My Comments—

Haitian gangs turn on each other as they embed with innocent people. Fear of Bukele is the common denominator... and it should be. The rest of the world could care less about Haitian gangs and innocents caught in the crossfire. Bukele has everything to gain and nothing to lose.

jc

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Roodschill Christopher Pierre

November 2, 2026

As Haitian and international forces fight gangs in Port-au-Prince, one of Haiti’s biggest gang leaders, Claudy Célestin aka Chen Mechan, and his men are regrouping among innocent civilians in areas like Santo, and Croix Des Missions.

As operations push into neighborhoods like Marikaj, Koridò Jo, and Croix Des Missions, security forces can’t always tell who is innocent and who is not. Gangs know this. That is why they purposely mix with civilians when they flee ,to hide among them and make operations harder.

This raises a serious question: Why didn’t the Haitian government ask the international community for more funding to secure shelters for innocent civilians when it requested foreign troops and funding?

For years, officials requested troops, equipment, and money to fight gangs. Several countries agreed. But there were few plans for the more than 2 million innocent civilians living among an estimated 20,000 gang members in Port-au-Prince.

Without secured shelters, families have nowhere safe to go, and security forces have a harder time distinguishing civilians from gang members. With secured shelters, screening, and security measures, civilians can be protected and gang members can be identified.

Other governments have understood this. In 2017, the Philippines created Task Force Bangon Marawi to provide secured temporary shelters and services for displaced families. Ukraine also established secured emergency shelters and evacuation plans.

You cannot ask the world to help secure communities without also asking for resources to protect the people who live in them.

Restoring security is not just about removing gangs. It is also about making sure families have somewhere safe to go. They are the people these operations are meant to protect.

—

#EnspirasyonAyiti

November 1, 2026

We have finally reached this point. The leader of the notorious 400 Mawozo gang, Wilson Joseph, better known as Lanmò San Jou, who has been terrorizing the Croix-des-Bouquets and Plaine du Cul-de-Sac areas, has officially written a formal letter to United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres.

In the letter dated November 1, 2026, he claims he raised a white flag on August 20, 2026, and is now requesting international mediation and the opening of a dialogue for peace and stability in Haiti. He expresses concern over recent violence involving Claudy Célestin (Chen Mechan), incidents with Salvadoran military forces, and civilian casualties — including the tragic case of an 8-year-old girl shot in the head. He even references threats and statements from El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele and asks for a UN delegation to facilitate talks.

We are used to hearing this man speak. His words are rarely correct, clear, or formal. So the real question remains: Who is actually writing these polished letters for him?

The situation in Haiti continues to take unexpected turns.

#EnspirasyonAyiti #Haiti

—

John A. Carroll, MD

www.haitianhearts.org

johnacarroll.substack.com

The Haitian gangs are positioning themselves in Port-au-Prince’s communities surrounded by innocent people while they make the innocents work to barricade the streets in an attempt to slow down the advancement of the Salvadoran soldiers. I worry that many people will be caught in the cross fire in the upcoming days.

I wonder if President Bukele of El Salvador thinks his four missing technicians are alive or dead. My guess is that they are indeed dead and that Bukele believes this to be the case. So he most likely has other reasons to come to Haiti with several thousand soldiers.

How this is going to play out with the mix of Salvadoran soldiers, the pre existing Gang Suppression Force, the Haitian National Police, Erik Prince and his mercenaries and their deadly drones, the Haitian Military, and the vigilante groups in the local neighborhoods is anyone”s guess.

I can envision the few functioning hospitals and health care workers as completely overwhelmed with acutely injured people on top of the usual medical illnesses in a country that most have forgotten.

jc

—

In English

Forced Recruitment, Demonstrations, Barricades… Gangs Are Preparing

ayibopost.com

PAR Jérôme Wendy Norestyl, Wethzer Piercin, Fenel Pélissier•1 novembre 2026

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Port-au-Prince’s gunmen are preparing for a confrontation with the troops of Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele

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Haiti’s most powerful armed gangs are stepping up preparations in anticipation of possible operations in the Plaine du Cul-de-Sac, following Nayib Bukele’s threats to target them after the disappearance, on October 18 in Santo, of four citizens of his country.

The gunmen are erecting barricades, blocking major roads, forcing residents to participate in demonstrations against the foreign presence in the country, and coercively recruiting young men, according to half a dozen people familiar with these activities.

Two Santo residents report that armed men are threatening reprisals against anyone attempting to leave the neighborhood.

The gang led by Claudy “Chen Mechan” Célestin is using tree trunks to block access to the territories it controls in order to prevent any advance by security forces.

Barricades have been observed in Lillavois, Lizon, Marin, Lathan, Carrefour Shada, Santo and Damien. They are also multiplying in Santo 11, Santo 17, Croix-des-Missions, Carrefour Fouji and Bajou.

According to testimonies collected by AyiboPost in these areas, gang members are dumping truckloads of stones onto certain roads in order to obstruct traffic and slow the movement of armored law enforcement vehicles.

Men, often heavily armed young individuals, are slowing motorcycle taxi traffic in Santo 9. A resident who wished to leave the neighborhood told AyiboPost that she could only do so empty-handed, “because the gangs would prevent her from taking her belongings.”

According to the same source, some armed groups warn residents fleeing their homes that they will have to pay in order to return once the situation has calmed down.

The gangs are also conducting a campaign of forced recruitment among young men. These pressures are pushing many residents to flee their homes in haste.

Since the disappearance last month of four Salvadoran aeronautical technicians involved in the Anti-Gang Force (FRG), more than 2,000 members of that country’s special forces have arrived in Haiti to reinforce search operations. Barely 200 of these new troops will be placed under the command of the FRG.

Negotiations with the Haitian state are underway to determine the parameters, chain of command and operational zones of the Salvadoran force, AyiboPost learned from a source familiar with the discussions.

According to Bukele, the main objective is to bring back his four compatriots “alive, safe and sound.”

On October 24, the FRG received suspicious human remains. Investigators are analyzing their DNA abroad to determine whether they belong to the missing Salvadorans, but Bukele stated that the bodies are not those of his compatriots.

Haitian authorities have said little publicly about the case, but several gang leaders have responded to the Salvadoran president’s threats.
“Lanmò San Jou,” based in the municipality of Croix-des-Bouquets, released images of bags filled with ammunition and firearms, claiming that its members would fight to “stay alive.”

A source close to Chen Mechan says the gang leader does not share Lanmò San Jou’s combative rhetoric. According to this source, the alleged killing of the Salvadorans is considered within the group to have been a “mistake.”
More than two weeks after the disappearance of the Salvadorans and the start of rescue operations, the situation remains tense in the Plaine du Cul-de-Sac.

In Santo and several surrounding localities, gangs are forcing residents to take part in their preparations. According to two sources familiar with the situation, civilians are notably being compelled to help build the barricades.
“The gunmen have barricaded the streets and force everyone they encounter to help them build the roadblocks,” a resident explained.

Residents are approached when they go out to shop or simply pass through the area. Faced with threats, they cannot refuse, the resident added.

In Santo 11, a woman fled with her ten-year-old son after a statement by the Salvadoran president announcing an intensification of operations. She feared she would later be unable to leave the area. During the motorcycle ride out, she said she noticed several trees felled by gangs and placed across the roads.

In Bon-Repos, another resident who managed to leave the area to make a few purchases reported seeing residents fleeing toward Delmas. The roads were barricaded and traffic was moving very slowly, he told AyiboPost.

A communications professional living in Santo also said he left the neighborhood with his mother a week ago after an armed man entered his home to seek protection from helicopters flying overhead. According to him, these operations prevented some residents from leaving their homes and caused deaths among the civilian population. “I told myself I couldn’t stay any longer,” he said.

Since then, hundreds of people have continued to leave the area in search of refuge elsewhere.

The gunmen are trying to mobilize the population against the foreign presence in the country, according to two sources familiar with their actions.
A high school teacher in Santo reports that two of his students told him that some young people had been forced to participate in a march organized on October 30 under pressure from the gangs.

The two students, who still cannot leave the area, refuse to speak with journalists for fear of being killed by the gunmen.

According to the communications professional cited above, armed groups have already attempted, on at least two occasions, to force residents to demonstrate against the authorities. A march that was supposed to go to Lizon on the last Wednesday of last month was largely boycotted by the population.

By : Jérôme Wendy Norestyl , Wethzer Piercin, Fenel Pélissier

Wilder Sylvain et Widlore Mérancourt contributed to this article.

—

John A. Carroll, MD

www.haitianhearts.org

johnacarroll.substack.com

El Salvador’s President Bukele Launches Illegal War in Haiti, with the Support of Dominican Troops

OCTOBER 30, 2026

BY KIM IVES

Oct 28, 2026

On Feb. 29, 2024, the Viv Ansanm (Live Together), an alliance of greater Port-au-Prince’s neighborhood armed groups, blocked the capital’s international airport, thereby thwarting the return to Haiti of reviled de facto Prime Minister Ariel Henry.

He was returning from Kenya, where he had just signed an agreement to allow the deployment of the Multinational Security Support mission (MSS), a proxy “Coalition of the Willing”-like force that then Secretary of State Antony Blinken cooked up to fight the Viv Ansanm, which a Pentagon spokesperson called a “proto-insurgency” this past summer.

The Haitian people almost universally welcomed Henry’s ouster.

But nine days later, Malaysian far-right Elon-Musk-finger-puppet Ian Miles Cheong tweeted out: “Haiti has collapsed. The President [sic] is no longer in the country. The ports are officially closed. Cannibal gangs are besieging the national palace in Port-au-Prince,” to which Musk immediately replied “End of days. This is bleaker than Mad Max.”

But a savior quickly stepped forward. The next day, El Salvador’s hard-right president Nayib Bukele tweeted back to Cheong: “We can fix it. But we’ll need a UNSC [UN Security Council] resolution, the consent of the host country, and all the mission expenses to be covered.”

Steamrolling international law
Now, two and a half years later, Bukele’s Rambo moment has finally come. At this writing on Oct. 27, some 450 Salvadoran soldiers have already landed in Haiti in the past five days, with another 700 reportedly to arrive soon. The first deployment was 100 “special forces” troops deployed on Oct. 22, the day after Bukele announced his “rescue operation.” (As we go to press, the Salvadoran outlet Tendencias reports that there are now 1,000 Salvadoran soldiers in Haiti.)

But these soon-to-be 1,100-odd Salvadoran troops are not deployed as part of the Gang Suppression Force (GSF), launched in September 2025, which is current Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s enlarged and overhauled version of Blinken’s MSS. The Salvadorans sent this past week are commanded unilaterally by Bukele, an egregious departure from his Mar. 10, 2024 tweet (need “a UNSC resolution”) and a flagrant violation of the UN Charter.

What prompted the unlawful Salvadoran deployment was the Oct. 18 killing of five GSF mercenaries, four of whom were Salvadoran aircraft mechanics that were part of a contingent of some 80 Salvadorans attached to both the MSS and GSF.

Although Haïti Liberté reported last week that the mercenaries had burned to death in their armored car, the US and El Salvador continued to insist, without any evidence, that they were alive. So the troops that Bukele is sending are a supposed “rescue mission.”

But this ruse appeared to be foiled on Oct. 24 when the Chen Mechan (Mean Dog) armed group, a Viv Ansanm affiliate, returned the bodies of the mercenaries, whom they said were killed in the armored car ambush and burning.

However, Bukele rejects that the bodies are those of his GSF-attached soldiers, even though the GSF command itself contradicts him, saying that it does not know.

Fils-Aimé missing in action
Meanwhile, the second of Bukele’s 2024 “fix it” conditions was also not met. There was absolutely no “consent from the host country.” First, this consent is impossible to obtain because Haiti only has a US-protected, increasingly unpopular, de facto Prime Minister, Alix Didier Fils-Aimé, who rules by decree. But the second reason was that Fils-Aimé was not even present in Haiti when Bukele started to land his troops there. Fils-Aimé had left the country on Oct. 22 on a private jet to attend a wedding in Mexico, not returning until Oct. 27.

To add insult to injury, the newsroom of Corvington Matin reports that “the private jet chartered by the de facto Prime Minister to attend a wedding in Mexico last week cost the public treasury more than $100,000 USD, based on the rental rates listed for this aircraft, which logged 16 hours of flight time to transport Alix Didier Fils-Aimé and his family… The plane departed from Port-au-Prince and made a stopover in Miami both outbound and on its return. Even after this trip, the population had still not been informed of the Prime Minister’s absence from the national territory.”

That leaves the third condition as the only question mark: “all the mission expenses [need] to be covered.” As Bukele’s unilateral deployment does not fall under the purview of the GSF, one has to wonder: who is going to cover its costs? The only logical answer: the US taxpayer.

Haïti Liberté asked the US State Department if it had any foreknowledge or gave any approval to Bukele for his deployment. It seems very unlikely that he would have sent his troops to Haiti without a nod from Washington, specifically Marco Rubio.

Bukele’s El Salvador is one of the Trump administration’s “closest Central American allies,” reports The Latin Times. “Bukele has long positioned the United States as El Salvador’s most vital international partner, and his government has shown little interest in concealing its alignment with the Trump administration’s broader agenda,” which includes “push back against Chinese Communist Party activity” in the hemisphere and “Washington’s ongoing effort to press allied governments to withhold engagement from Havana,” particularly before the Oct. 28 vote on the General Assembly resolution calling for an end to the US embargo against Cuba. Both of those subjects were alluded to in the State Department’s readout of the Oct. 13 call between Rubio and Bukele. It is reasonable to suspect that Haiti was also discussed.

So was Bukele given any assurances that he would be reimbursed for this deployment? Are he and Rubio going to try to get the money, after the fact, from the United Nations Support Office in Haiti (UNSOH), a mechanism Rubio devised to siphon off funds from the UN peacekeeping budget to support the GSF’s logistics?

‘Viewed strictly as invaders’
Whatever Rubio did or didn’t promise, Bukele’s troops have landed on a battlefield that his “Bukele model” was never built for. Salvadoran soldiers rounding up tattooed youths in San Salvador’s barrios is one thing. Fighting the Viv Ansanm in the warrens of Croix-des-Missions and the open plain of Croix-des-Bouquets is something else.

That is the judgment of Chris Martin, who should know. A former US Special Forces adviser with three combat rotations in Afghanistan’s Regional Command-South, Martin also served as the US Contingent Commander in Haiti under the UN’s MINUSTAH mission, and was personally tasked with training the Haitian National Police (PNH) SWAT team. In an Oct. 25 assessment on his LinkedIn site entitled “The Bukele Escalation: Parallel Operations and the Kinetic Limits of the Salvadoran Model in Haiti,” Martin argues that Bukele “bypassed the slow-moving GSF oversight frameworks to launch a parallel, unilateral rescue operation,” which “entirely fractures the unified command structure” of the UN-authorized mission.

Martin’s critique starts with the uniforms. By sending aviation technicians and then hundreds of special forces onto the streets of Port-au-Prince in full combat gear, Martin writes, the Salvadoran command “committed a baseline tactical error.” On an asymmetric battlefield, he explains, “your visual profile dictates how you are targeted.” Entering a theater “completely blind to the local language, culture, and human terrain,” the foreigner’s “uniform ceases to be a symbol of state power – it becomes a high-visibility target marker.” The neighborhood fighters, Martin notes, don’t need to match the invaders’ technology. They “simply wait for predictable armored columns to enter their pre-planned kill zones.”

But Martin’s most important point is political, not tactical. Planners in Washington and San Salvador call their targets “gangs,” “criminals,” and “terrorists.” But they don’t know how people in Haiti’s popular neighborhoods where the Viv Ansanm was born see those fighters, nor, more importantly, how they see the GSF and now Salvadoran special forces flooding in. “To the population on the ground, these external units are viewed strictly as invaders,” Martin writes.

The foreign offensive, he argues, is propping up “an unrepresentative proxy government that contains zero elected officials and governs strictly by executive decree” – the government of the jet-setting Fils-Aimé. In doing so, it “forces a nationalist consolidation.” Rivalries among armed groups are “instantly erased by the presence of a foreign boot,” and the armed groups can now present their fight “as an indigenous defense of national sovereignty,” with the community becoming their “intelligence and logistical shield.”

Martin, in assessing what advantage the Viv Ansanm coalition might have, examines what he calls “the Spirit of 1804.” Haiti was “forged in the fire of the first successful slave revolution in human history,” he reminds the “armchair strategists.” When foreign troops arrive on foreign planes, “it does not matter what color uniform the external forces wear, or whether they travel north from San Salvador or south from Washington.” In Haiti’s collective memory, they are “instantly mapped onto the historical archetype of the oppressor,” and the local fighters are transformed “in the eyes of the community from regional actors into Warriors.”

His bottom line is blunt: “conventional forces only control what they can physically sit on, while local networks govern the terrain.” Far from saving Haiti’s de facto regime, “Bukele’s unilateral escalation has inadvertently accelerated the collapse of the proxy state’s legitimacy.” With elections indefinitely postponed, Martin concludes, “Bukele is attempting to enforce security from the top down to protect a hollow political framework that has completely run out of road.”

‘We are not afraid’
Martin’s prediction is already playing out. In a video released on Oct. 25, Joseph Wilson, better known as Lanmò San Jou (“Death doesn’t know what day it is coming”), the leader of the 400 Mawozo armed group which controls much of Croix-des-Bouquets, addressed Bukele directly. He invoked the name of Jean-Jacques Dessalines, the founding father who led Haiti’s revolutionary army to victory over Napoleon’s troops in 1803 and declared independence on Jan. 1, 1804.

