A hastily created U.S. policy to curb irregular migration at the United States’ border with Mexico is having unintended consequences in Haiti, one of the four countries whose nationals can apply for the program and where the Biden administration is spending tens of millions of dollars to help the police take on heavily armed kidnapping gangs.
Ever since the Biden administration on Jan. 5 announced that the U.S. will allow up to 30,000 migrants a month from Haiti, Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela to lawfully enter as part of a new parole program, thousands of Haitians have been flocking to immigration offices seeking passports in order to be considered for sponsorship by family and friends in the U.S.
Lines in Haiti are so long and disorderly that employees at the Directorate of Immigration and Emigration in the capital often can’t even get through the front door, and U.S. citizens with adopted Haitian children complain that they cannot find appointments to apply for passports required for their children to come join them, the final step in an already arduous process. So many Haiti National Police officers are applying to leave that the head of the immigration office last week announced a separate location just for officers and their families to drop off applications.
In fact, the rate at which members of the force are requesting passports for themselves and relatives is nothing short of disastrous for Haiti, Jean Osselin Lambert, director of immigration told the Miami Herald.
“We are about to lose one-third of the police officers with this program,” Lambert said. “It’s total collateral damage.”
Fritz Jean, an economist who leads the civil society initiative known as the Montana Accord that is calling for the creation of a two-year transition government, said that one-third estimate may be too low.
“Most of the police have lost confidence in the hierarchy,” he said. “The work ahead is immense. Restoring confidence is not going to be an easy task.”
From 1,500 requests a day to 5,000
Videos shared on social media show Haitians pushing and shoving their way in crowded lines, women scaling the top of bleachers in gymnasiums and Haitians holding late-night vigils outside the main immigration office in Port-au-Prince despite an uptick in ransom kidnappings. In Cap-Haïtien, where a near riot broke out last month, a Miami Herald reporter observed crowds spilling out into the road in front of one of the two passport offices in the city, making it impossible for even motorcycles to pass.
“Everybody wants a passport,” Lambert said. “We have a lot of chaos.... We have a lot of police officers who have come to apply and when they come they don’t want to make the line.”
The requests for passports, Lambert said, has gone from an average of 1,500 a day to about 5,000. He noted that while the requests have tripled, forcing him to expand the number of facilities to 15 nationwide to accommodate the growing demand, the prices have not changed, with the passports costing around $100.
Data he shared with the Herald showed that between Jan. 9 and Feb. 7, his office received over 87,900 applications. In recent days, he’s issued new rules. In addition to opening a center just for police officers, Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays are now reserved for those 65 years and older and weekends are for children.
“We’ve never had this kind of demand,” Lambert said. “Never.”
Marleine Bastien, a Haitian community activist and immigration rights advocate who recently won office to the Miami-Dade County Commission, called the new program “ill-advised and ill-conceived.”
She said the administration should have instead made it easier for Haitians to reunite with families in the U.S. by clearing the backlog of qualified applicants waiting for green cards, and actually resuming the Haiti Family Reunification Parole Program, which expedites reunification, as promised by Biden in June.
“If the intent of this parole program was to really help Haiti, than why would you keep on deporting Haitians? The deportations have not stopped,” Bastien said. The Biden administration has warned that anyone who enters without authorization will be quickly expelled.
“This program is creating the worst brain drain ever,” she added.
Jean-Marie Denis, a longtime advocate of Haitian rights and culture in the United States and owner of Libreri Mapou bookstore in Little Haiti, says the program is draining Haiti of “the future of the country,” youth, intellectuals, writers and students.
“Instead of standing together to defend themselves, they are all running,” said Denis. “This is against everything we believe in. It’s true people cannot live in the conditions they are living in. But was there an analysis into why they can’t live in these conditions, what’s the cause? The cause is the gangs. Eliminate the gangs.”
Denis, who has family in both Haiti and Cuba, said his phone hasn’t stopped ringing with requests for sponsorship. He said the new program is placing incredible pressure on Haitians living abroad, who are themselves struggling to make ends-meet.
“The Biden administration made this decision without thinking about the consequences,” he said. “What he did here was not good at all and despite his doing this, the boats continue to come” to South Florida.
