WASHINGTON — US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), in coordination with the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and U.S. Customs and Border Protection, facilitated multiple removal flights, including single adults and family units, to Central America, Ecuador, Haiti, Jamaica and Peru as part of dozens of other routine ICE removal flights conducted throughout the hemisphere and around the world. Since May 2023, DHS has removed or returned over 200,000 individuals, including over 17,000 individual family unit members.
The administration conducted a deportation flight to Haiti on Thursday, a day after the State Department called on all US citizens to leave the country immediately due to security concerns there, and shortly after a gang in Canaan opened fire on a group of churchgoers protesting violence in the area.
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The scheduled deportation flight, the second to Haiti this month, left Alexandria, La., shortly before 8 am EDT and landed in Port-au-Prince shortly after 11 am.
Human rights advocates are baffled over many elements of the administration’s policies toward Haiti, from its support for the current regime to continued deportations to a country in chaos.
Steven Forester, immigration policy coordinator at the Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti said, “What’s unconscionable is that the US is propping up the illegitimate and abhorred regime which is responsible for the hellish conditions Haitians endure every day.”
He continued: “The United States must not deplane people, deported people. They need to turn that thing around.”
The same group penned an open letter to Biden in July saying:
Dear President Biden, The undersigned 292 civil, human rights, and immigrant rights groups write to express our tremendous alarm and condemnation of your administration’s recent announcement of your plan to issue a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) to resurrect Trump-era asylum bans. This
announcement marks a full-throated embrace of policies initiated by the prior administration, which
by your own description “contravened our values and caused needless human suffering.” We call on
you not to break your campaign promise to end restrictions on asylum seekers traveling through other countries. The Biden administration must adjust course immediately and abandon the misguided pursuit of an asylum ban. We urge you not to issue the NPRM on the asylum ban.
The group is intent on holding foreign administrations accountable in defense of Haiti’s current situation.
Individuals who lack a lawful basis to stay in the United States are ordered removed, consistent with U.S. law – all individuals who are removed have been screened for protection concerns. This policy applies to all non-citizens regardless of nationality to ensure the orderly and humane processing, transfer, and removal of single adults, family units, and others determined to be removeable.
Non-citizens placed into removal proceedings receive their due process from immigration judges in the immigration courts, which are administered by the Justice Department’s Executive Office for Immigration Review. Due to operational security reasons, ICE does not confirm or discuss future or pending transportation operations.
ICE Air Operations facilitates the transfer and removal of noncitizens, including family units, via commercial airlines and chartered flights in support of ICE field offices and other DHS initiatives. In fiscal year 2022, ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations conducted 72,177 removals to more than 150 countries worldwide.