Wilson said the four Salvadorans were already dead, killed by “an error” when they strayed into a neighboring group’s territory in an unknown vehicle, and denied that his men were involved. Had he captured them, he told Bukele, “you would have left El Salvador and come sit at the table with me. I would have taken them alive.” And his price would have been political: “I would have told you to remove all foreigners from Haiti,” he said. “Having foreigners here is not in our interest; they aren’t going to change anything for us here.”

Wilson also displayed three PNH cops held captive. All three criticized the de facto government for the attention it is lavishing on the Salvadorans while neglecting their own release. And Wilson made clear that his men would not run from the Salvadorans but would stand and fight, because, he said, they “are not afraid.”

Washington and the Haitian bourgeois press will dismiss such language as gangster bravado. But it is exactly the “nationalist consolidation” that Martin warns about. By sending in a foreign army under his personal command, Bukele has handed leaders like Wilson the mantle of Dessalines. Whatever one thinks of the Viv Ansanm, its leaders are now able to cast themselves, with growing credibility in the popular neighborhoods, as defenders of the nation against an invader, much as the Cacos did when they took up arms against the US Marine occupation that began in 1915.

Enter the Dominicans
That patriotic reaction is likely to grow sharper still with the appearance of Dominican soldiers alongside the Salvadorans.

At about 3:30 p.m. on Oct. 26, a correspondent for Live Tanbou Verite was at the Carrefour Marin in Croix-des-Missions, in the Chen Mechan neighborhood, just as a large firefight between the Salvadoran forces and Viv Ansanm fighters was getting underway. The correspondent saw a soldier in a Dominican military uniform step out of an armored vehicle. As the shooting became intense, the soldier climbed back into the tank.

This sighting flatly contradicts Dominican President Luis Abinader, who said on Oct. 26 that “the participation of Dominican personnel was never contemplated” in the international mission’s operations in Haiti.

But Abinader has made no secret of his political backing for Bukele’s adventure. “I identify with the position of President Nayib Bukele, which we must support: to defend the dignity and the life of those four Salvadorans who went to work for peace in the Republic of Haiti,” Abinader tweeted on Oct. 26. The day before, he had announced that he and Bukele had discussed “logistical and intelligence collaboration for operations against criminal gangs in Haiti.” He has also offered the GSF medical care for its wounded. “The relationship with President Bukele is very good,” he said on Oct. 26. And if Bukele wishes to visit the Haitian-Dominican border, Abinader told Diario Libre, “we would obviously receive him and give him all our support.”

Few things could inflame Haitian popular sentiment more than Dominican troops on Haitian soil. Haitians have not forgotten the 1937 Parsley Massacre, when dictator Rafael Trujillo’s troops slaughtered as many as 20,000 Haitians and Dominicans of Haitian descent, nor the 2013 court ruling that stripped tens of thousands of Dominicans of Haitian descent of their citizenship. And they live today with Abinader’s mass deportations of hundreds of thousands of Haitians, pregnant women and children included. A Dominican soldier stepping out of an armored car in Croix-des-Missions is the fulfillment of a long-standing nightmare, and a gift to Viv Ansanm recruiters.

‘No one is permitted to leave’
The scale and ferocity of the offensive is documented in a GSF Situation Report dated Oct. 26 and obtained by Haïti Liberté.

“The deployment of elite Salvadoran troops to rescue their kidnapped technicians has triggered fierce fighting, prompting the Haitian government to declare the situation an ‘absolute priority’ and leading to the immediate establishment of an international security cordon,” the report states.

“A contingent of 100 elite Salvadoran soldiers is conducting a massive sweep, supported by armored vehicles from the Haitian National Police (PNH) and the Salvadoran forces (GSF), throughout the strongholds of Santo, Marassa, Shada, and Croix-des-Bouquets,” the report continues. “NO ONE is permitted to leave without being screened.”

Note the confusion of command, where the “Salvadoran forces” are equated with the GSF. This is exactly what Martin warns about. The “elite” Salvadoran forces are leading the operation, merely getting “support” from the PNH, the only armed force (along with Haiti’s army) that the 1987 Haitian Constitution allows on the soil of the oldest republic in Latin America, and the GSF, the only foreign force recognized (but not directed) by the UN Security Council. Bukele’s troops are operating solely under his own authority. According to the Miami Herald, Bukele is having his troops “operate independently of the [GSF] mission, answering directly to his commander on the ground in Haiti,” while flights of soldiers and equipment, at least a dozen so far, keep landing “without prior notice.”

The report adds that the fighting has caused “the collapse of hospital operations” in the area. “To prevent a mass escape of armed criminals and an incursion into its territory – driven by the ferocity of the offensive – Dominican President Luis Abinader has ordered a total and absolute closure of the borders,” the SITREP (in military parlance) says. “The military has been deployed on high alert, and armed clashes have also been reported along the border.”

In other words, the international “cordon” is a military vise, with the Salvadorans, supported by the GSF and the PNH, squeezing from the west and the Dominican army sealing the east.

The cost of this operation is being paid, as always, by the people who live in these neighborhoods. Dozens of local residents have been killed in the fighting that the Salvadoran, GSF, and PNH assault has unleashed in and around Croix-des-Missions and Croix-des-Bouquets. (Haïti Liberté is unable to publish the videos and photographs of five innocent Haitian civilian victims of the Salvadoran/GSF attack due to their graphic nature, which would cause this article to be censored online, but they can be viewed by clicking Here, Here, Here, Here, and Here.)

The invaders are also taking losses: according to a highly placed source in the Viv Ansanm, 11 Chadian GSF soldiers were killed in battles after Oct. 18, but their deaths have not been announced by the force.

Meanwhile, the drone war being waged on the capital’s popular neighborhoods continues. Five drones were exploded in Belair on Oct. 25, and four soldiers of the Village de Dieu armed group, headed by Johnson “Izo” André, were killed.

Three armies against one
The result is a war without precedent in Haiti’s modern history. The Viv Ansanm is now fighting three different armies at once: a private one, Erik Prince’s Vectus Global, whose mercenaries operate the drones and armored car death-squads that have killed hundreds in the capital’s poor neighborhoods; a multinational one, the GSF, authorized by the UN Security Council but designed in Washington; and now a binational one, the Salvadoran expeditionary force, with Dominican support, at the very least.

None of these three forces answers to the Haitian people. Not one has been authorized by an elected Haitian official, because there are none left.

The ‘Shield of the Americas’
The Salvadoran-Dominican partnership in Haiti is not happening in a vacuum. On Oct. 26 and 27, Abinader hosted in Santo Domingo a conference of the Americas Counter Cartel Coalition (A3C), co-organized by the Dominican Defense Ministry and the US Southern Command (SOUTHCOM), whose commander, Marine Gen. Francis L. Donovan, opened the gathering alongside Abinader and US Ambassador Leah Francis Campos. Defense and security officials from 19 hemispheric nations attended to finalize “a strategic operational plan” and a “governance charter” for “combined operations” against “criminal networks,” according to the US Embassy. SOUTHCOM itself trumpeted the meeting on X.

The A3C was announced in March by Pete Hegseth, Trump’s “Secretary of War,” and the US Embassy describes it as “independent, but complementary” to the “Shield of the Americas,” the US-led military and political coalition that Trump launched on Mar. 7 in Doral, near Miami. Headquartered at SOUTHCOM, the Shield promises member states “increased access to US military equipment, training, and intelligence.” Among its founding members: El Salvador and the Dominican Republic. Bukele personally attended its launch.

So Bukele’s “rescue mission” and Abinader’s logistical and intelligence support are not improvised acts of neighborly solidarity. They are the first live-fire test of the Shield of the Americas, the vehicle through which Washington aims to militarize the Caribbean and Latin America under the banner of fighting “cartels” and “narco-terrorists.” That banner has already been used to justify lethal US strikes on boats in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific (there was another strike on Oct. 27) and the military campaign against Venezuela.

Haiti, where the Viv Ansanm has been labeled a “foreign terrorist organization” by Rubio’s State Department, is the next laboratory.

Rubio’s Haitian interests?
Which brings us back to Marco Rubio, the architect of both the GSF and the hemispheric crusade against “narco-terrorism.” Does he have more than a policy interest in Haiti?

According to a very reliable Haïti Liberté source in Haiti, Rubio’s longtime friend and former roommate, ex-Congressman David Rivera, told him that Rubio had 140 businesses in Haiti. Rivera said this in August 2019, during a lengthy meeting with our source in Haiti. Rivera was in the country, the source said, seeking to bribe then-President Jovenel Moïse into opening the Haitian market to a range of Dominican products. It was while pitching this scheme that Rivera spoke about Rubio’s business interests in Haiti.

Haïti Liberté has not been able to independently verify Rivera’s claim. But if Rubio, or people close to him, have significant commercial stakes in Haiti, that would give him a powerful incentive to back a military offensive to “clear” the country of the armed groups that the Haitian bourgeoisie and its foreign masters see as a threat to their hegemony, business interests, and power.

Rivera and Rubio go back a long way. Before Rivera served in Congress from 2011 to 2013, the two Florida Republicans shared a home in Tallahassee as they rose together through the state legislature, and they remained close allies afterward.

On Oct. 2, a federal judge in Miami sentenced Rivera to 10 years in federal prison for concealing a $50 million lobbying campaign on behalf of Venezuela’s government during Trump’s first term. Tapped by Maduro’s Foreign Minister Delcy Rodríguez, now Venezuela’s acting president, to get Washington to normalize relations, Rivera and a co-defendant, Esther Nuhfer, obtained a three-month, $50 million contract from an affiliate of the state oil company PDVSA. The two then “sought to manipulate influential friends, including Rubio,” the Associated Press reported (Rubio testified that Rivera never mentioned the contract). In the conspirators’ encrypted chat group, Maduro was the “bus driver” and Rubio was “Miss Clairol,” a play on rubio, Spanish for “blond.”

Prosecutors said Rivera hid the deal behind backdated documents and sham agreements, including one covering a $3.75 million payment to maintain his Venezuelan go-between’s luxury yacht. “He used his position of trust – and betrayed it consistently and repeatedly,” said Assistant US Attorney Roger Cruz.

It was not Rivera’s first brush with scandal. He was accused of secretly funding a Democratic spoiler candidate in a 2012 congressional race (the case was eventually dropped) and was investigated, though never charged, over a $1 million contract with a gambling company while a Florida legislator. In other words, the man our source describes as trying to buy access to Haiti’s National Palace in 2019 had a long track record of exactly that kind of dealing.

Rivera, a stalwart of Miami’s Cuban-American anti-communist establishment, did not work for Caracas out of any sympathy for the government of Nicolás Maduro. He kept the lobbying secret, prosecutors argued, precisely because it “would ruin Rivera’s reputation as an anti-communist stalwart.” Judge Melissa Damian denounced him for betraying his life’s mission. “There’s no dispute this money came from the Maduro regime,” she said. Or, as US Attorney Jason Reding Quiñones put it after the sentencing, “He sold his anti-communism to communists to fill his greed.” His lawyers have now applied for a presidential pardon from Trump.

The question for Haitians is whether the same greed that drove Rivera to Caracas, and to the Haitian National Palace in 2019, also lies behind the enthusiasm in Washington for the Salvadoran invasion of Haiti. Haïti Liberté’s questions to the State Department about what Rubio knew of Bukele’s deployment, and when, remain unanswered.

What is clear is that the Haitian people, once again, find foreign armies on their soil, in violation of their Constitution, fighting a war that they did not choose, to protect a government that they did not elect. As Chris Martin warns, history suggests how that might end.

(Haïti Liberté)

Kim Ives

+ posts

Journalist, documentary filmmaker, radio and television commentator.

Could El Salvador’s Bukele Be Haiti’s Savior?

The Salvadoran government dispatched more than 2,000 troops to Haiti this week in an extraordinary deployment on foreign soil

A Salvadoran gunner in a UH-1N Twin Huey helicopter during an aerial patrol over Port-au-Prince last month. Some Salvadoran troops are members of a U.N.-backed international force in Haiti.Credit...Michael Anthony Adams/The New York Times

The New York Times

By Frances Robles

Reporting from Florida

Oct. 30, 2026

In March 2024, when Haiti’s gangs had joined forces and parts of its capital were literally in flames, El Salvador’s president Nayib Bukele took to X and defiantly boasted: “We can fix it.”

Now, more than two and half years later, following the Oct. 18 abduction of four Salvadoran soldiers who were members of a United Nations-backed international force, Mr. Bukele is making his move.

In a step backed by the Trump administration, El Salvador sent more than 2,000 soldiers to Haiti this week, in what experts say is one of the largest bilateral military deployments to the island, one that threatens to escalate an already precarious security situation on the ground.

The extraordinary military operation in the Caribbean, outside the framework of a U.N.-backed mission, is highly unusual, raising questions about whether it represents a new, more aggressive form of intervention.

If successful, the move could raise Mr. Bukele’s international standing even further, as the leader who pulled Haiti out of crisis when other nations either refused to help or were incapable.

Experts, however, fear that Mr. Bukele’s reputation for a no-holds-barred approach to fighting illegal armed groups could result in large numbers of civilian casualties, escalating violence in a country that already has seen more than 5,000 killings this year.

President Nayib Bukele’s strategy for cracking down on gangs in El Salvador included mass incarceration in a high security prison known as CECOT, or the Terrorism Confinement Center.Credit...Fred Ramos for The New York Times

“The risks and the stakes are incredibly high,” said Romain Le Cour, the director of the Haiti Observatory at the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime. “Are Bukele and his troops becoming the vehicle for a new form of intervention, more direct and less constrained by multilateral rules, that allies of Washington carry out on its behalf?”

In a post in Creole on X on Thursday, Mr. Bukele threatened to “teach the gangs a lesson.”

In the post, which included a video showing soldiers getting on a plane and military gear apparently being loaded for transport, he added: “This is not an operation against the Haitian people, nor an invasion of Haiti.”

Mr. Bukele has gained worldwide renown because of his campaign to dismantle Salvadoran gangs, though critics say that has come at the cost of civil liberties.

Want to stay updated on what’s happening in El Salvador and Haiti? Sign up for Your Places: Global Update, and we’ll send our latest coverage to your inbox.

The Salvadoran leader, in his post, suggested that he can now transfer his strategy to Haiti and help wrest the country back from gangs, succeeding, as Mr. Bukele noted, where the international community has failed.

“We went through the same suffering that Haiti is going through today,” Mr. Bukele wrote. “But we managed to escape it.”

The quick deployment of thousands of Salvadoran soldiers follows a United Nations-backed mission called the Gang Suppression Force that has struggled for a year to reach a similar troop level.

Haiti now has not one, but two, international forces battling thousands of gang members who have seized control of much of the nation’s capital of Port-au-Prince — in addition to private military contractors from abroad armed with drones who work with the Haitian National Police.

The United Nations on Friday confirmed that the Salvadoran forces will not be part of the Gang Suppression Force already on the ground. But it remained unclear how long they would stay or whose command the Salvadoran troops would be under. Mr. Bukele’s office did not respond to a request for more details on his plans for Haiti.

Mr. Bukele said El Salvador was paying for up to 90 percent of the mission, though a spokesman for U.S. Southern Command said the Trump administration provided at least one flight to transport Salvadoran troops, but declined to provide more details.

The U.S. State Department did not respond to a request for more information. The Department of Defense declined to comment.

President Trump spoke to Mr. Bukele on Tuesday and expressed support for his efforts to find and save the four abducted Salvadoran military personnel in Haiti, according to a U.S. official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to detail the conversation between the two leaders.

The conversation was first reported on Friday by Axios.

Mr. Bukele is resting his credibility to assist Haiti on his history of cleaning up his small Central American country, which was once among the world’s most dangerous, and is now among its safest. A decade ago, El Salvador had a staggering homicide rate, but Mr. Bukele incarcerated more than 80,000 gang members, many of them after mass criminal trials.

In 2022, he sent 10,000 troops to seal off a town and hunt for gang members. A year later, he sent 5,000 soldiers to a city where a police officer had been killed.

On Wednesday, Prime Minister Alix Didier Fils-Aimé of Haiti released a statement welcoming the deployment.

“The Haitian Government expresses its solidarity with the Salvadoran military personnel and their families, and reaffirms its determination to work with its partners to restore security and stability in the country,” his office’s statement said. (His office did not respond to requests for further comment.)

The last foreign military deployment to Haiti outside an official U.N. mission was in 2004, when the United States, Canada and France sent troops after the military deposed President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, according to Jake Johnston, a researcher for the Center for Economic Policy Research who has been tracking El Salvador’s flights to Haiti.

It was El Salvador’s largest foreign deployment, he added, since the country’s so-called soccer war with Honduras — in 1969.

Having overlapping and competing forces on the ground could spell trouble for Haiti, he said.

“On paper, this looks like a nightmare for coordination,” Mr. Johnston said. “Stepping back, there is a huge risk that increased security operations lead to lots of death and destruction but do little to address the broader ecosystem of violence.”

A street in the gang stronghold of Cité Soleil, seen through the front window of an armored personnel carrier driven by members of the Gang Suppression Force last month in Port-au-Prince.Credit...Michael Anthony Adams/The New York Times

The Salvadoran deployment, experts said, is a blow to the U.N.-backed force, which has strict rules of engagement but has widely been viewed as too slow and timid.

The international mission did not respond to a request for comment.

Haiti has been in the throes of extraordinary levels of gang violence for at least five years. Its last elected president was assassinated in 2021, which sent the already volatile country into a spiral of violence. At least 22,000 people have been killed since.

In 2024, competing gangs teamed up in a coordinated effort to attack government institutions, such as police stations and prisons. Entire neighborhoods emptied out as people fled.

