Imprisonment, murder, extortion: Why U.S. deportees to Haiti are being targeted by gangs

• Haitian deportees face discrimination and violence, perceived as criminals or a path to profit through extortion
• Despite a do not travel advisory issued by the U.S. due to widespread violence in Haiti, deportations continue, raising concerns about their safety
• Deportees are frequently imprisoned without charge upon arrival, subject to extortion attempts, and denied basic necessities

After eight months in a packed prison teeming with heat, disease and hunger, Peterson Rosier should have felt free. Instead, he felt fear.

Immediately upon arrival in Port-au-Prince, the Haitian capital where the United States deported him in 2022, Haitian authorities illegally imprisoned him without charge. He not lived in Haiti since age 4.

Now, finally freed, he knew no one.

He was stranded in a country where political upheaval and gang violence have become so dire that its capital is now ranked as the most dangerous city in the world.

In Haiti, one’s status as a deportee brings an added level of risk. Deportees, especially those deported for criminal matters, have long been viewed by authorities and citizens as outsiders and are blamed for bringing crime and violence to Haiti.

Targeted by police, deportees said they had been imprisoned without charge, surveilled and harassed. Armed watch groups don’t want them in their neighborhoods. Gangs have tried to kidnap them for ransom or draft them into their ranks. Hostilities have escalated to extortion, violence and even lynching, said advocates and researchers who work with deportees in Haiti.

Fearing for their safety, deportees said they stayed out of the public eye.

“I’m still in prison; I’m in Haiti,” said Rosier, 37, who grew up in Florida. “I’ll be honest. I stay inside the house. I don’t like to move around. Anything is possible. Everything is a threat. If I leave, people will be watching me, thinking I’m going to do something. If people don’t know me ― I’m new in town ― they will assume I’m in some type of gang.”

As violence in Haiti escalates, advocates worry that a growing number of deportees will now be in the same predicament: targeted by a U.S. president ran on a campaign to deport dangerous immigrants, then sent to a country where many view them the same way, often with devastating results.

President Donald Trump has signed a series of executive orders laying groundwork for mass deportations, including Haitians American communities. In February, administration officials announced they will end “temporary protected status” for 521,000 Haitians starting in August. The status, known as TPS, gives temporary permission for migrants to live and work in the U.S. because their native country is deemed unsafe for return.

In Haitian communities, the announcement sparked fear, protests and lawsuits. The U.S. is preparing to deport thousands, even as it imposes a “do not travel” advisory on Haiti, citing widespread kidnapping, crime, sexual assault, civil unrest and limited health care.

NorthJersey.com and The Record spoke with four men who had been deported to Haiti under the Biden Administration after serving their jail time for criminal offenses, including drug possession, assault and burglary. Unable to get work, they rely on help from friends and family in the U.S., but they often go hungry. Some have fled Haiti for safety in other countries.

Unwelcome in Haiti

The United States first granted TPS to Haitians after a massive earthquake in 2010 and extended it multiple times. A new wave of migrants arrived in recent years, as Haiti plunged into political turmoil and violence.

After President Jovenel Moïse’s assassination in 2021, gangs increased control across Haiti and now reportedly have overtaken 85% of the capital. Violence and kidnappings are at record levels. More than 5,600 people were killed in gang violence last year, the UN reported. Half the population faces acute hunger.

“They tried to burn my house one time,” said Patrick Julney, 41, a deportee from New Jersey who stayed with family after his release from Haiti’s National Penitentiary in 2022. “I diffused the situation because I know people around here. Wherever you go, it’s ‘We’re watching you, we’re going to kill you, this ain’t America, it’s Haiti’ … They hate us. I’m like, I just came here. I don’t even know nobody.”

Political turmoil is not new in Haiti, nor is discrimination against deportees. Haitian officials and the press have long blamed them for crime and gang violence, advocates said.

Read: Our coverage of Haitian deportation and the deplorable conditions in Haitian prisons

“We didn’t even make it out of the airport,” said Saguens Bernabe, 36, who lived in Georgia and Ohio and was deported in 2022. “They said, ‘Look at the deportees. They came to ruin the country. They’re the reason why all these gangs are terrorizing the population. They said other crazy stuff about us taking their women and daughters.”

“The Haitian government, including prime ministers and presidents, have denounced the criminal deportees, saying they are a big threat,” said Michelle Karshan, executive director of Alternative Chance, a support program for criminal deportees in Haiti.

The criminal deportees are seen “as killers,” and that “they should be detained when they first arrive to teach them a lesson,” Karshan said. Many have lived in the United States since childhood and stand out because of their speech and appearance, from tattoos to hairstyles.

