A Haitian man whose immigration arrest outside Boston became a conservative-media sensation last year has been deported to Haiti, and his removal has been repackaged by the Trump administration and Fox News as a political victory, complete with an exclusive photograph from the plane and a joking presidential meme.
Wisteguens Jean Quely Charles was flown out of the country on Sept. 10 aboard an ICE deportation flight that originated in Louisiana, the Department of Homeland Security confirmed to Fox News, which first reported the removal this week.
The agency said Charles had spent roughly 19 months in federal custody following his January 2025 arrest and that an immigration judge issued a final order of removal in November of that year.
Charles, who was 25 when he was detained, drew national attention on Jan. 22, 2025, when a Fox News crew embedded with ICE officers in the Boston area filmed him leaning out of a government vehicle to declare that he would not be sent back to Haiti — and to add, “Biden forever.” The clip spread rapidly across conservative outlets and social media, and Vice President JD Vance amplified it at the time, according to contemporaneous coverage in the New York Post and other outlets.
DHS describes Charles as a member of a Haitian street group it calls the Back Block Money Gang and says he accumulated 17 criminal convictions, among them assault and battery on a public employee, assault and battery with a dangerous weapon, drug distribution and weapons offenses. Some outlets reported 18 convictions at the time of his arrest. CTN could not independently confirm the gang affiliation or the full record, which comes from the government.
His immigration history, as DHS recounts, goes back more than a decade.
Charles received Temporary Protected Status under the Obama administration in February 2013 and was admitted to the United States that July; U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services terminated that status in July 2022.
What distinguished this case was less the removal itself than the way it was presented. By Fox News’s own account, DHS made the deportation public only after the network obtained flight details — and the government then built its announcement around the old viral video, casting the expulsion as an answer to Charles’s 2025 outburst. DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin issued a statement listing Charles’s convictions and pledging that the administration would keep finding and removing people who are in the country without legal authorization. A White House spokeswoman, Lauren Bis, framed the removal in sharply partisan terms, saying Charles was now “off our streets and back in Haiti.” The department paired the news with a tongue-in-cheek image of President Trump waving goodbye, lifted from a campaign-trail stop. Fox News, for its part, published an exclusive photo of Charles aboard the aircraft, supplied by an ICE source, and cited unnamed sources who described him as combative during the flight — an account CTN could not verify.
That framing largely left out the country on the other end of the flight.
Charles was returned as the administration sharply expands removals to Haiti, a nation the U.S. State Department itself warns Americans not to visit. Armed gangs control an estimated 70 percent of Port-au-Prince, roughly 1.5 million people have been driven from their homes, and the country has gone years without an elected government. In July, the administration ended Temporary Protected Status for Haitians — a designation that had shielded about 350,000 people — after the Supreme Court cleared the way, and deportation flights to Haiti have since gone from roughly monthly to nearly weekly.
The high-visibility, media-embedded enforcement that produced the original video has also affected immigrants communities. After the January 2025 operations around Boston, CBS’s local station reported that immigrant neighborhoods in East Boston and Chelsea were rattled by the footage of federal agents carrying out arrests.
The politics of sending people back to Haiti do not fall neatly along party lines. Mullin has publicly defended the Haiti deportations, including in a recent televised exchange over the policy, even as at least one House Republican has broken with the administration to warn that ending Haitian TPS could deepen shortages in the U.S. health care workforce, which employs many Haitian immigrants, according to news reports.
This article was originally written in English. Other language versions were produced using AI translation software, and errors are possible—the English version is authoritative. CTN also uses AI to convert text into audio.
https://ctninfo.com/haitian-man-from…olitical-fanfare/
Source: FoxNews