After an international police mission led by Kenya failed to quell the violence, the U.N. Security Council last year authorized the current force. Billed as an aggressive crime-fighting mission five times the size of the Kenyan-led mission and with arrest powers, it arrived in April.

But six months in, it has about 2,000 of its promised 5,500 soldiers, from Chad, Mongolia and several other nations. Its helicopter unit is staffed by Salvadorans.

The four abducted Salvadorans came under fire while driving through a gang stronghold and have not been seen since. Remains were found last week, but have not been confirmed to belong to the men.

Mr. Bukele initially sent several hundred special forces to help the Gang Suppression Force look for the men, who were aviation technicians. But it is unclear whether the U.N.-backed force has continued the search, which could explain Mr. Bukele’s frustration.

“All we want is for our four aviation technicians to return home,” Mr. Bukele wrote.

Robert Fatton Jr., a Haiti-born political scientist at the University of Virginia, said the new Salvadoran mission shows that the force managed by the U.N. has so far been “incapable” of neutralizing the gangs.

“The question is whether these troops can do what Bukele thinks they can do, and whether the Trump administration is outsourcing the Salvadorans to bring a modicum of order in Haiti,” Mr. Fatton said. “It seems clear that the Haitian government is not in charge of what is taking place in its own territory.”

Zolan Kanno-Youngs and Eric Schmitt contributed reporting from Washington.

Frances Robles is a Times reporter covering Latin America and the Caribbean. She has reported on the region for more than 25 years.

—

John A. Carroll, MD

www.haitianhearts.org

johnacarroll.substack.com

Analysis by Caitlin Stephen Hu

October 30, 2026

What could go wrong? For over a week, El Salvador has been quietly sending troops to Haiti, a project whose scale was only revealed publicly last night: More than 2,000 Salvadoran soldiers will be sent to the Caribbean nation, but their mission and mandate remain opaque.

The deployment is a wildcard in Port-au-Prince, a city of densely-inhabited hills where battle lines constantly shift between dozens of gangs and anti-gang groups, including foreign forces, neighborhood vigilantes, and mercenaries.

Two thousand soldiers is a significant arrival here. That’s more than Haiti’s entire army, and about a quarter of the urban footprint of the Haitian National Police. It’s about equal to the current staffing of the multinational UN-backed Gang Suppression Force (GSF) and far outnumbers the private military contractors on the Haitian government’s secretive “task force.”

But how do they fit into Haiti’s fractured security landscape? Who is paying for it? And what exactly is their mission? For now, the Salvadoran forces’ command structure has not been established, according to a source close to the matter.

Related article

Erik Prince speaks to CNN in Port-au-Prince, Haiti.

Brice Lainé/CNN

Exclusive: Inside Erik Prince’s secretive operation taking on Haiti’s gangs

On Thursday evening, Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele posted online in Haitian Creole, announcing that the deployment to Haiti is “nearly completed” and that “90% of the expenses” would be shouldered by El Salvador.

“This is not an operation against the Haitian people nor an invasion of Haiti… Our only goal is to bring our four aviation technicians back home. Furthermore, we intend to teach a lesson to the gangs,” he wrote.

“Perhaps future generations of Haitians will remember us as friends who once came to help,” he added.

The missing air technicians, catalyst for this deployment, disappeared earlier this month after an apparent gang ambush. They had been working with the GSF in a noncombat role, according to Salvadoran officials. In the immediate aftermath, 100 special forces were sent to Haiti to assist in search and rescue operations — a precursor to the now expanded force.

Ten days later, local sources say it is unlikely that the missing four can be recovered. If Salvadoran forces cannot achieve that, they’ll likely seek other wins, perhaps joining one of several existing security forces for an extended push against the gangs in retaliation.

A communiqué released by Haitian interim leader Alix Didier Fils-Aimé on Wednesday night described a phone call with Bukele about the deployment and operational cooperation “within the framework of the GSF.”

A clue to their plans may eventually lie with the troops’ physical location; at time of reporting, the Salvadorans were not staying at the main GSF base in Port-au-Prince.

Related article

Armored police vehicles that are part of the Gang Suppression Force (GSF) patrol near the airport in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, Tuesday, Oct. 20, 2026. (AP Photo/Odelyn Joseph)

Odelyn Joseph/AP

El Salvador sends troops to Haiti to rescue four service members

Bukele has argued that he has unique bona fides to address Haiti’s crisis. His government’s own hardline crackdown on gangs back home did restore peace to what was once the most violent country in the Western Hemisphere — though critics highlight his use of mass incarceration and accusations of widespread abuses.

In a message posted to X last week, he addressed the gangs in Haitian Creole: “There is still time to avoid this,” Bukele said. “Return our four countrymen to us alive and unharmed and everything will return to the way it was before the kidnapping.”

Most residents of Port-au-Prince would rather see dramatic change, after years of brutal gang violence that have driven over a million people from their homes. Just two hours from Florida’s coast, the city is terrorized by frequent gang kidnappings, rape and arson, all broadcast on social media.

On Thursday, Haitians nationwide were reminded again of just how much insecurity has put civil life on pause, with the news that long-deferred presidential elections are postponed yet again until next year.

But experts warn about the dangers of additional players on a crowded urban battlefield. “The situation is volatile and could become more violent with innocent people being harmed,” Bill O’Neill, the UN’s human rights expert for Haiti, said.

Romain LeCoeur, Haiti expert at the Global Initiative against Transnational Organized Crime, echoed the concern. “Haiti’s security response no longer rests on a single strategy, but on a juxtaposition of multilateral, national and private actors, each operating under its own rules,” he said.

“As long as no one can say who decides and who is accountable, every operation risks adding to the confusion rather than to security.”

Reporting contributed by CNN’s Merlin Delcid in El Salvador.

—

John A. Carroll, MD

www.haitianhearts.org

johnacarroll.substack.com

Haitian Americans

Facebook

October 28, 2026

BREAKING: 1,000 SALVADORAN TROOPS REPORTEDLY DEPLOYED TO HAITI — BUT WHO IS IN COMMAND?

El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele has reportedly deployed approximately 1,000 troops to Haiti following the disappearance of four Salvadoran aviation personnel during an October 18 gang ambush in Croix-des-Bouquets.

According to the Miami Herald, military aircraft have transported Salvadoran soldiers and equipment into Port-au-Prince, with U.S. aircraft reportedly assisting in the operation.

HERE’S WHERE THINGS GET COMPLICATED:

The Miami Herald reports that Bukele wants his additional troops to operate independently of the international Gang Suppression Force (GSF), answering directly to their own Salvadoran commander.

This raises serious questions about Haiti’s sovereignty and the legal authority of foreign military operations on Haitian soil.

QUESTIONS THAT NEED ANSWERS:

Has Haiti’s transitional government formally authorized this independent deployment?

Will these soldiers operate under a bilateral agreement or a separate military command?

Who will oversee their operations and ensure accountability?

How long will they remain in Haiti?

While Haitian authorities previously acknowledged the disappearance of the four Salvadorans, the full command arrangements governing the reported reinforcements have not been publicly clarified.

WHAT DO YOU THINK? Should foreign troops be permitted to operate independently in Haiti, or should all military operations require direct Haitian oversight?

Sources: Miami Herald | Reuters

#HaitianAmericans #HaitiNews #NayibBukele #ElSalvador #HaitiSecurity

—

John A. Carroll, MD

www.haitianhearts.org

johnacarroll.substack.com

The nighttime migratory hunt is terrifying: they break into homes, smash doors, and drag people away by force. This brings back memories of the days of slavery! They even take away minors, no matter where their parents are.

Cañeros Organizados

@EsclavizadosRD

Somos una organización que luchamos en contra de la esclavitud posmoderna y la explotación laboral que son víctimas los cañeros haitianos en RD.

I am sure glad nothing like this could ever happen in the US!

John A. Carroll, MD

www.haitianhearts.org

johnacarroll.substack.com

Jamaica Observer

October 26, 2026

US-based Haitian group renews call to halt deportations to Haiti

SAN DIEGO, United States (CMC)—The California-based Haitian Bridge Alliance (HBA) on Monday renewed its call on the Donald Trump administration to halt the deportation of Haitians, strongly condemning the removals.

The group also called on the US Senate to restore Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for over 300,000 Haitians whose TPS status the United States government refused to renew, subjecting Haitians to deportation.

HBA executive director Guerline Jozef told the Caribbean Media Corporation (CMC) that the administration continues to deport Haitians at a steady pace, the latest reportedly being on October 22.

“HBA reiterates its longstanding call for an immediate suspension of deportations to a country devastated by gang violence, mass displacement and institutional collapse. Nearly 1.5 million people are internally displaced in Haiti, where armed groups continue to perpetrate killings, kidnappings, and attacks against civilians.

Jozef alluded to UN reports, where “thousands of girls and women have been raped across” the country.

She also said that, recently, four Salvadoran soldiers were kidnapped in Haiti and that, a few months prior, several high-level officials within the Haitian government were also kidnapped.

“Despite these conditions, the Trump administration terminated Haiti’s Temporary Protected Status and employment authorisation designation effective July 27, 2026, jeopardising protections for more than 300,000 Haitian nationals living in the United States and who have contributed to our nation’s economy,” Jozef said.

“The Trump administration knows Haiti is not safe; yet, it continues to deport people into a humanitarian catastrophe. Stripping hundreds of thousands of Haitians of Temporary Protected Status while sending families into conditions of violence and instability is a profound assault on human dignity. Haitian lives are not disposable.

“Black immigrant lives are not expendable. We call on the Senate to act immediately and on this administration to end these deportations. No immigration policy should come at the expense of human life.”

Jozef noted that in April this year, the US House of Representatives, under the leadership of Democratic Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts, with bipartisan support, passed legislation to extend TPS protections for Haitian nationals.

She said Senators Edward Markey and Lisa Blunt Rochester subsequently introduced S. 4814 to provide renewed TPS protections, which currently has 46 co-sponsors.

“Despite these efforts, the Senate has yet to enact legislation safeguarding Haitian families from deportation. HBA urges the Senate to immediately pass legislation restoring TPS protections for Haitian nationals and calls on the Department of Homeland Security to suspend all deportations to Haiti and other countries facing humanitarian and insecurity crises,” Jozef said.

“The United States must uphold its domestic and international legal obligations, including protections against returning individuals to persecution, torture, or other qualifying serious harm.

“The Trump administration cannot credibly deny the dangers facing Haitian nationals when its own government has repeatedly acknowledged those very risks,” Jozef said, noting that the US Department of State maintains its level 4 travel warning for Haiti, Do Not Travel, restricts the movement of American diplomatic personnel, and acknowledges widespread killings, kidnappings and armed violence.

She said federal aviation restrictions further underscore the severity of the security crisis in Haiti.

“Yet, Haitian nationals continue to face deportation to the same country the United States warns its own citizens not to enter. If Haiti is too dangerous for American citizens and diplomatic personnel, the administration must explain why it continues to send Haitian families into those same conditions.”

She also said the Trump administration, “through its own actions on the international stage, in September 2025, co-sponsored a United Nations Security Council resolution authorising a multinational force of up to 5,550 personnel to confront escalating gang violence, which the US will finance.”

Jozef said the Chadian and the Salvadoran governments have already deployed troops in Haiti under the United Nations Security Council-approved resolution allowing the Gang Suppression Force (GSF) to operate in the French-speaking Caribbean Community (Caricom) country until March next year.

John A. Carroll, MD

www.haitianhearts.org

johnacarroll.substack.com

The Killing of an American Town

There’s no greater distillation of the Trump project than Springfield, Ohio.

Slate

By Alexander Sammon

Oct 26, 2026

Part 1

The windows of the Haitian Support Center in Springfield, Ohio, were papered over from the inside, the blinds were drawn, the door locked, and the doorbell camera running. A volunteer guard stood watch from within, peering out into the parking lot, scanning for activity, opening the door just one body’s width to let people slide in, or out, as needed.

There were fewer people entering or leaving than there ever had been before. A lot fewer—at the HSC, at the St. Vincent de Paul on Raffensperger Avenue, everywhere. Some were trying not to be seen. Many were, in a word, disappearing.

Around a square formation of plastic folding tables sat about a dozen Haitian immigrants, still here, old women and men, young parents and children. Haitian Creole was spoken quietly, intermittently. In the corner of the room there were household items, food and water and diapers and paper towels.

Nearly everyone sat in silence, looking down, eyes fixed on phones. Some were watching TikToks to pass the time. Others were scanning QR codes and filling out forms. “Now Hiring” flashed on one man’s screen as he scrolled. He stopped, and his finger hovered as he looked at the link. But on July 27, when the Department of Homeland Security revoked temporary protected status for the 300,000 Haitians living in the United States, it had canceled work permits, along with permission to live in the country legally. So he kept scrolling.

James Fleurijean, the center’s office assistant and interpreter, paced back and forth from the main room to his small side office, fielding questions. Fleurijean had initially come to Springfield enticed by a recruitment bonus from Amazon.

Almost nobody was allowed to work anymore, which meant they needed money for rent, food assistance, and more. Their driver’s licenses were no longer valid, so they needed transportation, and help getting kids to and from school. Basically everything. And even if they could work, or drive, or leave the house, there was fear of getting picked up by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, sent to detention centers, and deported to Haiti.

This afternoon was mostly about arranging rides, which departed Springfield every weekday morning. Some people had been summoned two hours away to ICE offices in Cincinnati, or Blue Ash, to submit to tracking devices. Some were summoned three hours away to court hearings in Cleveland, the date and time of which changed frequently. The penalty for missing a court date was automatic deportation, and there was always the risk that one might show up at an ICE facility and be arrested anyway, but still they showed up. Now letters had been arriving mandating children as young as 4 years old to report to ICE facilities to set up monitoring. “They don’t have a choice,” Fleurijean said. “They are compliant to the law.”

I sat in the plastic folding chair in the office, across from Fleurijean’s desk, where a few weeks prior, a 20-year-old named Pierre Damas Bel had sat, asking for help. Bel, who graduated from Springfield High in May, had been fitted with an ankle monitor just before his freshman year of college. Usually, those devices were saved for heads of households, and not appended to youths and minors. “He was very young to have it,” Fleurijean said. Bel had visited the ICE facility in Cincinnati multiple times, hoping to get it off, but had no luck.

Bel had agreed to talk to the New York Times about the situation, he told Fleurijean, which worried him. “He was so timid,” Fleurijean said. “We didn’t want to put a spotlight on him.”

Initially, Bel had planned to play soccer at nearby private Wittenberg University, but the ankle monitor had put a wrench in that, so he had swapped to public Wright State, with its ROTC program, where his immigration status had played at least some role in his being denied a uniform. He was despondent. “He told his father again and again that he was not coming back,” Fleurijean said. Did he mean to Haiti? Or school? Or Springfield?

And then Bel flung himself in front of a tractor trailer on Interstate 70, on Aug. 31, and died.

And so there was one extra thing to get straightened out this week: planning for his funeral, which was to be held the following weekend. “The whole community is devastated since then,” Fleurijean said.

As we spoke, another man in an ankle monitor came into the office. The monitors were becoming less common since Bel’s suicide, I was told. Now ICE had begun monitoring pregnant women via wrist monitors, and others via an app on the phone.

Where was everyone? All across Springfield, one of the largest Haitian populations in America, between 12,000 and 20,000 people, there were few signs of them. “It’s like the end of the world hits,” said Devon Hendricks, a content creator and videographer who has covered the Haitian population in Springfield for multiple years. “Like, where the fuck did all these people go?” It was not the first time Springfield had been depopulated: From the 1970s to the early 2010s, the city dwindled from over 80,000 to fewer than 60,000, a net loss of 20,000, owing to factory closures as the town deindustrialized. Now it was happening again.

One place they were: in jail. Haitian detentions in four Ohio jails had shot up more than 140 percent in the first five weeks since the end of their protected status, according to a report from the Ohio Immigrant Alliance. And so the nurses were absent from the area’s many nursing homes, and the third shifts at the auto parts manufacturing plants had basically gone dark.

All across town, they were behind drawn blinds and locked doors and padlocked gates. One auto repair shop, which its owner asked that I not identify, looked closed, though it was still open. They had pulled a truck around in front of the entrance, leaving just a few inches for the employees to slip in and out of the garage, invisible from the street.

“We have this truck blocking the entry—we’ve got to stay on our tippy-toes,” a mechanic named Denson, who started out at Amazon, told me. When the truck wasn’t there, they would draw the heavy metal gate closed and lock it, or else pay a scout to sit out front watching, relaying surveillance intel when needed.

Those changes were not precautionary. ICE agents had picked up a man leaving the shop a few weeks prior. “One of my customers,” Denson said. ICE had been patrolling the neighborhood, he told me, and when the man drove away from the shop with his vehicle fixed, there were five cars on him within a minute.

Hence the renovation. Not wanting to put their customers at risk, they’d begun towing people’s cars from their homes to the shop, and driving them back once the repairs were complete. “We’re doing it for free. I try to help,” Denson said.

But it was getting expensive. People were missing work, and had been delinquent on repairs, and late on bills, calling in favors everywhere, even for the essentials. There was no room to make up the towing costs with additional charges, because who had extra money to pay? Meanwhile, Denson told me, nearly everyone had converted all their money to cash, fearful that they could get locked up or deported at any moment, and lose access to checking accounts. “People don’t leave money in accounts anymore, which means that all the scheduled auto payments have ceased,” he said. “In six years in business, this has been the hardest for sure. The hole is getting deeper.

“We are waiting for the election,” Denson told me, though none of them could vote.

There were still flyers around the neighborhood celebrating the grand opening of the Lantern Bar, which had been scheduled for July 25. “Good Food. Good Drinks. Good Vibes,” they promised.