“They are often the most dreaded sector of Haitian society,” she said. “Now it’s gangs. They see all criminal deportees as being part of gangs, and I see that very few are.”

The University of Miami School of Law Human Rights Clinic also found that deportees “have been robbed, denied jobs and housing for which they were qualified, shunned in their neighborhoods, and physically attacked on account of their physical appearance and speech, denoting their status as deportees from the U.S.”

Chelsey Kivland, an associate professor of anthropology at Dartmouth College, said discrimination has included “not renting a property, not offering employment and not welcoming one into the community,” said Kivland, whose research is focused on Haiti. If they don’t have family or friends in Haiti, she said, they are at risk of social abandonment.

“Not being able to get a house, a job, a car, these are things that will leave the deportee at greater risk of engaging in other activities that would put the deportee at risk, whether they are stealing from others or joining the ‘baz,’ or gangs in Haiti,” Kivland said.

Immigrant advocacy groups have sued over the cancelation of TPS. They argue that Trump’s order is discriminatory, citing “dehumanizing and disparaging statements” he has made against Haitian migrants. Trump has maintained that the TPS program, which the Biden Administration expanded, had been “exploited and abused” and that it unfairly benefited people who entered the U.S. illegally.

Asked about reported abuses against deportees, a U.S. State Department spokesperson said, “We are working with receiving countries to facilitate a humane response.  We refer you to the receiving country’s government authorities for further information.”

The Haitian government’s communications office and its embassy in Washington, D.C. did not respond to requests for comment.

William O’Neill, expert on Haiti for the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, said at a press conference Tuesday that the United States and other nations should halt deportations to Haiti. “You cannot guarantee a dignified safe return which is required under international law to deport people,” O’Neill said. 

Haiti is facing extreme violence, he said. Gangs have set up tolls along the roads and demanded payment from passerby, crippling transport of goods and making travel dangerous for all, including deportees, O’Neill added.

“If they have family or support networks in the capital, how do they get back?” he said. “The FAA just announced no U.S. airplanes until September using the main international airport of the country, so they land in Cap-Haitien. How are they going to get back and what do they face in the capital, with violence and shortages of everything, and a million already displaced?”

From plane to prison

For some deportees, problems started as soon as soon as they landed in Haiti on flights chartered by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

On Feb. 4, the first group of Haitian migrants deported since Trump’s return to the White House ― 21 men in total ― were brought to police holding cells and held for eight days without charge. They landed in the northern city of Cap-Haïtien; U.S. flights to the Port-au-Prince were suspended in November after three civilian planes, operated by Spirit, JetBlue and American Airlines, were hit with gunfire.

They included 12 men convicted of crimes in the U.S. and nine who had no criminal record. Authorities told the Haitian Times that they were investigating possible gang affiliations among some of the men, and that a police delegation that was supposed to screen the men on Feb. 6 did not show up. Karshan believes police held them under false pretenses to extort payment.

“They had no right to hold those people,” Karshan said, stressing that detaining deportees without charge is illegal under Haitian and international human rights law.

The 21 were held in a crowded cell with no beds, no provisions and forced to use the travel monies they were given, which equals $38, to buy food and water, Karshan said.

Their imprisonment sparked fears that Haiti was reviving a banned practice.

Haitian authorities routinely imprisoned deportees who had criminal convictions in the U.S. and extorted relatives for thousands of dollars, The Record revealed in a 2022 investigation. One deportee, Roody Fogg of Florida, died of cholera while detained during an outbreak in prison.

Deportees said they were still haunted by their time in prison, where they saw dozens die of starvation and cholera. Cells were so overcrowded they slept sitting or standing, and rats crawled on them as they slept.

Authorities demanded that deportees pay thousands for supposed legal fees, to appear before a judge or for paperwork for their release ― requests that advocates decried as extortion. Their families in the United States worked extra shifts, depleted retirement savings and borrowed to help them.

A legal U.S. resident, Julney was deported following drug and robbery convictions and jail terms — among more than 27,000 Haitians that the former Biden Administration deported to the Caribbean nation. He made mistakes, he said, but he has paid for them.

Human rights groups and lawmakers intervened to end their detention, but it has continued “on and off” in a system rife with corruption, Karshan said.

‘We’re watching you’

Julney had lived in the U.S. since age 2. He did not know his mother, and his father, who wrote political music, was killed in Haiti when he was a boy. Homeless at 12, an aunt in New Jersey took him in.

“I’m a changed man,” said Julney. “I’m older, I did my time, and I paid my dues to the community. Why I got to come to Haiti and go through this?”

Haitian police pursued him after his release, asking for more money and even trying to re-arrest him, Julney said. He moved eight times until he finally fled to the Dominican Republic.

Other deportees have also struggled.

