Today, Explained - Haitians at the southern border

Episode Date: September 21, 2021

Vox’s Nicole Narea explains the latest border crisis, and Ayibopost’s Widlore Mérancourt documents deported Haitians’ return to Port-au-Prince. Today’s show was produced by Will Reid, edited by Matt Collette, engineered by Efim Shapiro, fact-checked by Laura Bullard, and hosted by Sean Rameswaram. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained. Support Today, Explained by making a financial contribution to Vox! bit.ly/givepodcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Get groceries delivered across the GTA from Real Canadian Superstore with PC Express. Shop online for super prices and super savings. Try it today and get up to $75 in PC Optimum Points. Visit Superstore.ca to get started. President Biden is struggling with the southern border of the United States, and the last few weeks have delivered a new crisis for him. Nicole Nerea has been covering it for Vox. So in recent weeks, thousands of migrants have crossed the Rio Grande

and gathered in a camp under an international bridge. A sea of humanity and desperation along the Texas-Mexico border that has overwhelmed the U.S. Border Patrol. Thousands of migrants living in makeshift huts, sleeping in the dirt, waiting their turn to get processed by U.S. immigration authorities.

Most of them are Haitian migrants, and the numbers in the camp peaked at more than 14,000, but the Biden administration has been working in recent days to empty it. The Department of Homeland Security is executing what could be one of the largest mass deportations in decades. Immigration authorities removed some 3,000 Haitians on Monday alone. It is a 24-7 operation here under this bridge about a quarter mile behind me. This is kind of part of a broader migration wave that's been happening since Biden took office, as migrants have thought that the new president might have more favorable policies towards them. You say that the route is open to enter in the United States. What does that mean? Family, friends, he says.

The border is open? This video from over the weekend shows a horse patrol for U.S. Customs and Border Protection trying to corral human beings like cattle, chasing after Haitian migrants trying to cross back into the United States. And of course, Haiti has had an especially brutal summer, as we've covered on the show. A presidential assassination, an earthquake, a storm. Are these migrants the people who fled the country since that news? It doesn't seem like it. A lot of these people had been living in Latin America for years prior to arriving on the southern border.

Many of them initially settled in Brazil and then moved to Chile and Ecuador. They actually fled Haiti after earlier crises like the 2010 earthquake and also the ongoing gang violence that's been happening even before this most recent round of crises. And it seems like the COVID recession in Latin America, racial discrimination,

and the perception that they could get into the U.S. all sort of played a role in their movement north over the last few months. So contrary to what you might think, seeing a bunch of Haitian immigrants at the border, this is not a result of all of the news we've been hearing about Haiti in the past few months. Not particularly, yeah. These are people who have been out of the country for mostly a decade or so. What conditions are these migrants facing under this bridge in the Rio Grande? So we've seen other migrant camps along the border that are somewhat comparable,

but this might be even more makeshift than the ones we've seen recently. There were only about 20 portable toilets available for the entire population of the camp, and there was inadequate access to drinkable water and food. Most of them had to cross back and forth across the Rio Grande to buy their own supplies in Mexico. They were crossing to and from the U.S. via this dam.

Just take a look. That's Mexico. You can see the flag flying. And, you know, weather's also been an issue. Temperatures have been in the triple digits, putting people at risk for heat stroke. And so they've been asked to stay under the international bridge where they can be in the shade. How is the Biden administration handling this? You mentioned they removed 3,000 people from the camp just yesterday. I heard something like 6,000 on NPR this morning. Yeah. So they've

been trying to transfer people from the camps to facilities in the U.S. where they're being processed. And then from those facilities, the Biden administration's begun deporting people back to Haiti. So at this point, it's more than 6,000 people who have been moved from the camp. And then hundreds more have been deported and arrived in the Haitian capital of Port-au-Prince. So the administration had briefly halted deportation flights to Haiti following the earthquake and tropical depression that hit the country earlier this year. But now those flights have resumed, even though Haiti isn't equipped at the moment to ensure that the migrants basic security and needs due to the ongoing crisis there. Yeah, I'm guessing these migrants do not want to go back to Haiti. Why is the Biden administration

