SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico — John Parry was at his rental home in the Puerto Rican coastal town of Rincón on Monday afternoon when he spotted dozens of people, wet and coming toward his driveway. As the group walked up the steep hill up from a nearby beach, he called over his wife, Laura Goldman, to come see.
Leaning over her railing, Goldman made eye contact with one of the men and asked, “‘English or español?”
“He said, ‘English,’ ” said Goldman, who followed up with, “Where are you coming from?”
The man yelled, “Haiti.”
The shocking scene in a community known for its world-famous surfing and expatriate community caught the couple from Northern California and Rincón residents and tourists by surprise. But it is part of a growing surge in landings by migrants from Cuba and Haiti that has shorelines in the U.S. territory and Florida increasingly littered with boats, and officials increasingly worried about tragedies at sea.
The rise in migration by sea is coinciding with increased political and economic instability in the two Caribbean countries. As a result, people are sailing on makeshift and private vessels or hiring human smugglers to get them to the U.S. coastlines, say immigration officials, who are growing increasingly concerned as more undocumented migrants risk dangerous sea voyages on fragile boats.
Days ago, a 25-foot boat with 40 people crossing from the Bahamas capsized off Fort Pierce. The U.S. Coast Guard said it had found one body and one survivor floating in the waters off Florida’s east coast. The man, whose identity and nationality has not been released, told the Coast Guard that he and the group left Bimini Saturday, and their boat overturned in rough weather soon after they departed.
The day before the boat capsized, the Coast Guard reported that it had intercepted 88 Haitians near the Bahamas and returned them to Haiti. Another 191 Haitians aboard an overloaded sailboat were intercepted on Tuesday some 40 miles southwest of Great Inagua in the southern Bahamas.
The commander of Coast Guard Sector Miami, Capt. Jo-Ann Burdian, told reporters Wednesday at a press briefing in Miami Beach about the missing boaters. She said that while she understands people’s desire to leave the economic and political instability of their homelands, taking to the sea is dangerous.
“The decision to take to the sea is a complicated one,” Burdian said. “Certainly, as we saw in this case, the waters in the northern Florida Straits can be quite treacherous.”
Since Oct. 1, the U.S. Coast Guard says it has stopped 802 Haitians at sea attempting to get to the U.S. The tally is on track to surpass last fiscal year’s number, which was 1,527 Haitians. That number also was a significant increase compared to the 418 the previous year.
While Haitian migration is on track to exceed that of recent years, so too is Cuban migration. Last fiscal year, 838 Cubans were intercepted at sea by Coast Guard crews, compared to 49 in the previous year. So far this fiscal year, which began Oct. 1, 557 Cubans have been stopped at sea trying to get to Florida.
South Florida, in particular the Key Largo area of the Upper Florida Keys, has become a favorite landing spot, with several large groups of Haitian migrants arriving since November. The arrivals were a group of 63 people on Nov. 18; a group of 52 people on Dec. 24; and another 176 people packed on the deck of a 60-foot sailboat on Jan. 9.
Traffickers are attempting to drop migrants off in Puerto Rico, where boats are increasingly risking the treacherous voyage directly from Haiti through the Mona Passage, or making the trip from the Dominican Republic.
Father Olin Pierre, a Haitian priest in San Juan who offers Haitian migrants shelter at the San Mateo de Cangrejos Church, said he has housed more than 60 people this month alone. He is seeing more Haitians arrive at his church’s steps than in November and December.
“Before it was eight, 15 people a week,” Pierre told the Miami Herald.
Between October 2021 and mid-January, U.S. Customs and Border Protection in Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands detained 331 Haitian migrants, double the number in the same time period last year. Most of the landings, according to CBP, happened on Mona Island, an uninhabited nature reserve between Puerto Rico and Hispaniola, the island that Haiti shares with the Dominican Republic.
But migrants are also arriving on other coasts across Puerto Rico. U.S. Customs and Border Protection said it detained the group of undocumented Haitians, which included 20 women and 25 men, on Monday, Jan. 24, in Rincón, not far from the beach. Photos that Goldman took show a large group of men and women, wearing casual clothes, under the canopy of palm trees.
Later, Goldman picked up wet jackets the migrants had left behind on the steep hill. She went to the secluded beach near their home, and spotted a wooden open boat by the shore. Along it was a trail of items: toothbrushes, clothes, underwear, tennis shoes, life jackets, clothes, a flashlight, flip-flops, water bottles, a box of condoms and backpacks.
Denise Tynes, who has lived in Rincón for two and a half years, says she was with her best friend on Monday when they spotted border agent cars with their lights speeding through Rincón. Curious about what was happening in the beach town, the pair decided to follow them.
By the time they caught up to the agents, they saw a group of people, stopped by authorities, on the ground in front of a local restaurant.
“They didn’t even make it a quarter of a mile,” from the beach, Tynes said.
In a tweet, Scott D. Garrett, Acting Chief Patrol Agent with Border Protection in Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands, said all of the Haitians were transported to Ramey Station for processing and removal.
Two days after the arrival of the Haitian migrants, ocean waves tore the boat apart . Driftwood and screws speckle the golden sand.
“It had been completely destroyed into a billion pieces that have washed up on the beach,” said Parry.
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