With his American accent and tattoos on his face and arms, Rosier said he is easily identifiable as a deportee. He rarely goes out. Most days, he has one meal, usually rice and beans. Last month, a friend sent him $25, so he went to a park and bought a dish of plantains and ground beef.

The park was full of homeless families who had fled other parts of Haiti, he said. Ongoing gang violence has displaced more than a million people, nearly a tenth of the population, the UN Humanitarian Coordinator in Haiti said in February.

At the park, two police officers arrested Rosier and detained him overnight, accusing him of gang involvement.

Discrimination and vigilantism grew as gang violence escalated across Haiti, Karshan said. Police have targeted criminal deportees “not in the act of a crime.”

In November, police in an armored vehicle shot and wounded Shyler Registre, a deportee, as he walked through a park near the National Palace, Karshan said. No one came to his aid, and a health clinic asked for an “exorbitant amount” that he could not pay. In December, police detained Edzer Rene, a deportee living in Port-au-Prince. His body was found in the street a few weeks later, Karshan said.

Deportees are often the first suspects in local crimes, Kivland said. In one such case in August, neighborhood residents accused a deportee of involvement in a home burglary. He was “shot and killed as a result without any due process,” and no one was arrested for his shooting, she said.

Fleeing Haiti

Bernabe was deported in April 2022, after serving two years for drug possession. He also was promptly imprisoned and pressured to pay thousands in fees, a burden that fell on his family. He found shelter with relatives in Haiti, but some did not want him around and asked that he not visit their homes.

Some deportees have gotten involved with gangs, including offenders who “turn back to crime” and people who have no opportunities and no local support, he said. But most are just trying to rebuild their lives, he said. All have been scapegoated, he added.

Bernabe and others deportees said they also were targeted for speaking to media and protesting over their illegal imprisonment. Eventually, he moved to Haiti’s countryside, but gangs had spread there too.

Last fall, he boarded a plane to Nicaragua, then crossed by foot into Mexico, hoping to gain asylum in the United States. Bernabe decided to stay in Mexico, where he legalized his status and has a factory job. He’s not ready to return to the United States, worrying about the uncertain status of Haitians.

“You have the Conventions Against Torture act, and this is exactly what you are sending people to,” Bernabe said. “I’ve written to a judge a detailed letter or what would happen to me if I got deported. Everything in that letter happened to a tee and then some.”

In an interview last year, another deportee, Bergson Morin, 35, of Philadelphia, Penn., said he had fled to the Dominican Republic and hoped to reach Mexico. If not for his sister and her husband in Haiti, he said, “I absolutely would not have made it out alive,” and “would not have been able to eat.”

“As a deportee ― it doesn’t matter the case or anything like that ― they just see everybody as the worst animal,” he said. “It’s the worst thing you can think of when it comes to Haiti.”

“”They just deport you and leave you there,” he said. “They don’t care what happens to you.”

Julney is laying low in the Dominican Republic, where Haitians have also been rounded up for mass deportation. He can’t legally work, he said, but he is relieved to have escaped the violence that plagued Haiti. His wife visited in February, which he called “a blessing.” His dream is to one day return to New Jersey to be with her and his three stepchildren.

Peterson, too, dreams of returning to the United States and helping to raise his 12-year-old son. His father was not in his life, he said. His mother died when he was 12. He did not realize he was not a citizen until he was arrested for assault when he was 18. While on probation, he was arrested for robbery, court records show.

He was not deported then. The United States halted deportations in 2010 after a devastating earthquake struck Haiti. But 21 years after the earthquake, police pulled him over and found a controlled substance in his vehicle. It was Xanax, he said, and he didn’t have a prescription. He was arrested and deported.

He made mistakes, he said, but feels like is paying every day. Like other deportees, he served a criminal sentence, then was held in immigration detention, and then imprisoned in Haiti before being released into a country both unsafe and unwelcoming.

Kivland called for a public information campaign, both in Haiti and in the United States, to counter misunderstandings about deportees who are perceived as violent criminals, when in fact many have been deported after minor offenses, she said.

The University of Miami School of Law Human Rights Clinic also called on the United States in a 2023 report to act to ensure deportees’ human rights are respected.

The law clinic, in consultation with human rights groups, called for ending deportations to Haiti and granting asylum to those who could face jailing or persecution in Haiti. The U.S. must also ensure deportees are not imprisoned and take steps to end abuses, such as public anti-discrimination campaigns, the report states.

Peterson said Haiti should have support programs and shelters for deportees. Some have been in the U.S. for so long that they don’t speak the language or have connections there.

“They are coming back they are not prepared for the conditions or situation,” he said. “I’ll be honest. People’s lives are in danger here. They don’t have the necessities they need to survive. There is no government here. There is no help.”

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