On Thursday, 114 Haitians, mostly men, washed ashore in the Florida Keys. A video image online showed the men jumping and screaming, happy to have touched U.S. soil after days at sea.
“They believe once they reach Florida’s shore they will benefit from the Biden initiatives,” Jean, the economist, said, adding that the migrants do not fully grasp the process or that they will not qualify under the parole program because of their illegal entry.
He calls the lines at emigration offices in Haiti heart-wrenching.
“What should constitute one the youngest labor forces in the Caribbean, theoretically more productive, is fleeing the land looking for better living conditions,” he said.
Patrice Dumont, a former journalist who was among the last remaining 10 Haitian senators whose term just ended last month, said Haiti’s leaders, including its members of parliament, have failed the nation.
But the United States, he said, is not without responsibility.
“It’s time for a new deal,” said Dumont, noting that the U.S. has spent $92 million on a police force that is still struggling to combat gangs. “The Americans have to make a decision to do another deal with Haitians.”
International adoption providers in Haiti ask for help
Last week, a group of leaders of international adoption service providers licensed by the U.S. State Department wrote to members of Congress including Democratic lawmaker Adam Smith, who co-chairs the Congressional Coalition on Adoption, requesting help.
The Biden parole program, they wrote, has predictably led to a surge in the number of people trying to leave Haiti to get away from warring gangs and debilitating kidnappings.
“The surge to obtain passports in Haiti by those who wish to participate in the new parole program has overwhelmed Haiti’s already troubled passport and immigration services,” the letter said, adding that this in turn is having “the dire effect of halting completed legal adoption involving children who are otherwise ready to come home to the U.S.”
“The Haitian passport office is functionally closed for adoptive families,” the service providers wrote. “We are calling on you [to] seek answers from the U.S. Department of State as to why it refuses to utilize its authorized legal authority to request passport waivers in this limited circumstance. Passport waivers would allow families with completed adoptions to be united in the U.S. within days.”
Bryan Hanlon and his wife are in the process of adopting two children from Haiti. He said the waivers were issued by the State Department in the fall when a two-month blockade of the country’s main fuel terminal in Port-au-Prince brought everything to a halt.
“They’re supposed to be giving adoption cases priority. What the State Department told us is that the Haitian government is giving adoption cases, their word is quote-unquote VIP treatment. But nobody can get a passport appointment,” Hanlon said. “We’re not able to get in; it’s just chaos.”
Hanlon said he and his wife chose to adopt children from Haiti knowing that it would be difficult, but believing they could handle it. But they didn’t know it was going to be this hard.
“We’ve just been just a wreck worrying about them,” he said about their children, whose orphanage is located in a community where a gang massacre recently occurred.
The State Department did not respond to a Herald request for comment.
Tiffany Hansen said she is frustrated by the delay the new program is posing for adoptions. Given the many security challenges in Haiti, she doesn’t understand why the State Department can’t be more accommodating.
“The answer we always get is, ‘This is just how Haiti is,” Hansen said. “Why are we allowing it to continue this way? There are so many things within the adoption process of Haiti that are just so unnecessary.”
Her complaint is echoed by other adoptive parents, who have had their adoption applications stalled, sometimes in the final stages. The U.S. embassy in Haiti had made the problem worse, they said, sometimes denying U.S. visas for an adopted Haitian child to visit the U.S. to see a doctor, even after previously being issued one.
“The thing that feels really hard and frustrating is that it feels like the world is turning its back on Haiti,” Tiffany Hansen said. “It’s to the kids’ detriment. They continue to go without medication, they continue to go without food.”
Hansen said the person representing her case in Haiti recently confirmed that children’s documentation are ready be picked up at the Haitian Ministry of Interior to go to the passport office. But even if the representative can get the file, she acknowledged, there is no guarantee he will be able to physically get into the passport office.
“Our representative doesn’t even feel safe taking our children in for passport photos due to people storming the doors and trampling on each other,” she said. “So even if they could go, they aren’t safe to.”
Lambert acknowledge the issue with passport appointments for children being adopted is a problem.
“The problem isn’t that we can’t produce” the passports,” Lambert said. “People are spending the night in front of immigration, we can’t even get to the doors ourselves.”