sending them there? So this is sort of meant to clear the camp and remedy the bad optics for the administration on the ground. But it does ignore the fact that sending Haitians back to their home country might subject them to safety risks, especially given that they haven't been allowed the opportunity to apply for asylum in the U.S. and sort of state their claims. The Department of Homeland Security Secretary Mayorkas was on the border on Monday. Good afternoon. Thank you very much for being here. And he basically reiterated the administration's position that these migrants

have been misled by smugglers, that they should not make the dangerous journey to the U.S., and that they won't be able to ultimately enter the U.S. I want to make sure that it is known that this is not the way to come to the United States.

That is false information. Only Haitians who arrived in the U.S. prior to July 29 are eligible for what's called temporary protected status, which is a kind of legal status usually given to citizens of countries that have experienced violent conflict or natural disasters. And that allows them to live and work in the U.S. But the people on the border now would not be eligible for that and therefore are being sent back to their home country. And we've talked about this on the show before, but this seems to be consistent with the Biden stance on the southern border,

which is like, please do not come here. I believe the vice president went to Guatemala and said the same thing a few months ago. Do not come. Do not come. Are these Haitian deportations basically consistent with current Biden policy? Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, they are kind of a continuation as well of the Title 42 public health policy that we've talked about before. That was a policy that was instituted by Trump at the start of the pandemic, and it gave the government the authority to deport migrants and prevent the spread of COVID, or at least that's what they claimed.

But the public health justification for that policy has been really unclear. You know, thousands of people are crossing the border every day, not just migrants, and they aren't required to submit to public health measures like testing or masking. People have really been questioning why the Biden administration is continuing to keep that policy in place. Huh. What's the answer? Do we know? I think it's just politically convenient for them. Under the former president, there was, of course, this so-called Remain in Mexico policy, which tried to keep these migrant camps on the other side of the border. Is that policy still in place? Biden actually revoked this policy when he first came into office. The Biden administration is allowing some asylum seekers who've been waiting at a camp in Mexico

to cross into the U.S. to have their asylum requests processed. But a federal judge in Texas recently issued an injunction preventing the administration from doing so. And last month, the Supreme Court decided not to overrule that injunction. And basically what that means is that the administration will have to restart the program. But given that there's some negotiations with Mexico that need to take place before that can happen, it's really unclear at this point how the administration will get the program started again. And it's also upset a lot of immigration advocates because they think that Biden should continue fighting this issue.

And they're asking him to issue a new memo, giving a legal rationale for why the administration won't reinstate the policies that might potentially survive court review. Okay, so Biden tried to stop Remain in Mexico and a Texas judge stopped him from doing it. What else is Texas up to? I know the governor out there has been trying to carry the former president's torch on immigration. We've spoken to you about that before. How's Governor Abbott responding to the situation on the border? And when you have an administration that is not enforcing the law in this country, when you have an administration that has abandoned any pretense of securing the border and securing our sovereignty, you see the onrush of people

like what we saw walking across this dam that is right behind me. So the Texas GOP sees this as a political opportunity. Abbott has been fear-mongering about migration at the border for months now in different contexts. And he's trying to use this latest example as a means of hitting the Biden administration on a weak border policy. And that's, you know, an issue that resonates with Republican voters in Texas. And for Abbott, that's important, not only for his re-election campaign in 2022 and the midterms, but also in case he runs for president in 2024. At the same time, it's not really an attack that is based in fact

because the Biden administration has actually been pretty tough on the border. Meanwhile, Democrats in Congress want to reform immigration, and we got some news on that front on Monday as well, right? Yeah, so at this point, Democrats were hoping that they might be able to include a path to citizenship for as many as 8 million undocumented people living in the U.S. as part of the upcoming reconciliation budget bill. But the Senate parliamentarian, Elizabeth McDonough, recently ruled that she wouldn't approve the legislative language as it's written because it would have impacts that go far

beyond just the budget. Last night's ruling was extremely disappointing. It saddened me. It frustrated me. It angered me. Democrats are still hoping that they might be able to reach an agreement with her about what might be able to be included. We'll be holding additional meetings with the parliamentarian in the coming days. One particular area of the law that they're looking at is what's called the immigration registry. Basically, if you've been living in the U.S. since before a certain date, you're eligible to apply for legal status. But that date hasn't been updated in many years. It's currently January 1st, 1972. So by changing it to a more recent date, many more undocumented people could become eligible for permanent residency.