Two days later, the end of protected status for many Haitians became official.

“We opened on a Saturday,” said Keket, the Haitian woman who owned the bar, along with a restaurant nearby, and had spent nearly five years in a lengthy renovation. “And we had ICE on Monday.”

So they weren’t at the bar either. It had remained open, but there was little activity. That Friday night, only one patron came through, and so Keket closed early. There were not a lot of people coming, she said. “There are a lot of people leaving.”

Some went to Canada, though that was hard to pull off without immediate family already there. One went to Mexico. Those who had shown up to Springfield with money, or worked hard enough to buy into the town’s dilapidated housing stock, or founded their own businesses—those who had perhaps overinvested in their adopted community—were now tasked with the unenviable job of trying to sell. Maybe they were foolish for thinking that their protected status would last longer, even though immigrants from El Salvador have had TPS for 25 years thanks in part to an earthquake and gang violence, and Haiti had experienced worse versions of both of those, and more recently. In October, the Trump administration extended TPS for Sudanese and Ukrainian immigrants.

Some of the Haitians were already back on the island: some voluntarily, others deported. Part of the justification from the Trump administration for the withdrawal of TPS was that Haiti was safe enough to return to. But the Trump-run Federal Aviation Administration announced on Sept. 2, six weeks after ending protected status, that it was forbidding all American airlines from landing in Port-au-Prince for at least another six months, due to the risk of gang violence. Three separate commercial planes were shot trying to land in late 2024.

ICE deportation flights were being routed through the northern city of Cap-Haïtien, where planes could plausibly land without taking gunfire. Beyond that, there were no assurances. “I’ve heard stories that people are getting off the planes and literally sprinting down the runway for their lives,” said Carl Ruby, a pastor at the Central Christian Church of Springfield. Flight log data shows that ICE has now ramped up deportation flights to once a week: Every Thursday, a new planeful arrives.

“People are sleeping in the street,” said Fleurijean, of the Haitian Support Center. The gang violence was bad and everywhere, which meant that transportation between cities was dangerous, sometimes impossible. The Trump administration had publicized a pledge of $2,600 to anyone who voluntarily deports, which had turned into a bounty: Gangs expected recently returned Haitians to have thousands in cash on hand, minimum, and sought them out accordingly. At least 47 people were killed in one gang massacre in the town of Kenscoff in late August.

Fleurijean told me the people he’d spoken to had gotten the equivalent of only $65, and were now stuck in a city filling up with people after each flight. “They are living like hell down there.” Ruby had heard stories even worse. One of his parishioners recently told him that his brother had been burned alive by gangs.

Another place people weren’t: at the Southern Village Shopping Center. On Sunday nights, in the past, the mall could be rowdy. There was a Haitian barbershop, and a clothing store run by Haitians, a Christian church with French signage, a restaurant, and a car wash. All of them were closed but the restaurant and the clothing store, which now no one entered anyway. Cars rumbled into the parking lot, jostled by potholes, but nearly everyone went into the Dollar General. A small group gathered out front, smoking cigarettes in front of the Bureau of Motor Vehicles building, none of them Haitian. A purple news rack in front of the Dollar General advertised: Free Naloxone.

For a while, Keket Bongou restaurant, owned by the same Keket as the Lantern Bar, had been closed for ICE activity. But it couldn’t stay closed forever. It was dimly lit, and no one was dining inside. I sat out front through the whole dinner service. From 6:30 to 7:30, one man picked up a large to-go order; a woman came in for a small to-go order; a third man took an order to go. And that was it.

I went inside and spoke to a man named Lourdy, who was sitting in a booth. He wasn’t working per se, just helping out Keket, a friend. “Weekends used to be really good,” he said. “Now it’s dead.” For days, he said, he had seen ICE out in front of the restaurant, chasing people around the parking lot, though they weren’t here now. DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin said that immigration authorities arrested 380 people in Springfield in raids beginning in mid-August. One employee of a nearby store, forbidden from speaking to the press by her employer, guessed she’d seen 30 people taken from the area around this shopping mall alone.

When would ICE come back? everyone wondered. When would the customers?

Haitian life was disappearing in Springfield.

“If I get that letter to go in for an ankle monitor, then they have you. I’ll just buy my ticket back to Haiti,” Lourdy told me, a place he hadn’t been since 2006. “I’m not scared.” Then he changed his mind. “Because of the gangs, I am scared. Because they can kill you anytime, anywhere, they control the government.”

Then, near 8 p.m., an older, white couple entered the restaurant. Lourdy got up and brought them menus.

Part II on Wednesday.

—

John A. Carroll, MD

www.haitianhearts.org

johnacarroll.substack.com

Luis Abinader warns Haitian gangs: “If they come near, they will have a very bad time.”

Dominican Today

October 25, 2026

The President of the Republic, Luis Abinader, reported this Saturday that he held a conversation with his counterpart from El Salvador, Nayib Bukele, to coordinate logistical and intelligence support related to operations against armed gangs in Haiti, amid tensions arising from the disappearance of four Salvadoran citizens in Haitian territory.

In statements to the press, the Dominican president assured that the Government has significantly increased security in the border area, especially in the south of the country, given the violence affecting the neighboring nation.

“We have reinforced the border, especially the southern border, which is where the gangs operate. And we have reinforced it both in personnel and also in armored vehicles and equipment,” Abinader stated.

by Taboola

U.S. temporarily pauses immigrant visa appointments worldwide

The head of state recalled that the Dominican Republic has declared Haitian gangs as terrorist organizations and warned that Dominican authorities are prepared to respond to any attempt at incursion into national territory.

“We will treat them as they are, as terrorists, if they approach the border,” he stated.

Abinader reveals conversation with Nayib Bukele

One of the president’s main announcements was his communication with Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele to address the security situation in Haiti.

Abinader explained that the Dominican Republic maintains contact with the group in charge of gang-suppression operations and that his administration is willing to collaborate through logistical assistance and intelligence sharing.

“Today we are in communication with the gang suppression group, collaborating with them, and today I also spoke with President Bukele to collaborate logistically in terms of intelligence with the operations they are going to carry out,” he said.

The president did not offer details on the specific scope of the cooperation, nor did he specify what resources the Dominican Republic would make available for the operations.

They are reinforcing surveillance with airplanes, drones, and armored vehicles

Given the security situation in Haiti, Abinader assured that the Dominican Armed Forces maintain deployed human and technological resources to protect national sovereignty.

The measures include increasing military personnel, deploying armored vehicles, and using drones and aircraft to monitor movements near the border.

“We have planes flying over the border, we have armored vehicles nearby, and we also have drones,” he explained.

The president insisted that his administration’s priority is to prevent the violence of Haitian criminal organizations from spreading into Dominican territory.

He also clarified that, up to the time of his statements, these groups had not approached the border, nor were there any indications that this was their immediate intention.

“If they come near, they’re going to have a very bad time.”

Abinader issued a direct warning to armed organizations operating in Haiti, assuring that Dominican authorities will respond to any threat to border security.

“These terrorists are sure that if they go near there, they’re going to have a very, very bad time,” he said.

The president reiterated that the military and security institutions are prepared to face any eventuality.

His statements come amid concerns about the presence of armed gangs in various parts of Haiti and the announced operations to combat them.

Government sees no signs of a new wave of migration

When asked whether the Haitian situation might lead to more citizens attempting to cross into the Dominican Republic, the president assured that, for the moment, authorities have not identified any signs of mass displacement toward the border.

“No, so far we have no signs of that nature,” he replied.

However, he indicated that the Government will continue to monitor developments, particularly in light of planned operations against positions occupied by armed groups.

“What we see is that several special points where those terrorists are located in Haiti are going to be attacked,” he said.

Abinader concluded by reiterating that the Dominican Republic will continue to monitor the situation in the neighboring country and that the border reinforcement responds to the need to prevent any threat to national territory.

The president’s statements highlight the Dominican government’s priority of border security and its offer of logistical and intelligence cooperation, without announcing the direct participation of Dominican troops in operations within Haiti.

During the last several days, hundreds of Salvadoran soldiers have been flown to Haiti to help find four Salvadoran technicians who were recently kidnapped by a gang in Haiti.

The president of El Salvador has threatened the Haitian gang that all four Salvadoran men better be returned alive. And if they are not returned safe and sound, the Haitian gangs will suffer.

The president of El Salvador met with Donald Trump over the weekend to get his blessing (and helicopters) for the Salvadoran invasion of Haiti. And Trump was glad to comply so he can continue to deport Haitians from the US to Haiti.

I asked AI to write a few paragraphs on the Salvadoran vs. Haitian gang problem and the deportation of Haitians.

Below the AI written paragraphs is an article by Alexia Gardner on the cruelty of deporting Haitians written in June 2026.

jc

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El Salvador, Haitian Gangs, and Deportation—

Google AI

The ongoing deployment of international forces, including Salvadoran troops under the UN-approved Gang Suppression Force (GSF), highlights that Haiti remains in a state of active warfare. Turning a country into an active combat zone makes mass deportations a violation of basic humanitarian principles. Rather than indicating stability, the presence of Salvadoran forces underscores the severity of the crisis. This reality was starkly demonstrated when armed gangs ambushed and abducted Salvadoran personnel. In response, Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele launched localized military rescue operations. Returning civilians to areas where international militaries are actively engaging entrenched gangs in heavy gunfire and helicopter-supported sweeps places deportees directly in the line of fire.

Furthermore, sending individuals back to Haiti under current conditions creates immense logistical and structural dangers, both for the deportees and the ongoing military mission. Gangs currently control an estimated 80% to 90% of the capital, Port-au-Prince. This control has severely eroded basic infrastructure, restricted access to medical care, and forced over 1.3 million people into internal displacement. The local government remains entirely unequipped to safely reintegrate or protect returning citizens. Additionally, introducing influxes of deportees into an unstable territory strains critical resources and risks complicating tactical operations. GSF command has explicitly warned local residents to stay indoors to avoid ongoing clashes.

Finally, carrying out deportations at this time directly conflicts with international legal frameworks regarding human rights and refugee protection. International human rights law binds nations to the principle of non-refoulement. This principle strictly prohibits the return of individuals to a country where they face a clear risk of torture, systemic violence, or death. Despite domestic adjustments to Temporary Protected Status (TPS), deporting Haitians while foreign militaries are actively deployed to combat an overwhelming security vacuum fails to acknowledge the lack of safety on the ground. Pausing removals is a necessary measure until international interventions successfully restore basic state governance and ensure civilian safety.

—

The Cruelty of Deporting Haitians: Reflections on Country Conditions

June 24, 2026

US Committee for Refugees and Immigrants

By: Alexia Gardner

Port-au-Prince, Haiti’s capital, is a sprawling metropolis. Home to nearly two million residents, in 2025 it had only one working fire hydrant.

I came across this statistic while researching Haiti’s humanitarian crisis for an upcoming country conditions report (we last wrote one on Haiti in 2024). In speaking with experts both in Haiti and neighboring countries, I was struck by how precarious daily life in Haiti is. Port-au-Prince’s singular fire hydrant is symbolic of both the routine cruelties and extreme acts of violence that Haiti’s citizens are subjected to.

Fire hydrants are crucial to public safety. Without them, firefighters do not have the infrastructure or access to water needed to adequately extinguish most fires. Haiti’s firefighters are asked not only to fight fires without water, but to do so in a climate embroiled in violence and insecurity. Haiti’s gangs—who control an estimated 80-90% of the capital—are known to blaze hospitals, homes, and cultural centers.

Firefighters are called to service in zones where gangs actively lay siege. They do so without armored vehicles or bulletproof vests. They are often ambushed, sometimes killed. Some of Haiti’s fire departments have stopped being able to service areas of the country, the roads blocked by gangs.

Haiti’s deteriorating infrastructure and public order reflect years of political instability, institutional erosion, and insecurity. The assassination of President Jovenel Moïse in July 2021 deepened the country’s political crisis, while armed gangs were able to expand their control under intensified violence, particularly in and around the capital. More than 1.5 million people have been displaced. At least 16,000 people have been killed.

Gang violence in Haiti is designed to inflict as much pain as possible. The perpetrators of this violence have no consideration for vulnerable populations, like children and the elderly. Hospitals, for example, are often attacked. In one incident, gangs shot up the neonatal unit at a hospital, firing at the incubators and injuring newborn babies. In 2024, a gang massacred 207 people, targeting elderly Vodou practitioners in Port-au-Prince’s Cité Soleil neighborhood. The gang’s leader wrongly blamed them for the death of his son, and extracted retribution with impunity. In another incident, a gang member ripped a baby from their mother’s arms, throwing the child—alive—into a fire. The mother wandered around in shock for two days, eventually dying from the trauma at a police station.

These stories are not exceptional, but representative of the collapse of law and order in Haiti, of the violence that haunts daily life. Haiti’s humanitarian crisis is comparable to a civil war in its scale of suffering, yet it receives little if any international attention of late.

Despite this, Haiti’s story is not one of victimhood. Haiti is a country with a long history of resistance. After a successful rebellion against French colonial rule, it became the first Black republic in the early 1800s. France, however, required the new nation to pay for its freedom. Facing war and a loss of the country’s freedom as the alternative, Haiti’s then President was forced to agree to compensate the slave masters they had overthrown for the value of their “lost property.” In real terms, the sum amounts to a $21 billion USD loss. Many scholars credit this ransom—which at one point ate up three-quarters of the national budget—as a driving force underlying Haiti’s ongoing humanitarian crisis.

Migration is its own form of resistance. Hundreds of thousands of Haitians have left the country in search of a safer future than the one wrought by the legacy of colonialism and foreign intervention. They cross the Caribbean in crowded boats, risking interdiction at sea and return by the U.S. Government. They are the inheritors of the rebellion that founded their country, putting their lives on the line in aspirations of freedom.

Haitian asylum seekers are not asking to be saved: they are asking us to respect their human right to seek safety and opportunity elsewhere. But recent decisions of the U.S. Government, including the termination of Haitians’ Temporary Protected Status (TPS), threaten that right.

At the end of June 2026, the U.S. Supreme Court will decide on the future of Haiti’s TPS. Depending on how the court rules, it could impact millions beyond just Haitians. If the Court decides in favor of the U.S. Government, hundreds of thousands of Haitians could be stripped of their right to live and work in the United States. Deporting them would be a violation of international law. Citing states’ non-refoulement obligations not to return people to a place where their life would be threatened, United Nations’ officials have urged states not to return people to Haiti.

Removing people to a place where they could face persecution or serious harm is both illegal and immoral. It also represents the same logic that forced Haiti to pay France for its freedom. It is a logic that denies Haitians their humanity and refuses to reckon with the terror of living in constant fear.

It is long past time that the international community stop asking Haitians to survive atrocity after atrocity and instead respect their dignity. Protecting their right to seek asylum and find safety is a crucial first step.

If you have expertise on country conditions in Haiti – through lived experience or professional credentials– I would love to chat with you! We are also looking to talk with Haitian immigrants based in the U.S. Please email agardner@refugees.org if you are interested.

—

John A. Carroll, MD

www.haitianhearts.org

johnacarroll.substack.com

Americas|

Ambush of Salvadoran Soldiers Escalates Haiti’s Anti-Gang Mission

With four soldiers missing, Haiti’s new Gang Suppression Force, already off to a rocky start, is facing its first crisis.

The New York Times

By Frances Robles

Frances Robles spent 12 days in Haiti, including three embedded with the Gang Suppression Force.

Oct. 23, 2026

The skies above the slums and hills of Port-au-Prince are buzzing with helicopters.

Some of them are manned by a team of Salvadoran soldiers, medics and technicians who fly with machine guns at the ready in case they are fired upon.

The Salvadorans are deployed to Haiti as part of an international mission called the Gang Suppression Force aimed at eradicating rampant gang violence. Often tasked with evacuating the injured and transporting soldiers over gang territory, the Salvadorans once flew across the country to pick up a Sri Lankan soldier who had broken his legs.

The Salvadoran contingent in the U.N.-backed force is now the focal point of a high-stakes rescue operation after four of its members were ambushed on Sunday and went missing. Hundreds of Salvadoran special forces are expected to arrive in Haiti in the coming days, according to a person familiar with the matter who was not authorized to speak publicly.

The episode marks a critical flashpoint in the Gang Suppression Force’s deployment, quickly escalating what critics worried was a slow, underwhelming start to the mission. With El Salvador’s president, Nayib Bukele, warning of a severe military response if his soldiers are not returned alive, the U.N.-backed mission threatens to become a showdown between Haiti’s armed groups and El Salvador’s contentious leader.

For the first time, the understaffed Gang Suppression Force, known as the G.S.F., is conducting operations in Croix-des-Bouquets, a town outside the capital where the Salvadorans were abducted that is one of the country’s most entrenched gang strongholds.

“I think this is a wake up call,” said Louis-Henri Mars, senior adviser of the Institute for Research and Action for Peace, a peace-building organization in Port-au-Prince, the capital. “Wake up call for the international community, for the U.S., for everybody: ‘Hey, we’ve been fooling around here, and those guys are not fooling around. Let’s get it on.’”

The New York Times spent three days last month with the international force, including with the Salvadoran helicopter unit. Troops from a Chadian contingent conducted patrols in armored personnel carriers. The commander of the international mission is from Mongolia.

But the force has been dogged by late deployments and logistics problems, which experts say have led gangs to meet the mission’s arrival with a collective shrug.

Haiti’s gangs control many parts of Port-au-Prince, forcing residents to flee some neighborhoods that have become no man’s lands. In others, gangs are so entrenched that even the police do not dare enter.

More than 22,000 people have been killed in a spiral of gang violence that worsened since the assassination of Haiti’s president five years ago — more than 5,000 so far this year alone. Gangs, once controlled by powerful elites and politicians, outgrew their overseers and banded together, taking over major roads and entire communities.

