Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) expelled 86 Haitian nationals from the US on Wednesday, The Hill reports.
“[J]ust one month after this devastating earthquake and storm that resulted in the deaths of over 2,200 Haitians, injured 12,000 people, damaged or destroyed 120,000 homes and displaced hundreds of thousands of people, the Administration sent a plane full of families to Haiti under Title 42,” said Guerline Jozef, the founder and executive director of the Haitian Bridge Alliance. This includes children under the age of three.
“These families weren’t offered legal protection or the opportunity to file for asylum,” added Jozef.
People deported under Title 42 are repatriated to their home countries without the ability to request asylum under CDC guidelines related to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Hill reports.
“Migrant advocates have called on the Biden administration to end Title 42, a border management policy enacted under the Trump administration, but so far those calls have not been heeded,” they note.
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Advocates have denounced the deportations.
Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass) commented in response, “That ICE would continue to carry out the mass deportations of our Haitian neighbors—with Haiti in the midst of its worst political, public health and economic crises yet—is cruel and callous."
Frank Sharry, an immigrant advocate and Executive Director of the immigrant reform group Americas Voice added, "The news of renewed Haitian deportation flights is the type of morally indefensible news we would have expected from the Trump administration, not the Biden administration. Given the instability and suffering on the ground in Haiti, the last thing we should be doing is deporting Haitians. These deportation flights should stop, full stop."