I'm sure Republicans were pleased as punch that Liz didn't go through with the Democrats' intentions here on immigration. Is there any appetite between the two parties to do anything on immigration together? You know, this is sort of an age-old question. Yeah, I know. I'm sorry. There might be, but maybe not in the broad way that Democrats want. Legalizing dreamers who came to the U.S. as children and undocumented farm workers has drawn significant bipartisan support in the past. But Republicans would likely want to trade that for extra border security measures. And I'm just not sure that Democrats will want to agree to something like that.

OK, so where does that leave us? There's no major bipartisan work on immigration coming. Liz over at the Senate, 86th, the Democrats' efforts to sneak something into the budget reconciliation bill remain in Mexico, remains in place. And there's tons of migrants heading to the U.S. border where the president and Customs and Border Patrol are going to have to turn them away or deport them? Is that it? Is that everything? Yeah, I mean, the situation right now is pretty grim on all fronts in terms of making any major progress on immigration reform

or being able to lend a humanitarian hand to those who are continuing to arrive in vulnerable circumstances. But that's sort of what we've come to expect under the Biden administration, even though people might have had high hopes for his immigration policy at the outset. These Haitians at the border don't want to go back to Haiti, but some of them were sent back without even knowing they were going back to Haiti.

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My name is Wibler Mirancourt, and I am the editor-in-chief for Aibo Post, a Haitian-based news outlet. Last Sunday, I planned to sleep and have a restful day, but the US administration, the Biden administration, carried out deportations of Haitians. And they came to Haiti, a country that some of them left after the 2010 earthquake. And some of these people were coming back to this country with kids, and most of these kids do not speak a word of Creole, which is the language of the majority of Haitians. And they come to a country that has changed, you know,

since the last time they were here. The majority of the people that I talked to were telling me that they did not know that they were being deported to Haiti. Apparently nobody told them that the plane would land in Haiti. At least one of them told me that he thought he was going to Florida and they felt like they were deceived by the US authorities. Some of these people came from Chile, some from Brazil. I mean, most of them will tell you that they hope to start a new life and a better life in the US.

Some of these people also, they had a decent life, but they hoped that they could see families that are living in the US and, you know, reunite with their families. You have few other exceptional examples. For instance, I spoke to one lady. She left Chile because she worked at a dental office and her employer was asking her to sort of take the COVID vaccine. And she heard that in the US, it is not mandatory for her to take the vaccine. But at the same time, most people I talked to recounted horrific accounts of things they saw.

They crossed several countries. They crossed rivers. They crossed forests. And some of them were telling me how in this journey, they saw dead bodies, women who were raped, people being abused by traffickers and authorities in some of these countries. And some of them lost all their belongings or all the money that they came with. So it's a very difficult situation that these people were sent to.

What will they do now? It's an important question because the ancient authorities do not have the capacity to provide housing and to provide all sorts of services that these people would need. Lots of them tell me that this journey coming from Chile cost them thousands of dollars one of them said to me he sold everything in his house in terms of furniture he sold his car he sold actually a house that he bought in Chile to come to the United States and it cost him about twelve thousand dollars and these people do not have money and they were giving $50, 50 US dollars and this is the money that they have to use to eat, to find housing temporarily and you know in the meantime thinking about what it is that they will do next. Two gentlemen I talked to were telling me that they were already in a process to come back to Mexico and to take their chances so they can come back to the U.S.