Touring a former school that the G.S.F. had cleared of gangs, Maj. Tahir Bahar, of Chad, acknowledged that his troops faced a steep learning curve: They’re used to deserts, not cramped urban terrain.

Expectations from Haitians are high, but he promised improvements.

“They want results,” Maj. Bahar said. “We must do it. I cannot promise a timeline.”

Haiti’s ability to hold cleared areas remains a critical obstacle for long-term results, including elections that had been scheduled for December that many here consider an extremely unrealistic goal. The school, in the Tabarre neighborhood of Port-au-Prince, is an area so dangerous that it still lacks residents and basic services.

“We need someone to come in after us,” Maj. Bahar said. “The civilians want to come back. They need electricity, and they need schools. We cannot bring electricity.”

The G.S.F. arrived in April with a mandate to take the fight to the gangs and take back control. Unlike a previous international initiative known as the Multinational Security Support mission, it would be five times larger, conduct intelligence-led operations, have arrest powers and work independently without having to coordinate with the Haitian National Police.

It is also funded by contributions to a dedicated U.N. trust fund. Expected to cost about $400 million a year, the fund has received $194 million, according to U.N. records.

A Chadian member of the Gang Suppression Force watching the road ahead as his armored personnel carrier heads out on patrol in the gang stronghold of Cité Soleil, in Port-au-Prince.Credit...Michael Anthony Adams/The New York Times

The mission is supposed to have 5,500 soldiers, with contributions from countries around the world. Six months later, it only recently reached 2,000 troops, from six nations.

Troop contributions have been delayed, and moving people, vehicles and equipment across the world has proved a challenge.

The international force has cleared gang roadblocks, seized weapons and regularly conducts patrols in downtown Port-au-Prince, freeing up the Haitian National Police to respond to serious outbreaks of violence.

But of 26 arrests the force has made since its arrival, 18 people were released for lack of evidence. In one city, Gros-Morne, gangs killed civilians in retaliation for G.S.F. operations.

“We’ve got a long way to go, we totally recognize that,” Jack Christofides, the force’s special representative, said in an interview last month. “I don’t believe the gangs can sustain a fight against professional soldiers coming from so many different countries. We’ve got real capabilities coming — not just infantry, but police, we’ve got a maritime unit, we’ve got an air unit.”

The mission should have most of its forces on the ground by the end of this year and be making more progress by early next year, he said.

“We’re not saying that in two years’ time there will be no gangs in Haiti,” he said. “What we’re saying is that in two years’ time the Haitian state will no longer need an international force such as ours, because they can look after their own security and eventually stabilize the situation.”

From his social media posts, it does not appear that President Bukele plans to wait that long. In a message written in Creole directed to the Haitian gang members who abducted the four Salvadorans, he warned military operations would only get more intense.

“We have already finished with the gangs in El Salvador, and we can finish with you too,” he wrote.

Mr. Bukele, in office since 2019, is both praised and criticized for a harsh crack down on Salvadoran gangs that put tens of thousands of people in prison. El Salvador used to be one of the world’s most dangerous countries; now it’s among the safest.

A Salvadoran door gunner on a helicopter during an aerial patrol over Port-au-Prince.Credit...Michael Anthony Adams/The New York Times

The Salvadoran technicians went missing on Sunday after coming under attack while driving back from a supermarket through a gang-controlled area. Their vehicle was discovered burned, but the four Salvadorans have not been heard from since.

Although the attention is focused on finding them, the episode has raised serious questions about what they were doing driving through what is widely considered a “no-go” zone for foreigners and even most Haitians. While the incident is being treated as a kidnapping, many experts fear the men have been executed.

On Thursday, Lanmò Sanjou, a gang leader in the area where the Salvadorans were taken, released a video in which he refers to Mr. Bukele and shows buckets full of bullets.

“We will fight to stay alive,” he said.

Gédéon Jean, the director of the Center for Human Rights Analysis and Research in Port-au-Prince, said Haiti needed an international force to help shore up the local police, but that requires adequate technological and human resources.

“Unfortunately, this is still not the case, although the efforts are commendable,” Mr. Jean said. “We are still waiting for a full and complete deployment, and especially for tangible results.”

The ambush of the four Salvadorans will be a turning point for the international mission, he said.

“The disappearance of the four Salvadorans changes the situation,” he said, “because now it is the G.S.F. that is the victim of gang violence.”

André Paultre and Michael Anthony Adams contributed reporting.

Frances Robles is a Times reporter covering Latin America and the Caribbean. She has reported on the region for more than 25 years.

—

John A. Carroll, MD

www.haitianhearts.org

johnacarroll.substack.com

Reportedly the wealthiest man in the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, Gilbert Bigio was sanctioned for ties to criminal gangs. He was 91.

The New York Times

By Adam Nossiter

Oct. 19, 2026

Gilbert Bigio, a Haitian industrialist widely described as the country’s first billionaire, and who was sanctioned by Canada for ties to criminal gangs in his homeland, died on Sept. 29 in Florida. He was 91.

His death was reported in the Haitian press.

With interests in steel, energy, logistics, consumer goods, construction and banking, Mr. Bigio’s holding company, long known as the GB Group and eventually renamed BGO, touched the impoverished island nation’s economy in every corner.

Mr. Bigio’s family remain major players in what the International Monetary Fund and others have described as Haiti’s tiny economic elite. BGO supplies cooking oils and soap to Haitian households, steel from Haiti’s only steel mill to its builders and deepwater port facilities to its shippers. BGO became a regional economic force as well, owning gas stations in Jamaica and the Dominican Republic.

The elite plays an outsize role in Haiti’s chaotic politics, and Mr. Bigio appears not to have been an exception, though he stayed largely out of public view and rarely granted interviews. In December 2022, Canada sanctioned him, along with two other Haitian businessmen.

“Canada has reason to believe these individuals are using their status as high-profile members of the economic elite in Haiti to protect and enable the illegal activities of armed criminal gangs, including through money laundering and other acts of corruption,” a foreign ministry statement said.

“The sanctions Canada has imposed are intended to put pressure on those responsible for the ongoing violence and instability in Haiti,” the statement continued. “These people must stop providing funds and weapons to criminal gangs in Haiti.”

According to Reuters, the GB Group did not immediately reply to the sanctions; one Haiti expert, Jake Johnston, of the Center for Economic Policy and Research in Washington, said in an interview that Canada’s decision was a largely “symbolic” move with little practical impact. Members of Mr. Bigio’s family did not respond in recent days to queries for this obituary.

Mr. Johnston said Mr. Bigio’s immense wealth — he bought an ultraluxury $132,000 Mercedes Maybach from the estate of the disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein, The Miami Herald reported — was important to contrast with the brutal poverty of his native land.

“You can’t separate them from the broader context,” he said. “These are the elites who have benefited for decades from a status quo that very obviously does not work for a majority of Haitians.”

In a text message, Fritz Alphonse Jean, the former director of Haiti’s central bank and a former prime minister, noting the steady growth of Mr. Bigio’s company, wrote that “the capital that enabled this expansion was largely generated from Haiti’s economy, itself shaped by weak institutions that were incapable of ensuring a level playing field for all businesses.”

Mr. Jean criticized the absence of “meaningful integration of social responsibility into the operations of the country’s wealthiest enterprises.”

The I.M.F., in its 2025 report, noted that “many if not all gangs regularly cooperate with elites to serve oligarchic interests through kidnapping, murder, and the intimidation of neighborhoods.”

In the absence of a functional government, especially after the assassination in 2021 of President Jovenel Moïse, the gangs now have a virtual stranglehold on political and economic life in the country. They are said to control 70 percent of the capital, Port-au-Prince, and the country’s major highways.

For Mr. Johnston, it is almost inevitable that the country’s leading businessman had some kind of relationship with the gangs.

“If you’re running a port in Port-au-Prince, you’re engaging with armed actors. It’s a condition of doing business,” he said. “The cargo doesn’t leave that port without payments.” He noted that “the story of that port and its relationship with arms trafficking is well established.”

Canada’s sanctions were at least the second time Mr. Bigio had been subject to government strictures. The U.S. Treasury Department reportedly froze assets held in U.S. banks by Mr. Bigio and other prominent Haitians whom the department alleged backed the 1991 military coup that ousted Jean-Bertrand Aristide, Haiti’s first democratically elected president. Sanctions against Mr. Bigio and members of his family were removed after Mr. Aristide’s return in 1994 following U.S. intervention.

Mr. Bigio, the scion of immigrant Sephardic Jews from Syria who was Israel’s honorary consul in Haiti for 25 years, spent some of his time in a 9,200-square-foot mansion on a man-made island in Biscayne Bay called Indian Creek. Accessible by only a guarded bridge, it is known in Miami as the “Billionaire Bunker”; the Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, among others, have property there.

The man-made island in Florida’s Biscayne Bay known as “Billionaire Bunker.”Credit...Jeffrey Greenberg/Education Images, via Universal Images Group, via Getty Images

The Haitian businessman was extensively named in the 2021 Pandora Papers leak, a trove of financial records naming dozens of wealthy individuals who had set up shell companies in tax havens.

“Bigio was connected to at least a dozen such companies, many of which were created in the Bahamas,” the Washington-based International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, which helped disseminate the Pandora Papers, wrote in an online report.

The real-world consequences of this financial sleight-of-hand were dire in Haiti, the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, the I.M.F. noted in 2020. Between 2015 and that year, Haiti collected tax revenues equivalent to about 13 percent of its economy, ranking it above only Panama and Venezuela.

When Mr. Bigio gave an interview, in 2004 with The Herald, it was to deny any political role in his country. He preferred to talk about his part in supporting Jewish ritual, hosting gatherings on High Holy Days, in a country with only a handful of Jews. For years, a large Israeli flag flew in front of his mansion in Pétion-Ville, an affluent neighborhood in the capital. He kept Haiti’s only Torah in his study.

“Our principle, which we respect daily, is not to mix in Haitian politics,” he told The Herald. But that statement ran counter to the observations of the I.M.F., which wrote in its 2025 analysis that “the community of economic elites in Haiti is relatively small but it holds significant influence over politicians,” and that, “like politicians, some of economic elites employ gangs for close protection.”

Gilbert Bigio was born in Port-au-Prince on June 10, 1935, into a family that had come to Haiti from Syria at the end of the 19th century and made its fortune in the cotton-, cacao- and wood-export businesses.

With other investors, he founded Aciérie d’Haiti, the country’s first steel mill, in 1972, and it became the basis for the diversified GB Group. The group employed more than 2,000 people “at the height of his influence,” according to an obituary published by Memorial Keepers. GB Group was the principal developer of Port Lafito, Haiti’s first deepwater container terminal, which opened in 2015.

Mr. Bigio stepped down as head of the conglomerate in 2018 in favor of his son, Reuven. In addition to his son, survivors include his wife, Monique; and two daughters, Yael and Laurence.

Mr. Bigio “built industries where none existed, employed thousands, and gave generously, while also accumulating power in ways that drew international scrutiny,” according to the obituary in Memorial Keepers.

Mr. Johnston, the analyst, dismissed the argument frequently invoked by Haiti’s elites that “‘without us, you would all starve,’” noting that “they have a stranglehold on the economy. Have you been upholding transparency? Have you been paying taxes?”

André Paultre contributed reporting from Port-au-Prince. Sheelagh McNeill and Susan C. Beachy contributed research.

Adam Nossiter has been bureau chief in Kabul, Paris, West Africa and New Orleans and is now a writer on the Obituaries desk.

John A. Carroll, MD

www.haitianhearts.org

johnacarroll.substack.com

See this video which was filmed before the article below was posted.

jc

—

Five Salvadoran Soldiers Missing in Haiti After Ambush

A U.N.-backed force sent to combat gang violence said it was looking for the soldiers, who were in a gang-controlled area when they were attacked.

The New York Times

By Frances Robles

Frances Robles recently spent three days embedded with the Gang Suppression Force in Port-au-Prince, Haiti.

Published Oct. 18, 2026

Updated Oct. 19, 2026

Five Salvadoran soldiers, members of a new U.N.-backed force sent to stop gang violence in Haiti were ambushed while out shopping near the capital on Sunday and were still missing hours later, three people familiar with the situation said.

The soldiers were in a vehicle in a gang-controlled area just north of Port-au-Prince when one of the five reported they were under attack and he had been injured. No one has heard from him or the four others in the vehicle since, the people said.

The Salvadoran military said on social media early Monday that it was working to find and establish contact with four of its aviation technicians deployed in Haiti who had come under attack from heavily armed criminal groups. The discrepancy in numbers could not be immediately explained.

The military said the four had managed to escape from their armored vehicle after it was hit by explosives and caught fire, and that Salvadoran military helicopters were deployed to support them, forcing the criminal groups to retreat. But the helicopters were themselves hit by gunfire, and other support operations were hindered by violence in the area, it said.

The military said that it was working with the Gang Suppression Force, a U.N.-backed mission aimed at curtailing Haiti’s widespread gang violence, to find its missing troops.

After some recent arrivals, the force is currently made up of more than 2,000 personnel from Chad, El Salvador, Guatemala, Jamaica, Mongolia and Sri Lanka. The Salvadorans operate a helicopter unit that largely handles transportation and other logistics.

It was unclear what the Salvadorans were doing shopping in an area that is considered a restricted “red zone,” which people from the United Nations and diplomatic missions would be prohibited from entering without armored vehicles and weapons.

They were shopping in Santo, a community near Croix-de-Bouquets controlled by a gang known as “Chien Méchant,” or “Vicious Dog,” two of the people said. They and the third person all spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the case publicly.

The 400 Mawozo gang, known for conducting widespread kidnappings, also operates in that area.

In a statement late Sunday, the Gang Suppression Force confirmed that a vehicle carrying some of its soldiers came under attack and exchanged gunfire with suspected gang members.

It said the force was “continuing to assess the situation and verify the circumstances surrounding the incident.”

Other soldiers in the mission were out looking for the missing soldiers, one of the people close to the situation said. A spokesman for the Haitian National Police said he did not have information on the incident.

Residents in the area took to social media to report increased helicopter activity and gunfire.

Haiti is in the throes of an extreme gang crisis that has killed more than 22,000 people since 2021. At least 138 people were kidnapped in the first six months of this year, according to U.N. statistics.

The Gang Suppression Force was organized after a previous international mission failed to quell the violence. The new force is supposed to be much larger, made up of 5,500 soldiers from around the world, and with a more robust mandate to operate independently of the police and even make arrests.

In an interview last month, Jack Christofides, special representative of the Gang Suppression Force in Haiti, acknowledged that the force was behind in troop numbers but said the operations were already beginning to chip away at gang activities such as extortion.

“What we’re seeing is that the gangs are starting to attack us, which is a sure sign that we’re affecting their business model, and we’re affecting their revenue collection,” Mr. Christofides said. “But we’ve got a long way to go, we totally recognize that.”

He said the force would have most of its soldiers on the ground by late this year. The violence is so rampant that officials have repeatedly postponed elections, which have not been held in a decade.

André Paultre, Michael Anthony Adams and Mike Ives contributed reporting.

Frances Robles is a Times reporter covering Latin America and the Caribbean. She has reported on the region for more than 25 years.

—

John A. Carroll, MD

www.haitianhearts.org

johnacarroll.substack.com

Please see this video.

Jonathan Katz’s recent statement regarding deportation of 350,000 Haitians—

“I would just add that not only is the Department of Homeland Security lying when it says that “Haiti no longer [meets] the conditions for its designation for Temporary Protected Status”; the opposite is the case. Political and social conditions in Haiti are far worse than they were in the post-earthquake moment when the Obama administration first granted TPS status, particularly in Port-au-Prince. And that is thanks in no small part to the continuing cycles of abuse and neglect perpetrated on Haiti by the United States, including by Trump’s administrations. Dumping hundreds of thousands of people back into Haiti, including inevitably the U.S. citizen children of Haitian TPS immigrants born here, will only make things worse.”

—

John A. Carroll, MD

www.haitianhearts.org

johnacarroll.substack.com

Home U.S. Church

OSV News

Trump revives baseless claims about Haitian migrants in Ohio while touting deportations

by Kate Scanlon

October 13, 2026

U.S. President Donald Trump gestures during a campaign rally in Youngstown, Ohio, Oct. 12, 2026, for Sen. Jon Husted, R-Ohio, and gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy. During the rally, Trump revived baseless claims surrounding Haitian immigrants. (OSV News photo/Kevin Lamarque, Reuters)

WASHINGTON (OSV News) — President Donald Trump revived baseless claims surrounding Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, during an Oct. 12 campaign rally in the state.

In remarks at his Youngstown rally, Trump appeared to allude to unfounded allegations he made in 2024 that Haitian migrants were eating pets in Springfield, saying he was right, but without evidence.

“All of a sudden, they dropped 35,000 people in from Haiti, and it didn’t work out too well,” Trump said, before alluding to his previous claims made during a 2024 debate. “Remember during the debate I said some of the things they were doing? I was right.”

Dylan Corbett, executive director of the Hope Border Institute, a group that works to apply the perspective of Catholic social teaching in policy and practice to the U.S.-Mexico border region, told OSV News, “Two years ago, a lie about Haitian families in Springfield brought bomb threats to their schools and fear into their homes.”

Claims inspired bomb threats

During their 2024 presidential campaign, the baseless claims Trump and then-Sen. JD Vance, who became Catholic in 2019, spread about Haitian immigrants eating the pets of residents in Springfield, Ohio, were disputed by Vance’s fellow Ohio Republican officials, at both the local and state levels.

