Haiti deportations soar as Biden administration deploys Trump-era health order
Source: The Guardian
Haiti deportations soar as Biden administration deploys Trump-era health order
There have been more Title 42 expulsions in the space of a few weeks than during an entire year of Trumps administration, report says
Julian Borger in Washington
Thu 25 Mar 2021 09.00 GMT
The Biden administration has so far deported more Haitians in a few weeks than the Trump administration did in a whole year, with the use of a highly controversial Trump-era public health order denying asylum seekers basic legal rights, according to a new report.
The report, The Invisible Wall, due to be published on Thursday by a coalition of immigrant rights groups, focuses on Title 42, part of the 1944 Public Health Service Act invoked a year ago by the Trump administration as grounds for summary expulsion of migrants because of the supposed health risk they posed during the Covid pandemic.
The Biden team has sought to place a moratorium on deportations of immigrants already in the country (though that moratorium has been blocked by a court order), but it has not stopped Title 42 expulsions of newly arrived migrants. The report found the pace of deportation flights to Haiti in particular had increased dramatically.
More Haitians have been removed to Haiti in the weeks since President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris took office than during all of fiscal year 2020, according to the Invisible Wall report, published by the Haitian Bridge Alliance, the Quixote Center, and the UndocuBlack Network.
In part at least, the rise in expulsions mirrors an increase in arrivals of Haitians at the border, misled by rumours and deliberate disinformation from people smugglers, that the Biden administration had relaxed the regime at the border. Most of the new arrivals have been waiting in Mexico for months hoping for a change in the rules affecting Haitians. Some of the deportees may also have been held in detention centres in the US.
-snip-
Read more:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/mar/25/haiti-deportations-soar-as-biden-administration-deploys-trump-era-health-order