The United States deported 161 Haitians, including children, to the northern city of Cap-Haïtien on Thursday, resuming large-scale removals to a country in the grip of gang violence and humanitarian collapse.
It was the first deportation flight to Haiti since the Trump administration ended Temporary Protected Status last month for more than 350,000 Haitians, and a preview of a campaign U.S. officials say will soon accelerate, according to the Miami Herald.
The Immigration and Customs Enforcement charter, which originated in Alexandria, Louisiana, landed shortly before noon in Haiti’s second-largest city, according to the Miami Herald.
It was the eighth deportation flight from the United States to Haiti this year, the newspaper reported, and the first since Washington warned Haitian authorities to prepare for a sharp rise in removals now that the protections shielding their nationals have lapsed.
U.S. officials have signaled they intend to move to two flights a week, returning roughly 250 Haitians every seven days.
Haiti’s National Office of Migration had braced for as many as 175 people on the flight. In the end, there were 161, including children, the office’s director general, Jean Négot Bonheur Delva, said, according to the Miami Herald. Delva said the group was a mix: some had been placed in removal proceedings after entering the United States without authorization; others had completed prison sentences or had been arrested and charged with crimes. Still others, he said, had never lived in Haiti at all. Among the deportees were people born in Chile and in the Dominican Republic who were sent to Haiti solely because they had a Haitian parent, Delva told the Herald.
As noted by the Miami Herald, Cap-Haïtien, and not the capital, received the flight, underscoring how far Haiti’s crisis has advanced.
Commercial flights to Port-au-Prince remain suspended after gangs repeatedly opened fire on aircraft, and the capital’s main international airport has been largely off-limits to U.S. carriers, pushing arrivals north to Cap-Haïtien. For deportees whose families and homes are elsewhere in the country, that means a difficult and dangerous onward journey.
On landing, migration office staff received the returnees and handed them about $76.40 from the Haitian government to help them reach their destinations, the Miami Herald reported, citing journalist Gerard Maxineau. The amount does not come close to the roughly $250 a one-way ticket to Port-au-Prince costs, though it may cover part of an overland trip along roads that are frequently controlled by armed groups and dotted with checkpoints where kidnappings are common.
The flight is the leading edge of a policy shift months in the making.
The Trump administration moved to terminate TPS for Haiti late last year, and the terminations took effect in July after the U.S. Supreme Court in June cleared the way, ruling that courts could not review most challenges to how the Department of Homeland Security makes such designations. The end of the program stripped legal status and work authorization from a population the Herald put at more than 300,000, with some estimates closer to 350,000. DHS has urged those who lost status to leave the country on their own, and on July 16 it carried out an earlier flight it said had returned Haitians with criminal records. A flight planned shortly afterward was scrapped because of technical problems, according to the Herald.
The people now being returned face a country the U.S. government itself deems unsafe.
The State Department has kept Haiti at “Level 4: Do Not Travel,” its most severe warning, citing kidnapping, gang violence, civil unrest, and a near-total breakdown of health care and other basic services; the country has been under a state of emergency for more than a year. Rights groups have warned for years that deportees are especially vulnerable on return, sometimes detained on arrival or targeted by gangs. Advocates have pointed to cases such as a New Jersey man profiled by NorthJersey.com who had not lived in Haiti since he was 4, and Paul Pierrilus, deported to Haiti though he was never born there, as evidence of how far the removals can reach.
Haiti, for its part, has little capacity to absorb the returns.
The government has not announced a plan to house, employ or reintegrate deportees, and the migration office that meets each flight is already stretched thin.
The arrivals come as security forces wage an increasingly desperate fight against the gangs that control much of the capital. Earlier this week, a government task force used explosive drones to target Vitel’homme Innocent, one of the country’s most feared gang leaders, who is wanted by the FBI for crimes against U.S. citizens; the Herald reported that a drone struck a vehicle he was traveling in but that he appeared to have survived.
The United Nations warned that the deportations are compounding a crisis its agencies are already struggling to meet. Asked about the impact of the end of TPS, Stéphane Dujarric, spokesman for U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres, said the U.N. team in Haiti is stretched but that staff are “doing whatever they can to support the government as people are being forcibly returned” to a country facing severe insecurity and danger, according to the Miami Herald.
The removals are unfolding even as some U.S. lawmakers try to reverse them. In April, the House of Representatives passed a bipartisan bill, H.R. 1689, that would require DHS to designate Haiti for TPS through April 2029; it cleared the chamber with the help of a rare discharge petition but has since stalled in the Senate, where it faces a White House veto threat. Members of the Congressional Haiti Caucus and immigrant-rights organizations have repeatedly urged the administration to halt deportations while Haiti remains in crisis, arguing that returning people to a country the U.S. calls too dangerous for its own citizens to visit puts lives at risk.
https://ctninfo.com/u-s-deports-161-…-since-tps-ended/
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Source: Miami Herald (Jacqueline Charles), “First ICE deportation flight to Haiti since the end of TPS lands in Cap-Haïtien” (Aug. 20, 2026)