The same claims about Haitians — an overwhelmingly Christian population with a third to half estimated to be Catholics — prompted bomb threats and hoaxes in the city, local officials said.

In 2025, the City of Springfield sued the neo-Nazi group “Blood Tribe,” alleging it was responsible for “engaging in, and inciting, a campaign of harassment and intimidation, motivated by ethnic and racial hatred, against those who supported Springfield’s Haitian community in the face of Defendants’ racist attacks,” and that one of its leaders took credit for the notorious claims that Trump and Vance amplified nationally.

“To repeat that lie now, and to celebrate that these families are being driven out, is not politics,” Corbett said. “It is bearing false witness against neighbors. Haitians in Springfield and throughout the country largely came here legally, went to work, and filled the pews of faith communities. People of every political stripe should be able to say plainly that scapegoating vulnerable people for electoral gain is wrong.”

Truth and fiction

Ohio’s Senate race is one of the key competitive races in the 2026 midterm elections. The nonpartisan Cook Political Report ranked the race as a toss-up.

Kevin Appleby, senior fellow for policy and communications at the New York-based Center for Migration Studies and the former director of migration policy for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, told OSV News, “I think the president repeating a debunked myth and resorting to scare tactics is a sign of political desperation.”

“Hopefully, this time the public will not be fooled by this false assertion,” he said. “The truth that should be told is that the administration is deporting law-abiding, hard-working Haitians who held legal status back to a country that is wracked by gang violence, at risk of their lives.”

The Trump administration terminated Temporary Protected Status for Haiti earlier this year and has carried out mass deportations of Haitian nationals, among the immigration policies the U.S. bishops have criticized.

The revocation of TPS for Haiti has also led to grave social consequences, advocates for the Haitian community have said. Pierre Damas Bel, a 20-year-old Haitian, died in an apparent suicide after being fitted with a GPS ankle monitor by the Department of Homeland Security, his family said. Archbishop Thomas G. Wenski of Miami, whose archdiocese is home to an extensive Haitian and Haitian-American community, previously called Damas Bel’s passing “a death of despair” in a recent interview with OSV News.

Archbishop Coakley urges protection for Haitians

Archbishop Paul S. Coakley of Oklahoma City, president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, urged the Trump administration to end mass deportations to Haiti in a letter to Trump dated Sept. 8. He pointed to an Aug. 23 massacre — carried out by gangs in a village just outside the capital of Port-au-Prince — that left more than 47 dead, with at least 50 kidnapped, with most of the victims from displaced families.

“I implore you to avoid further endangering innocent human life by ceasing the deportation of large numbers of people to Haiti at this time, particularly while there is not an adequate system in place to provide for their safe and orderly reception and reintegration,” Archbishop Coakley wrote.

“The current approach will only contribute to the country’s already deepening crisis, undermining your own strategic objectives for the Western Hemisphere,” he said. “Please exercise your authority under the U.S. Constitution to provide deferred enforced departure for Haitians peacefully residing in the United States.”

Kate Scanlon is a national reporter for OSV News covering Washington. Follow her on X @kgscanlon.

—

John A. Carroll, MD

www.haitianhearts.org

johnacarroll.substack.com

HAITI U.N. panel: Gangs, corrupt politicians, cops fuel Haiti’s violent crisis

By Jacqueline Charles

October 6, 2026

As Haitian authorities prepare to postpone the country’s long-awaited Dec. 13 general elections and revise the rules for a third time, a new United Nations report is warning that political players remain intertwined with armed gangs — relationships that can be exploited to mobilize supporters, intimidate opponents and destabilize the electoral process.

The report by the U.N. Panel of Experts on Haiti, tasked with investigating the country’s security crisis and providing information that can be used to impose international sanctions, singles out several political players as it puts the spotlight on how political interests are driving violence in Kenscoff and the Artibonite region, two areas that have been the site of recurring massacres.

The 94-page report paints a disturbing and explosive picture describing how gangs, so-called self-defense groups, politicians and corrupt members of the security forces all see a business opportunity in Haiti’s unstable security environment, and risk perpetuating the country’s cycle of violence.

“The Panel is concerned about collusion between some members of local authorities and gangs within public institutions,” the group said after describing how an active member of the Brooklyn gang led by Gabriel Jean-Pierre, alias “Ti Gabriel,” was appointed in May to a new municipal commission in Cité Soleil established by the central government.

“These ties aim at consolidating territorial control and influencing upcoming elections, also building on Ti Gabriel’s long-standing political connections with a former member of parliament for Cité Soleil,” the panel said.

The report also raises concerns about the effectiveness of the U.N. sanctions regime. It found that delays by Haitian financial institutions, including the central bank, in freezing the assets of sanctioned individuals allowed them to transfer assets or conceal them under the names of third parties. Of the nine individuals who had been sanctioned by the U.N. at the time of the report, only accounts belonging to gang leader Kempes Sanon and the only politician in the group, former lawmaker Prophane Victor, had been frozen, the panel said, and they contained small sums.

“The meager amounts of money frozen by banks do not correlate with the wealth accumulated by those individuals,” the panel report said.

In the case of Victor, the total amount was less than $1,000, and none of his fixed assets had been identified and frozen.

“The hesitancy by Haitian authorities to take immediate action to freeze bank accounts and seize property of sanctioned individuals and entities leaves” room for individuals to move their assets out of reach for sanctions, the panel said.

The sanctions have also not stopped designated individuals from continuing to commit severe human rights abuses, including killings, rapes, kidnapping for ransom, forced recruitment of children, destruction of property and extortion. The reach of sanctions remains limited, the panel said.

While the current electoral decree bars people under U.N. sanctions from running for president, Parliament or local office, the panel said it’s likely to have a limited effect because people involved in supporting gangs are not on the sanctions list.

“The vast majority of those involved in supporting gangs and destabilizing the country have yet to be designated,” the report said.

Diego Da Rin, Haiti analyst at the International Crisis Group, notes that despite the reluctance of Security Council members to blacklist Haitian politicians, the panel’s latest findings “show once again how closely violence in Haiti remains tied to politics, while Haitian authorities and their foreign partners are doing little to break the links between criminal gangs and powerful elites.”

“Everybody agrees that Haiti cannot break the cycles of violence unless the longstanding ties between armed groups and the elites who support them are cut. Yet, little is being done to address that issue,” he said. “The U.N. can continue to impose travel bans and asset freezes on gang leaders, but these measures have no impact on criminals who have no passports or bank accounts in their names.”

Some Security members have expressed concerns that designating political figures would interfere in Haiti’s internal affairs, particularly with elections approaching, while others have criticized the lack of enforcement on an arms embargo. Da Rin says the risk of not designating political figures “is that the same actors who have worked with gangs could return to power.”

Haiti’s Provisional Electoral Council has not yet set a new date for the elections, though it has extended registration deadlines. Reports suggest that the vote will take place sometime next year, and that among the modifications the group will make is the removal of several documents, including one from the Banque de la République d’Haiti, the central bank, confirming that an individual isn’t barred from opening an account due to sanctions.

Ammo, high-powered weapons

The panel said they investigated several incidents during the reporting period. Among them: how armed groups continue to have access to ammunition and high-powered rifles.

“During the reporting period, both Gran Grif and Kokorat San Ras gangs have regularly displayed new material, pointing to a combination of direct supply from traffickers based abroad, inter-gang transfers — particularly from the Canaan gang led by Jeff Larose — and diversions from Haitian national police stockpiles,” the report said.

The panel investigated a network of officers of the Departmental Law Enforcement Unit selling ammunition to gangs, primarily operating out of the Pat-Chawal police substation in the Saint-Marc area . They also documented boxes and ammunition used by gangs and one self-defense group that are consisted with ammunition imported by the Haitian Armed Forces.

“Although the chain of custody of the ammunition is unclear, the Panel was informed that a portion of the ammunition imported by the Haitian Armed Forces had been transferred to the Haitian National Police,” the panel said.

The report highlights several political figures and former officials including Victor, who has also been sanctioned by the United States and is currently imprisoned in Haiti; Youri Latortue, a former president of the Haitian Senate; Rosemila Petit Frère, a former mayor of Arcahaie, an administrative district in the West region that includes Port-au-Prince; former Deputy Alfrédo Junior Antoine who represented Kenscoff in Parliament; former Sen. Nenel Cassy of the Nippes region, and former senator and presidential candidate Jean-Charles Moise.

Both Victor and Latortue have been linked to armed groups in the Artibonite through the provision of arms and ammunition, according to the panel. Victor contributed to the rise of the Gran Grif gang, while Latortue supported the Roboteau and the Kokorat San Ras gangs. The panel said Latortue subsequently turned against Kokorat San Ras after its leader, Bendjy, publicly denounced him as the founder of the gang. Latortue has repeatedly denied any gang affiliation.

Case against a former mayor

The U.N. panel said its investigation into illicit financial activities connected to gang financing also led them to Petit Frère, who led Arcahaie’s Town Hall from 2016-20.

A businesswoman, she has had “a long-standing relationship with gang leaders of Viv Ansanm,” the powerful coalition that came together in 2024 and has been designated as a foreign terrorist organization by the Trump administration, the report said, and has offered them financial and logistical support.

“Ms. Petit Frère also acted as an intermediary between gangs and other actors,” the panel said. “She was a key player in perpetuating the criminal-political-economic nexus between gangs, political, security and economic actors, including in facilitating communications and financial transactions.”

The panel said the information was corroborated by two U.N. member countries. After Petit Frère was arrested in August 2025 when going through the Dominican Republic from Canada, investigators uncovered messages that the panel said implicated her in supporting several Viv Ansanm leaders, including Renel Destina, alias Ti Lapli, the leader of the Grand Ravine gang.

Petit Frère is also accused of passing confidential information about impending police operations to Ti Lapli and other members of Viv Ansanm.

‘Legal bandits’ could take charge in Haiti’s parliament

According to the U.N. report, Petit Frère regularly exchanged information with Victor as well as with Magalie Habitant, whom the panel described as “a key intermediary” between gangs and economic backers and financiers.

Petit Frère is also accused of receiving sensitive investigative reports from corrupt police officers, which she funneled to Victor and Habitant to help them prepare their legal defenses, and used her relationship with corrupt cops to obtain contracts to supply uniforms to the police without competitive bidding or adequate oversight.

The former politician laundered funds through three Haiti-registered companies and used political connections to make strategic appointments in the government the report said, adding she used embezzled funds, in the case of a director general of the Social Assistance Fund, to funnel money to the head of the Krache Dife gang, Jean Gardy.

Petit Frère denied the allegations.

“The Panel reviewed the information shared by Ms. Petit Frère and shared it with the Committee. The Panel stands by its findings,” the U.N. report said.

Former members of Parliament

The report also highlights Antoine and Cassy, former lawmakers who were the subject of warrants by the Haitian national police.

The panel accuses Cassy of supporting armed groups to advance his political agenda. The report said he controls a criminal group, the “BLTS,” in the Miragoâne area. The group specializes in the illegal possession of firearms, murder, kidnapping for ransom, collective rape, truck hijacking and armed robberies, according to the report.

Cassy also contributed to the creation of Fantome 509, the armed group that emerged in 2018 and includes police officers.

“Fantome 509 was involved in the disruption of public order, arson and the vandalization of public and private property, and the killing of police officers,” the panel said. The group has also surfaced repeatedly in the Miami federal trial stemming from the 2021 assassination of President Jovenel Moïse..

“Nenel Cassy and his associates also perpetrated an attempted kidnapping with the subsequent assassination of a Haitian diplomat in February 2021,” the panel said. “Mr. Cassy sought to foment chaos in Haiti by planning armed attacks against airport infrastructure in Port-au-Prince, Les Cayes and Cap-Haïtien. He organized frequent meetings that led to attacks to destabilize Kenscoff in collusion with Viv Ansanm.”

Two U.N. member nations provided information linking Cassy to Haitian gangs, according to the report. Cassy was arrested in August 2025 on accusations that included conspiracy against state security, financing criminal groups, attempted murder and association with criminals. He was released 17 days later, prompting criticism from civil organizations and others.

“Despite official claims that the case is being re-examined, sources close to the investigation said that the case had been dropped,” the panel said.

The report linked Antoine, who recently filed to represent Kenscoff in the upcoming elections, to multiple attacks in Kenscoff and said he was “one of the main sponsors” of one on Jan. 27, 2025, that resulted in over 100 deaths, multiple cases of rapes, robberies and the burning of homes.

“Since then, gangs have taken over areas of the commune, causing severe unrest among residents,” the report said.

Though Antoine was arrested in April 2025 after being accused of several crimes, including financing criminal organizations and complicity in murder and criminal association, he was released about a month later.

Since 2016 Antoine has armed and supported youth groups in the area as a political tool for his agenda, the panel said. “These groups either subsequently developed into gangs or became affiliated with them. He is also responsible for the kidnapping and illegal detention of individuals, using gangs and other armed individuals to intimidate political opponents or illegally seize property.”

The panel said Antoine planned attacks with gangs in several neighborhoods of Kenscoff, communicated frequently with members of Viv Ansanm, was in regular contact with Habitant and had close ties with gang leader Vitel’homme Innocent.

“He was identified as one of the suppliers of firearms, ammunition and financial resources to Viv Ansanm, using an intermediary. Several illicit firearms were also found at his residence,” the panel said. The group notes that before running for Parliament, Antoine was imprisoned for fraud and was arrested for illegally taking control of property, forgery and the use of forged documents.

Antoine denied his connections to gangs in an email to the panel.

“Foreign powers seeking to help Haiti need to face the fact that the country’s justice system is currently too weak and vulnerable to manipulation by influential individuals to hold accountable those who continue to support gang violence,” said Da Rin, referring to the establishment of two special judicial units to investigate those involved in corruption and massacres to support efforts of the new U.N.-authorized Gang Suppression Force.

“The fight against violence must go hand in hand with efforts to end impunity,” he added. “Successful military operations against gangs will amount to little more than a pause in the violence unless those who support armed groups are held accountable.”

Eel smuggling

The panel also looked at the smuggling of baby eels, one of the most lucrative natural resources in Haiti, with one kilogram going for between $3,000 and $5,000 on the international market.

While the sector is poorly regulated and masked in secrecy and corruption, it is mainly dominated by Jean-Charles Moïse, the former senator form the North region and the head of the Pitit Dessalines political party.

“According to sources, Mr. Moïse’s network decides who works in the office that issues elvers export permits. He wields political and economic power over the elvers sector, controlling the elvers supply chain from exploitation to trade,” the panel said, noting his influence over the Ministry of Agriculture, Natural Resources and Rural Development through which export licenses are issued, as well as customs officials in charge of overseeing exports.

“Similarly, Mr. Moïse puts pressure on some customs officials to give in to his tax-evasion demands. Those who fail to comply get transferred elsewhere. Any refusal to give in to his demands or accept his bribes leads to punishment, as testified by some of his victims,” the panel said.

In a warning, the panel said the sector will remain vulnerable until Haiti accedes to international treaties regulating the trade.

The panel accuses Moïse of running “a syndicate of illicit exporters linked to a wider regional network operating” in the waters of the Caribbean. “By doing so, he contributes to the weakening of Haiti’s economy while abetting smuggling criminal networks that impact the region.”

Read more at: https://www.miamiherald.com/news/nation-world/world/americas/haiti/article317518649.html#storylink=cpy

John A. Carroll, MD

www.haitianhearts.org

johnacarroll.substack.com

My Comments in 2026—

Nothing is done in a vacuum. Please read the article below.

The young and talented Haitian man’s life was ended and his family is suffering….maybe forever.

Also, the truck driver’s life is now very complicated and he is suffering so much. (“If I had just swerved a little sooner,” he said. “I wish I could’ve done more to keep that truck off him.”)

None of this tragedy needed to happen.

jc

—

“A Reckoning in Springfield”

Stephanie McCrummen

The Atlantic

https://apple.news/A_0wvtiWuR_eWTHScLHwLTA

A truck driver out on his route confronts what the country has become.

OCTOBER 4, 2026

He kept going over the details.

“I run this route every day, like clockwork,” the trucker was saying, heading west to where he had first seen the man on the side of the highway.

Now it was a Sunday morning, his day off, and Jack Buhring was driving his mother’s minivan, retracing the route, trying to make sense of what had happened less than a week before. His girlfriend, Renee Claytor, was in the passenger seat, studying him, then looking out the window. His mother, Diana Buhring, was in the back. “It wasn’t your fault,” she kept saying, and “Jack, do you think you’re still in shock?” But her son was not really listening.”

“Mondays—that’s usually my long day,” he continued. Up at 1:30 a.m., shower, coffee, and by 2 a.m. he’d be pulling out of the mobile-home park in Chillicothe, the southern-Ohio town where he had grown up, gotten his first job hauling garbage, his second job driving cross-country, and the one he had now, hauling powdered concrete hardener in a Kenworth T800. Fairborn to Westerville, Westerville to Fairborn, repeat. Two loops, paid per load, no health insurance, and a recliner where he fell asleep most evenings. Those were the basics of Jack Buhring’s 41-year-old life, and just after eight that Monday morning, August 31, he had reached his favorite part of the route, a westbound stretch of highway running through miles of cornfields and wildflowers near Springfield, a small city that he passed each day, and whose recent troubles had barely registered as a series of memes and headlines that he’d mostly tried to avoid.

“We’re getting closer,” he said now, passing the fields. “We’re coming up on it.””

“He’d been in the right lane, he said, when he’d noticed a car rolling to a stop on the right shoulder. As he flipped on his left turn signal to move out of the way, he’d seen a man getting out of the car, who was then walking toward his trunk, who was then continuing on against traffic, then running—then diving out in front of him.

