haiti after the 2010 earthquake that levelled much of Port-au-Prince, killing more than 200,000 and setting the country on a downward spiral of instability from which it has still not recovered.

Since then, gang violence has brought the country to the brink of civil war. Many gang leaders have links with the fragile and corrupt police force. In few places is the rule of the gangs felt more than in Martissant. It looks like an urban war zone. The buildings that are still standing are pockmarked with bullet holes. Shops and shacks have been looted and razed. A few blocks over, the markets teem with commerce, but the few people who remain dare not go out. Trucks carrying food and supplies to survivors of the earthquake in the south are routinely turned back at roadblocks hastily thrown up by masked gunmen.

Thousands evacuated the Martissant neighbourhood in June and are living in a sports centre a mile away. Coriolande Auguste fled her home after it was burgled and torched by gangs. She sent her toddler daughter to live with her mother in the southern city of Les Cayes. The earthquake in August damaged their home there, leaving her elderly mother and daughter homeless too.

Now, Auguste relies on handouts, often going days without eating, and sleeping on a thin mat on the floor of the overcrowded gymnasium.

Like many Haitians, Auguste wants to start a new life in a safer country, but has neither the funds nor the papers to do so. “Who wouldn’t want out of this? But I don’t have money to eat, let alone a plane ticket,” she said.

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Number of gangs in Haiti, many with tacit political support, running extortion rackets, kidnapping for ransom, and overseeing the local drug and arms trade