Federal officials are moving to send removal flights to Haiti far more often than they have in years past, according to internal government records reviewed by The New York Times and described in secondary reporting since nytimes.com blocks direct automated access. The documents show the administration wants to move from roughly one Haiti-bound flight a month to as many as one a week, a jump that could push several hundred additional people out of the country every month. The escalation lands just as gang violence in Haiti has reached some of the deadliest levels of the year and hundreds of thousands of Haitians have lost the legal status that had shielded them from removal.
Not every account of the ramp-up agrees on the exact math. The Times' documents describe a monthly-to-weekly shift. But Haitian officials told the Haitian Times as early as July that the U.S. Embassy had briefed them to expect two flights a week carrying roughly 250 people combined, a figure repeated by wire coverage of the first flight in August. The LatinTimes is flagging that discrepancy here and readers should treat "weekly" as the confirmed floor and "twice weekly" as a plausible ceiling still being finalized.