“Right here,” Jack said as he drove over black tire marks curving left across all three lanes. “See, I locked it down right here. You can see where I swerved. See? I started to signal and—it just happened so fast.”

Renee and Diana glanced back at the marks. Jack continued: An SUV and another truck behind him had swerved to a stop. The other trucker had helped Jack out of the cab, which had somehow been jammed shut, and checked on the man, who had been caught under Jack’s truck. Jack, who was not physically injured, had called 911 and told the dispatcher that a man had jumped in front of him, and—“Oh my God. I killed him.””

“Waiting on state troopers, he had looked around and seen a black device about 20 feet from his truck. He realized that it was an ankle monitor, smashed and blinking red.

“I started trying to put two and two together,” he said now, continuing west on the highway. “I said, ‘I hope he’s not a troubled kid, down on his luck, in trouble with the cops.’ That’s the first thing that come through my mind.” Then the state troopers had arrived, and after a while, one of them told Jack that it was a young Haitian man from Springfield.

At that point, Jack didn’t understand the full significance of what the trooper had said. He was shaking and sweating in the middle of the highway. He called his boss to tell him what had happened. He sat in a trooper’s car and gave his report. He cleared a drug test. Then he started asking questions that the troopers could not immediately answer. He wanted to know the young man’s name. He wanted to know if he had kids. He wanted to know anything about him.”

“When he got home later that afternoon, Renee told Jack what she was hearing on the news, a story that would soon become another defining moment in the Trump administration’s mass-deportation campaign. More and more, Americans going about their regular lives were witnessing black SUVs roaming parking lots and gas stations, neighbors and colleagues disappearing, and sometimes ICE agents grabbing, tackling, or even shooting people, forcing a thousand quiet reckonings with what the country has become. This time the violence was being investigated as a suicide, the witness was Jack, and the reckoning began as Renee told him the young man’s name, Pierre Damas Bel.

He was 20, and had arrived legally in the United States in March 2024 and been granted something called Temporary Protective Status, or TPS, due to dangerous conditions in Haiti. He had joined his family in Springfield, where roughly 15,000 Haitians had settled in recent years. He had just graduated from high school, where he’d been a standout student, soccer player, and member of the Junior ROTC program. He’d enrolled at Wright State University, half an hour from Springfield, and wanted to study neuroscience. The news coverage mentioned that the Trump administration had revoked “TPS for approximately 350,000 Haitian nationals living in the U.S., which Jack remembered hearing something about. And that in recent weeks, ICE had started ordering Haitians in Springfield to check in at field offices, where they were being fitted with ankle monitors, which Jack had not known about.

By the next day, he’d heard that Bel’s father, Ronal Bel, who declined to be interviewed for this story, had put out a statement saying that “after my son was outfitted with this ankle monitor, he felt like he was treated like an animal.” Ronal wrote that his son had told him that classmates had bullied him because of the ankle monitor and that he felt “humiliated,” and that he’d called moments before his death to tell his father that he was not “feeling okay.” Jack heard that politicians and activists, including a Springfield pastor named Carl Ruby, were blaming the Trump administration for what happened. “It’s our immigration policy that took his life,” Ruby had told reporters.”

“ack thought about that. He was a lifelong Democrat who had voted for Trump for the first time in 2024, reasoning that things weren’t getting better, so why not try something different. He’d supported what Trump had said about deporting undocumented immigrants convicted of crimes, but none of what he was learning now sounded like that.

He began searching for more details about the young man he was now calling Pierre. He found his social-media pages. Here was Pierre in a blue suit receiving an award from a local business group. Here he was smiling in his JROTC uniform. Here he was at an award ceremony for Texas Roadhouse, where he’d worked as a waiter, and playing on a soccer field. And here was the photo of Pierre’s left leg, the bulky black monitor clamped around his ankle, the red light glowing above a shiny black-and-white wingtip. “I came to this country to pursue my education,” the caption read. “Yet now I’m walking through the streets of the United States with a GPS monitor on my leg,” he said, “carrying a feeling of shame and humiliation that I never imagined I would experience.””

““I mean, Pierre would have been a model citizen,” Jack said now, driving Renee and his mom toward another part of the route that he needed to see. “He had so much going for him. I think there’s more to the story than they’re saying.”

He said he knew there was more because of how the state troopers had described what happened in their preliminary report. It said that Pierre had “walked” into traffic, whereas Jack had told them that “he ran at me like a damn football player.” He kept replaying the moment.

“I didn’t see him until the last minute—when I got up to him, it was just timed perfectly,” he said. “That’s what I’m saying. That’s what don’t make any sense.”

“It was a coincidence,” Renee said.”

““Maybe it was, but it was just all timed too perfectly,” Jack continued. “You’d have to be in my shoes to see that. But I keep on thinking about it.”

Renee kept telling him that he was rationalizing. That he was traumatized. But in the days after Pierre’s death, Jack had kept going. He reviewed what he knew about Haiti, which was gangs, killings, and corruption. The only Haitian Jack knew was a girl Renee’s aunt and uncle had adopted as a baby when they were missionaries over there. They had told him what it was like.

He reviewed what he knew about the Haitians in Springfield, which had mostly come from his mother, via a friend of hers who lived there, and had little good to say; Jack had seen a video she’d circulated purporting to show Haitians eating cats and dogs. Diana had called her up after everything happened, and her friend had sworn that Pierre had waited on her at Texas Roadhouse the weekend before. The friend said she recognized him from the photos. She told Diana that she and her husband had ordered two salads, and when the waiter she assumed was Pierre brought only one “salad, she told him that they’d ordered two; she said that he had smiled and said something in a language she did not understand. Diana still wondered about what he’d said. She told Jack that she was worried about him, that Haitians in Springfield were angry. That everybody in the country seemed to be angry, including her.”

““My son could have died,” she said now. “A whole bunch of lives could have been taken. And that’s another thing—”

“No,” Renee said, attempting to preempt what she knew was coming.

“That’s why I think this is a statement—some kind of statement,” Diana continued.

“It’s not a statement,” Renee said.

“It is. Look how it’s blowing out,” Diana said, referring to all the news and the vitriol toward the Trump administration.

“No,” Renee said.”

“But Diana, who had spent years working as a nurse in Ohio prisons, continued. She said her experience had taught her to think “outside the box,” and she offered a theory that none of the investigating authorities had suggested. She believed that what happened could have been more than a suicide, that Pierre could have been “almost like a suicide bomber,” attempting to send a political message. She said she believed that this could start happening more often.”

““I’ve seen stuff on the internet too—like, someone said, ‘You should be thinking of the truck driver too,’ and someone commented, ‘Oh, fuck that truck driver,’” Diana said.

She had been worried enough to contact Carl Ruby, the pastor in Springfield, to hear more about the situation there. He had told her that Haitians had been losing their jobs since Trump revoked their legal status, and were terrified of being sent back to Haiti, where deportees were being targeted because gangs assumed they had money. He told her they found the ankle monitors humiliating. He also told her that he had been with Pierre’s father the night his son died and had gone with him to view his son’s body. He said that the family had no animosity toward her or Jack, and that they understood he had done everything in his power to avoid the collision. Ruby, who told me that it was a “really good talk,” told Diana that he was sorry for what her son had been through, and invited them both to come to one of the vigils that had been happening almost every night since Pierre’s death. Diana had asked Ruby to pass on “their condolences to the family, but she did not think it was a good idea to show up. Jack had thought about going; some part of him wanted to go.

“I feel really bad for the family,” he said now, getting closer to the stop on his route that he wanted to see. “I just don’t want to take the chance for the safety of my family. I mean, he jumped out in front of me. But I still killed their son.”

“You feel guilty about it,” Renee said.

“I feel guilty,” Jack said.

“I hate to say it, but there’s a lot of animosity against, just, white people,” Diana said. “I’m sorry.”

“That’s not our belief, Diana,” Renee said.”

““I put my pistol out, just in case—you never know,” Jack said.

He exited the highway in Westerville, the stop on the route where he delivers concrete powder twice a day, and drove over to a complex of metal chutes and silos. Right after everything happened, he had been talking with a friend who found out that Westerville had an ICE field office that Pierre had visited, and now Jack put the address into Google Maps and navigated over to a brick building 1.7 miles away.

He tried to imagine Pierre getting fitted with the ankle monitor and, in the weeks before his death, showing up at the field office and pleading to get it taken off. Jack imagined this happening right down the street from where he was going about his job.”

““It was so close,” he said, looking at the building. “It don’t make sense in my mind. I’m trying to come up with a reason.”

Renee told him it was just a coincidence.

“It could be a coincidence, it could,” he said. “Maybe my intuition is telling me something.”

He wondered whether Pierre might have noticed his truck as he drove through Westerville. “My truck is 23 years old—it’s not something you see on the road every day. I think, at some point, we’d get off at the same exit and get on at the same exit,” he said, turning back onto the highway.

He started replaying everything that had happened. Seeing the car, seeing Pierre get out, seeing Pierre run toward his truck. And then he recalled another detail about that moment.”

“He made eye contact,” Jack said now.

“He was looking at your truck, not you,” Renee said.

“Renee, he made eye contact,” Jack said. “He looked me dead in the eyes.”

“They headed toward home. Chillicothe was an hour from Springfield, but to Jack what was happening there felt closer now.

Since ICE operations began in early August, locals have witnessed agents in unmarked SUVs with dark windows detain people at apartment complexes, strip-mall parking lots, gas stations, a car wash, and frequently during traffic stops. At least 74 people, nearly all Haitians, almost none with criminal convictions, have been detained so far, according to lawyers and local activists. Dozens more, they said, have been fitted with ankle monitors, including pregnant women and elderly people.”

“When I visited in early September, much of the Haitian community was in hiding. Families were getting food delivered to their homes, attending church services online. Haitian activists told me that some people had spoken of suicide as an alternative to deportation. At the vigils for Pierre, the people who showed up included his high-school teachers, his soccer coaches and teammates, waiters from Texas Roadhouse, and others who described themselves as neighbors, including a man who told a crowd one night that Pierre’s death was “a failing of broader policy, but I will always bear the guilt that there is more that I could have done and we could have done.””

“What is happening has been transformative for some people, including Carl Ruby. His congregation, Central Christian Church, has been actively supporting the Haitian community since 2024, when Vice President Vance and others started spreading the false stories about Haitians eating cats and dogs. On the Monday night after Pierre’s death, Ruby told me, he’d sat with Ronal Bel as he talked to reporters with a stoicism that Ruby could not fathom, then followed him into a closet, where Ronal broke down. A few days later, when Ruby accompanied him to a local funeral home, he watched as Ronal walked circles around the table where his son’s body lay and repeated, “You have been a good son.” At one point, Ronal took off his shirt and waved it over his son’s body, which Ruby understood as a ritual that meant “I want my spirit to go with you. I’m not abandoning you.””

“Viles Dorsainvil, the executive director of the Haitian Support Center in Springfield, who has been spending time with Ronal, told me, “He’s still having questions, and it’s hard for him to accept if he’s living in this reality.”

Yesterday, Ronal Bel sat in the front row at St. John Missionary Baptist Church for his son’s funeral. He asked a family friend to read his recollections of his first-born son, who had grown up in the port city of Aux Cayes, along the southern coast of Haiti. “I feel like I have lost everything,” the friend read. “I just cannot sleep” and “When someone opens the front door, I have the sense that it is him, coming home.”

Governor Mike DeWine, a Republican, who has taken multiple humanitarian trips to Haiti and has criticized Trump’s effort to deport Haitians as “a mistake,” was among those in the pews, sitting alongside Haitians and other people from Springfield and beyond.”

Addressing the crowd, Dorsainvil said that Ronal Bel had come to the U.S. after surviving a massacre in Haiti, and that his son’s life is “part of a larger human story. ” He said that the mourning “extends beyond one family.” Ruby spoke of the different circles of people affected by Pierre’s death—those closest to him, neighbors in Springfield who want Haitian families to know that “you are a blessing and not a burden to this community,” and another group, those who are “curious and just want to reach a better understanding of what happened to Damas. Some, even though they don’t know your family and are not part of this community, want you to know that they share your grief.””

“In the two weeks before the funeral, Jack had gone back to work. He returned to his regular route, avoiding the right lane as he passed through the stretch of cornfields and wildflowers. One Saturday morning, he and Renee were at his mother’s house in Chillicothe, still trying to piece things together.

“Maybe you just felt like he made eye contact,” Renee was saying to him.

“I know he did. I don’t know why,” Jack said.

“I think you were affected by this more than you want to admit,” Renee said, and then Jack mentioned that the other truck driver, the one who had pried him from his cab, had called him. He and the man, John Hallings, had exchanged phone numbers at the scene that day and had been talking off and on since then, Hallings told me. He was a trained emergency responder and had a medical kit in his truck. He had gotten out of his cab with gloves on, kneeled in front of Jack’s truck, and checked for Pierre’s pulse, which was gone.

“He went straight to that boy,” Jack said. “He said it kind of messed him up. He’s not doing so hot.””

“Hallings had told Jack that he’d gotten extremely depressed thinking about Pierre, and then extremely angry thinking that he could have killed more people than just himself, and thinking about immigrants taking jobs in the trucking industry, bringing down wages. Then, a few days after that, he had broken down crying.

“He said he was kind of worried about me,” Jack said, checking his phone for any more details about Pierre.

“You shouldn’t look so much,” Renee said.

“But, Renee, I care,” Jack said.

He said that the more he learned about Pierre, the more he was beginning to understand. He’d recently found out, for instance, that Pierre had been a kind of leader in his family. Besides bringing in money, those who knew him had talked about how he was the one in his family who spoke the best English, who could fill out forms, make phone calls, and otherwise help his family manage their lives in Springfield.”

““I think he just had a lot piled on his shoulders,” Jack said. He himself had been caring for an ailing father for the past 15 years, bathing him, helping him recover after two strokes. “I’d say the boy was stressed. I’d say he’d probably had enough.”

“I wish I would have known him, because I would have taken him in,” Diana said at one point. “I got a spare room.”

“I think a lot of people would have helped him,” Jack said.

He had kept thinking about the ankle monitor, to the point that he went online one night to find out more about the devices.

“His was a dinosaur—it was big,” Jack said.

“My sister’s ex had one,” Renee said.

“Pierre’s was ginormous,” Jack said, calling up a photo of one on his phone.”

“He had tried to imagine how Pierre had felt walking around with it on, attempting to play soccer, and he had learned something else about the ICE monitor that really bothered him, which was that Pierre had to keep it charged himself.

“And if he let it go dead, he gets in trouble. I mean, it’s a joke,” Jack said. “I mean, come on, you got a decorated kid, a full-time student, playing soccer, and they’re going to do that shit to him? I think he just probably felt defeated. He put all that effort in, and he wasn’t getting anywhere. And being from a Third World country too? We don’t know what those people walk in day-to-day.”

“I’m not trying to sound mean or anything, but we can’t take care of everybody,” Diana said.”

““Well, we wouldn’t have had to take care of Pierre. Pierre was doing what he was supposed to do,” Jack said. “We did not do right by him.”

He was beginning to believe that the Trump administration was “a joke,” and that the Democrats were no better. “Everything is broken,” Jack said.

He started going over it all again. The morning that began so normally. The cornfields and wildflowers. A young Haitian man named Pierre Damas Bel whose troubles had become his own.

He kept imagining Pierre looking him dead in the eyes.

“He was hurting,” Jack said.”

“He recalled the moment right after that.

“If I had just swerved a little sooner,” he said. “I wish I could’ve done more to keep that truck off him.”

And the moment right after that.

“I felt a big thump, and I knew it was him,” he said. “I could feel it all.”

Renee reached for his hand, knowing that he was feeling it still.

“I’m good, I’m good,” the truck driver said.”

John A. Carroll, MD

www.haitianhearts.org

johnacarroll.substack.com

Dear Family and Friends,

We are in our sixth year under gang rule in Haiti, of violence that is unspeakable, including many massacres of innocent men and women, elderly people and children.

We mourn many friends and colleagues who have known a bitter end. We have also been victims of attacks, have had to run as refugees, and have had to negotiate for kidnapped staff and friends.

I am still astounded at the cruelty of the gangs in Kenscoff, and especially the cruelty that ten-year-old Lionel suffered when his mountain village was attacked a few months ago, and how he was shot and paralyzed, and left for dead.

I have written elsewhere about his heroic mother, who ran to hide two smaller children during the attack, and then returned to try to carry Lionel, who was nearly her size, to a find a hospital in Port-au-Prince, many miles away. (No small feat since up to 70% of hospitals have been closed because of insecurity.)

She had to stop and rest often because of Lionel’s size, watch for bandits at every turn, hide Lionel and the two small children in the bushes at night as she foraged for wild beets or carrots in abandoned gardens. They slept under the cold rains. It took them three weeks of such an ordeal, to reach our St Luke Hospital. Lionel was anemic, malnourished, and had deep, infected sacral ulcers.

You surely have your own experiences of tragedies as the years pass, and you also deal with very painful realities that don’t change except to get worse.

It is not possible for any person to feel all these things, all the time, at full emotional throttle. Especially for us, with the depth and frequency of the tragedies that confront us.

After a while, there is a numbness that sets in like armor, which is protective of psychological well-being. But it also generates cynicism, resignation, apathy, and a gradual acceptance of what is totally atrocious as normal life.

Our hearts are at first terrorized and stunned, and then optimistically invest deep hope that someone will come to “right the dreadful and unbelievable wrong”, and then, as that never materializes, the danger is that the heart gets set in stone.

Some 400 years before Jesus was born, and referring to gall bladder stones, Hippocrates wrote this in his famous oath for physicians:

“I will not cut for stone, even for patients in whom disease is manifest; I will leave this operation to practitioners of this craft.”

