The Immigrant Family Services Institute (IFSI), a migrant rights organization based in Boston, Massachusetts, has launched a petition to support Haitians who do not have the proper travel documents to travel to the United States under President Joe Biden’s humanitarian visa program.
In launching this petition requesting that Haitian nationals be allowed to travel with their expired passports, IFSI-USA said that since the launch of the program on January 6, 2023 in response to the humanitarian, economic and/or political crises underway in the four countries involved, it has created a rush of first-time passport applications and passport renewals to the Haitian Immigration and Emigration Department.
Many Haitians are currently in limbo and are unable to renew their passports due to the crisis, laments IFSI, deploring that unscrupulous people have also taken advantage of this situation to extort applicants, forcing them to pay large sums of money to have their passport application expedited.
Hence this petition to “ask the Haitian government to allow Haitian citizens to travel to the United States with a recently expired passport (less than 5 years old).”
This is an emergency writes the IFSI in the document posted online given the terms of the program it is imperative to travel in a timely manner.
Wanting to draw the attention of the authorities to this difficulty that Haitians face in obtaining their passport booklet, IFSI urges the Haitian government to take all necessary measures to respond favorably to this request and to facilitate the rapid ability of Haitian citizens to travel by air outside the country.
At the time of writing this article the petition has already collected 754 signatures. Only 46 more signatures were needed before reaching IFSI’s goal of 800 signatures.
Here is the link to the petition.
https://actionnetwork.org/petitions/haitian-expired-passport-petition?source=direct_link&referrer=group-ifsi
Many already approved beneficiaries cannot travel because of their passports. Some of these people have been waiting for over a month.
According to figures released by the Immigrant Family Services Institute last week, 11,300 Haitians have already been approved to enter the U.S. under Biden’s program. Only 5,500 have already made the trip.
Meanwhile IFSI confirmed on Tuesday that the U.S. government and the governors of the 20 states opposed to Joe Biden’s humanitarian visa program have reached an agreement for a judge to rule on the case in June 2023.
Editor:
Pierre Philor Saint-Fleur