Some of them are trying to reach Chile again, but a few of them also do not have anything left. And these people are in a very desperate condition. How is the Haitian government handling this influx of potentially thousands of people? Yes, it is a very difficult crisis for the Haitian government. I talked to the head of the Haitian national migration, and he told me that it is a crisis that Haiti did not want at the time that we are in right now. Because they don't have the proper resources, because they don't have the proper personnel,

they can't handle this right. But at the same time, at the same time, he told me, you know, the immigration laws and the international laws governing these type of things require us to accept the citizens. So we do not have any choice whatsoever. He specifically said to the press that he would ask the U.S. government to halt the deportation because remember we are receiving from two to three planes a day but we expect to receive at least six flights a day in the coming days. So it's a very very brutal situation for the Haitian government, which is already battling with crisis. You have a president which was killed on 7th of July.

You have this earthquake that hits the south of the country in August. And right after that, you had this storm and you have also this political crisis in their hands when the prime minister, the acting leader of the country, has his name embattled in the assassination of the president. Yeah, tell me more about that investigation. Well, it is a very hectic type of investigation. Since July 7th, when the president was killed in his home in Port-au-Prince, we have about 40 people in custody. These people are accused of being the hands that killed the president. Like they participated in some capacity in executing the acts. But today, we have no information whatsoever regarding who asked these people to kill the president.

And last week, you have a new turn in the investigation. Ariel Henry, Haiti's new prime minister, a former minister of labor, a former neuropathologist, now a suspect in the assassination of President Jovenel Moise. A prosecutor on the case formally asked the judge that is on the case formally asked the judge that is investigating the case to indict the actual prime minister because there is, according to this prosecutor, because he was in touch at least two times on the day of the assassination, right after the assassination, with one of the alleged masterminds. Prosecutors say the prime minister spoke with that suspect twice by telephone on the night of Moise's assassination.

The prime minister, the guy who's kind of in charge right now, is a suspect in the assassination of the president. Does the prosecutor successfully indict him? That's a good question, because right after we in the press know about the request to the judge to indict the prime minister, we received a letter that said

this prosecutor is fired. And quickly, he was replaced by a new prosecutor. And, you know, we have yet to know if the judge will accept this request and indict, you know, the prime minister. The prime minister has insisted he's innocent in the Moise affair. The actions to create confusion and prevent justice will not be allowed to happen.

The real culprits, the masterminds, those responsible for the assassination of President Jovenel Moïse will be brought to justice and punished for their acts. Okay, so on top of the assassination, there's a fact that the prime minister may have been involved. It's not even clear if there'll be a legitimate investigation of the assassination.

On top of that, there's the earthquake, the storm, thousands dead, infrastructure crippled. And on top of all that, you now have the United States deporting thousands of Haitians back to the country. What do Haitians want out of this moment where it doesn't look like they're going to be able to rely on a functional government? Most people want a better life. Most people want to have food on their plate. Most people want to have their kids in schools so they can have, you know, a better life than themselves as parents. You have a group of civil society people before the assassination of the president, which was in meeting to find a solution to the crisis because this crisis did not

start with the assassination of the president so they have an agreement and they are trying to have a new president and a new prime minister which will conduct the affairs of the government and these people have to be highly regarded people were not cited in corruptions and things like that. But this civil society is frustrated by the international community who choose to back, you know, Ariel Henry and sometimes backing other leaders that are not well regarded. So these people are asking the international community, which is very, very powerful in Haiti. They are asking them to listen to the Haitian people,

listen to the civil society people, to the civil society groups, to these grassroots people, so we can have a new government that will appease the country and bring it to the next elections. Okay. Well, Woodlot, I wish you all the best and stay safe. Well, was glad speaking to you, Sean. Woodlaw Marencourt is the editor-in-chief of the Aibo Post. It's a Haitian news source in French, but also English. You can find it at ayibopost.com. He's also tweeting at Widlaw. That's W-I-D-L-O-R-E.

It's Widlaw. Widlaw. Widlaw. You can find Today Explained on Twitter at today underscore explained. I'm at Ramis Verum. Today's show was produced by Will Reed. He seldom tweets. Thank you.