This was part of his pledge to “above all, do no harm.” Physicians did not have the competence to cut for stone.

In Haiti, and elsewhere on the world scene, we often have to cut for bullets.

This was a big issue in Lionel’s case. We invoked international consultation. We needed to get him, sooner or later, to sit in a wheelchair that he could roll with his own arms. His future possibilities depended on this. Yet we could not take the chance that removing the bullet (or ignoring it) might cause more internal harm.

A wider question is, who are those skilled today in the craft of cutting for stone in hearts, to free hearts from the coldness of armor?

There is the added heart-danger of vengeful anger, of outrage and hatred. These swell to radicalized levels against those who are afflicting such violence on the population.

This anger is destructive to the heart, to both its physical and spiritual dimensions.

It adds to the heaviness of the stone-hearted, becoming toxic and venomous.

There are resounding warnings throughout the Judeo-Christian Scriptures about the grave dangers of this kind of anger.

Then what is the right kind of anger?

Both God and Jesus get angry very often in the Bible.
It is worth understanding and imitating their anger.

The anger of Jesus follows the pattern of encountering innocent suffering, sharing that suffering as grief, and then love takes the form of “grief-anger” to vindicate and restore the life and dignity of the innocent.

It is not the anger of retaliation, which is to encounter harm and to inflict harm in return.

It is the anger of restoration, which is the righteous awareness that this should not be happening, that the preciousness of life is violated, and that this must be set straight to restore life and dignity to the victim.

This kind of “grief-anger” is motivated by love, not by hatred. It has wisely been referred to as “love under pressure”.

Love takes the form of “grief-anger” when the heart refuses to become apathetic in the face of suffering. This is how the heart refuses to become stone. It is a medicine.

Jesus used love in the form of grief-anger to ram up against hardness of heart in religious leaders.

Reflecting on this Divine kind of anger led me, in a round-about way, to Michelangelo’s famous statue of Moses.

It is amazing how Michelangelo looked at an immense piece of Carrara marble and saw Moses inside of it.

Faithful to his inner eye, he cut away from the stone everything that “was not Moses.”

The result was so spectacular, even to him, that he allegedly shouted at the colossal image before him, “now speak!”

The fact that the Moses of Michelangelo has horns, and not a halo, is because of a translation error from Hebrew to Latin about what Moses looked like as he came down Mount Sinai after meeting face to face with God. “Rays of light” in Hebrew became “horns” in Latin.

But the horns also fit well, because the image is of Moses about to explode as he sees the people worshipping a golden calf instead of worshipping God. The statue completely captures what “love in the form of grief-anger” looks like, in the whole body (face, torso, hands, legs), the very second before the it erupts furiously to set things straight.

To the extent that any of us have not evolved in the mighty craft of wielding love as “grief-anger”, no one will ever confuse our horns for halos.

Let’s go for it. Let’s cut for stone.

Cutting for stone can become our way of rebelling against the evil around us.

Let’s both free ourselves from stony hearts,
and let’s look at people like Lionel
and not so much see the heaviness and rock-fast impossibility with which life has covered him,
but rather with vision, like that of Michelangelo,
let’s cut away with great skill “everything that is not Lionel”
and set him free. For his good, and to the Glory of God.

Lionel is in physical therapy, occupational therapy, and just starting school (he is a promising student). This is a picture of him leaving our morning mass just now, getting his fan back to his dormitory!

Thank you for your friendship, and for the sacrifices you make continually, to enable us to still be here in Haiti, with and for the poor.

Fr Richard Frechette CP DO
Port-au- Prince
October 4, 2026

Copyright © 2026 Fr. Rick, All rights reserved.

—

John A. Carroll, MD

www.haitianhearts.org

johnacarroll.substack.com

Haiti prime minister urges dignity for migrants as his country grapples with deportees

Miami Herald

By Jacqueline Charles

September 25, 2026

Haiti Prime Minister Alix Didier Fils-Aimé on Friday thanked countries that have welcomed Haitians, using his address at the United Nations General Assembly to ask that they be treated with dignity and that their rights be upheld.

“Behind statistics and debates there are women, children and men who carry with them a history, talents, hopes, and sometimes the burden of exile,” Fils-Aimé told world leaders gathered in New York at the 81st U.N. General Assembly.

“Respect for dignity and fundamental rights of all migrants must be upheld, no matter their situation. No circumstance can justify trampling their dignity under foot. The protection of a border and respect for human dignity are not incompatible.”

Fils-Aimé’s rare public appeal on behalf of migrants are among his most direct public comments yet on migration and come as Haiti grapples with a growing influx of nationals being forcibly returned from the neighboring Dominican Republic and the United States. Nearly 200,000 Haitians were forcefully returned during the first eight months of this year, a 10% increase over the same period last year, according to the United Nations.

The Trump administration is accelerating deportations of Haitians after the Supreme Court over the summer cleared the way for the termination of Temporary Protected Status, the humanitarian program that had sheltered more than 300,000 Haitians in the U.S. Deportation flights have increased from once a month to once a week, with the latest flight landing on Thursday.

The Bahamas and Turks and Caicos have also stepped up enforcement against Haitians who amid a worsening humanitarian crisis and gang violence are increasingly taking to the high seas.

“For generations, Haitians settled abroad have contributed to the societies that welcomed them,” Fils-Aimé said. “From this rostrum, I wish to express my thanks to the countries that have opened their doors and have encouraged their integration.”

In his address, he invoked Haiti’s own history as a nation born out of a successful slave revolt that became a founding member of the U.N. 80 years ago, and that once offered refuge to those fleeing slavery and racial and religious persecution.

“Haiti was a land of welcome, refuge and hope, and we are working to make sure it becomes that again,” Fils-Aimé said. “We want it to be a country where one can rest there, return and live, and build one’s future and dignity.”

Fils-Aimé’s appearance at the U.N. was his first since becoming the sole head of Haiti’s transition in February following the end of the mandate of the controversial nine-member Transitional Presidential Council. During his address, he stressed his commitment to holding elections — Haitians last went to the ballot box in 2016 — and addressing the ongoing crisis of gang violence.

He also reiterated support for the U.N.-authorized Gang Suppression Force, and trade over aid. Haiti doesn’t need a savior, he said, but is rather looking for partners. “We call upon the world not to save it, but to stand side by side with it while it takes its own destiny into its own hands,” Fils-Aimé said, adding that too often people, including Haitians, are being asked to “bear the weight of crises that they did not create.”

Fils-Aimé acknowledged that his Caribbean nation’s ongoing gang crisis has resulted in an exodus of thousands of Haitians. “The response to this crisis in Haiti will mean re-establishing security, stability and economic recovery. These are the three priorities of my government,” he said. And while the Haitian crisis is complex, “it is not insurmountable,” he added, calling on nations to live up to their commitments to the Gang Suppression Force and for the Security Council to reauthorized its mandate next week.

“It is regrettable that the force that was supposed to temporarily support these efforts, that this force is not yet fully operational and still hasn’t reached on the ground the planned force of 5,500 members,” he said.

Resources and equipment are needed, the Haitian leader said, for the new force to be effective. “We are at a watershed moment. The time is not a time for any half measures or partially honored commitments, or a too tepid response, given the scale of the threat, massacres, bereaved families, women that have fallen victim to despicable violence, children deprived of their innocence, and communities chased away from their homes need to compel us to act,” Fils-Aimé said.

Armed gangs have killed thousands of Haitians this year, and were responsible for a massacre in the hills above Port-au-Prince in the community of Kenscoff. The losses compel “us to ensure that justice is done,” he said. “Haiti will also never forget the sacrifice” he added. “Through their courage, they have written with their blood as ink a page in the book of our struggle for security and peace.”

Fils-Aimé also brought up the thorny issues of the illicit trafficking in weapons and ammunition, which he described as Haiti’s other security challenge. “These are weapons that are killing Haitians, that are sowing terror in our neighborhoods, in cutting down innocent lives, and they’re not being produced in Haiti,” he said. “They are arriving here through transnational criminal networks.” Dismantling the arms traffic is a shared responsibility, and advocacy needs to move beyond Haiti, he said.

“For as long as this traffic prospers, violence will find ways to perpetuate.”

—

John A. Carroll, MD

www.haitianhearts.org

johnacarroll.substack.com

My Comments in 2026—

Do you really think that Roger Stone’s lobbying efforts will be focused on the best interest of the Haitian lady above?

jc

—

Haitians demand answers over Haiti’s $65,000-a-month Stone lobbying contract

Advocates in the U.S. and Haiti question the cost, terms and purpose of the transition government’s deal with the longtime Trump ally and political operative

Haitian Times

by Juhakenson Blaise and Fritznel D. Octave

Sep. 24, 2026

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Overview:

Advocates in the United States and Haitian political leaders are demanding that Haiti’s transition government explain its lobbying contract with Roger Stone’s firm, Drake Ventures LLC. They question the agreement’s broad mandate, cost and timing as Haitians in the United States face deportation and Haiti prepares for elections amid an accelerated humanitarian crisis and uncertainties caused by gang-fueled insecurity.

Haitian American advocates and political leaders are demanding that Haiti’s government explain why it agreed to pay longtime Republican political operative Roger Stone $65,000 a month to lobby United States officials on its behalf.

The Haitian American Foundation for Democracy (HAFFD) is among the first groups to publicly raise concerns over the agreement. In a Sept. 23 press release, the organization’s leaders asked Prime Minister Alix Didier Fils-Aimé’s government to explain the purpose of the lobbying deal with Stone’s Fort Lauderdale-based firm, Drake Ventures, LLC.

Several Haitian political actors have also questioned and criticized the contract.

For one, Jean Elysée Céliscar, a leader in the political platform Chemen Delivrans Ayiti (Road to Haiti’s Deliverance), described the agreement as “a gratuitous scandal” in an interview with The Haitian Times.

“At Chemen Delivrans,” said Céliscar, “we question the motives behind Haiti’s government authorities’ decision to spend nearly $1 million a year to hire a lobbying firm to advocate on their behalf, while the same government earlier rejected a $250 million budget proposal for elections, calling it ‘absurd’.”

“This is another unwarranted scandal among too many, orchestrated by this transition government, while national security forces complain about the lack of resources and materials to carry out their duties. The country also faces an acute humanitarian crisis, in addition to the uncertainty surrounding the upcoming elections,” said Céliscar, who is also a high school teacher.

André Michel, a lawyer and political leader in a newly formed coalition of 44 Haitian political parties and organizations called Coalition of Republican Forces (CFR), also criticized the agreement, calling it “an absolute scandal” and “a waste of public funds,” according to the Miami Herald.

What is Haiti paying for?

The deal was signed Sept. 2 between Foreign Minister Raina Forbin and Stone, a staunch Trump ally and supporter of the administration’s policies harmful to Haitians.

Under the agreement, Drake Ventures, LLC receives a $65,000 monthly retainer, paid in quarterly installments of $195,000, for a total of $780,000 a year. The contract runs through Sept. 2, 2027, and renews automatically under its terms.

The public filing broadly describes Stone’s assignment as advocacy before the U.S. government and political activities on Haiti’s behalf. It does not specify whether his lobbying will focus on support for elections, security assistance, immigration or other U.S.-Haiti policy issues.

That lack of specificity is at the center of HAFFD’s concerns.

The organization said the contract does not specifically mention Temporary Protected Status (TPS), deportations or the safety of Haitians in the United States, even as the Trump administration’s termination of TPS has left hundreds of thousands of Haitians vulnerable to deportation.

“Five weeks after 350,000 Haitians lost their legal status and deportation flights to Cap-Haïtien resumed, the Haitian government found $780,000 for a lobbyist — and chose the one man in Washington who helped build the movement that is deporting our people,” Patrick Gaspard, HAFFD’s vice chairman, said in the organization’s statement.

“Roger Stone has never spoken a word in defense of a Haitian migrant,” Gaspard said. “Haitians at home and in the diaspora deserve to know whether he is being paid to undo this policy or to make it easier.”

Neither Stone nor his firm’s associates have responded to The Haitian Times’ request for comment. A call to a number listed under Grant Smith as a contact was answered by someone who declined to speak, saying, “that’s not his number” [in reference to Stone].

Haiti’s government has not yet responded to critics, nor has it publicly detailed the contract’s specific policy objectives either.

Questions over Stone’s record

HAFFD is also questioning the government’s decision to hire Stone, citing his long political association with President Donald Trump and his criminal conviction.

Stone was convicted in 2019 on seven felony counts, including lying to Congress and witness tampering. Trump commuted his sentence in 2020 and later pardoned him.

HAFFD also cited Stone’s history of racially offensive comments about Black people. Stone has denied that he is racist and has defended himself against such accusations. The Miami Herald reported that Stone did not respond to its request for comment on the Haiti contract.

The foundation said Haiti’s choice of Stone is particularly difficult to understand given the country’s current challenges and the government’s existing lobbying arrangements in Washington.

Haiti has also retained Continental Strategy and Continental Law PLLC, a firm led by Carlos Trujillo— former U.S. ambassador to the Organization of American States. According to Miami Herald reporting, a March 2026 filing showed Haiti had paid Continental Strategy $314,940 for work performed between October 2025 and February 2026.

HAFFD said arrangements with the two Trump-aligned lobbying firms would cost Haiti at least $100,000 a month if both contracts remain active at their reported rates.

HAFFD seeks six answers

HAFFD said it has written to Forbin and Fils-Aimé seeking answers to six questions, including what Stone was hired to do, why the contract does not specifically address TPS or deportations, whether the government reviewed Stone’s record and whether Haiti’s Superior Court of Auditors reviewed the agreement.

The group also questioned provisions covering Stone’s legal fees and liability and the requirement that disputes involving the Haitian government be handled in Broward County, Florida.

“This is not a question of politics. It is a question of whom the Haitian state represents,” Jocelyn McCalla, HAFFD’s executive director, said. “If the government has a case for this contract, let it make that case to the Haitian people. If it does not, it should cancel it.”

HAFFD has asked the government to respond within 15 days and said it will share the contract and any response with members of Congress.

Haiti Turns to Roger Stone to Lobby Trump Administration

The Haitian government hired Mr. Stone, a confidant of President Trump, weeks after hundreds of thousands of Haitians lost deportation protection. The contract is worth nearly $800,000, a document shows.

The New York Times

By David C. Adams

Reporting from Florida

Sept. 24, 2026

Few people have better access to the White House than Roger J. Stone Jr., a close friend and associate of President Trump. Even so Mr. Stone’s latest lobbying deal, worth nearly $800,000 with the government of Haiti, is raising eyebrows.

The Republican political operative was hired by Haiti’s Foreign Ministry to conduct unspecified “issue advocacy” on U.S. government policy relevant to Haiti, according to a document filed last week with the Department of Justice.

Haiti’s prime minister, Alix Didier Fils-Aimé, declined to discuss details of the contract, though he highlighted migration as a priority.

“Certain matters of importance to the Haitian people are being addressed at the highest levels of the U.S. administration, notably at the White House,” he wrote in a text message. “The issue of migration is among the topics of concern to us.’’

Mr. Stone, 74, confirmed the contract but declined to discuss the nature of his work for Haiti’s government.

“I have a policy of not talking about the work I do for my clients beyond that which is legally required which is in my filing,” he said in a brief phone call.

He declined to say if he had ever visited Haiti.

Mr. Stone, a self-described “dirty trickster,” is a close confidant of Mr. Trump, though he is not well known for work related to Latin America. In May, he weighed in on Haiti in a brief social media post about a political debate over the timetable for long overdue elections in the country.

“There cannot be elections until there is security and stability,” he wrote. “The Trump administration is moving in the right direction, but we are not there yet.”

Haiti has not held elections for president, or its Parliament, in 10 years, having delayed them since its last president was assassinated five years ago. Violence fueled by gangs that control much of the capital has set off a humanitarian crisis.

The country is entering a key phase in international efforts to restore security and push gangs out of their stronghold. Elections have been scheduled for December, though there are serious doubts that the vote will actually happen.

Haiti already pays $35,000 a month for lobbying services to Continental Strategy, a firm run by Carlos Trujillo, Mr. Trump’s former ambassador to the Organization of American States and a Cuban American from Miami who is close to Secretary of State Marco Rubio.

Mr. Stone could work with Haiti’s government on the Trump administration’s recent decision not to extend protected status for Haitians, which shielded an estimated 300,000 Haitians lacking legal status in the United States and are facing deportation.

The end of the protection has led to a spike in detentions and an increase in deportations to Haiti, a major challenge for a poor country lacking basic services.

Migrants are also an important financial lifeline for Haiti. Money sent back home by Haitians living abroad totaled $4 billion in 2025, about 17 percent of the value of all goods and services produced within the country, according to official government data.

Beyond the scant details about Mr. Stone’s work, it is unclear why Haiti hired him.

Mr. Stone has built a reputation, in part, for using his connections to Mr. Trump to win pardons for people convicted of wrongdoing. Last year he was a key intermediary in Mr. Trump’s pardon of a former Honduran president, Juan Orlando Hernández, who was convicted of trafficking more than 400 tons of cocaine into the United States.

“His value is that he could talk directly to the president,” said Damian Merlo, a former lobbyist for Haiti who is now registered to work for the government of El Salvador.

Mr. Stone was convicted in 2019 for lying to Congress during its investigation into Mr. Trump’s connections to Russia, but Mr. Trump commuted his prison sentence.

André Michel, a lawyer in Haiti and opposition political leader, criticized Mr. Stone’s hiring, saying his contract was “a scandalous amount for a country like Haiti. It’s a waste of public funds.”

—

John A. Carroll, MD

www.haitianhearts.org

johnacarroll.substack.com