Haiti’s northern coast is where the country faces the vast Atlantic Ocean with all its baggage. Labadee is a private resort available only to American cruise ships and foreign vacationers. Right next door is Tortue Island, a notorious stopover for human traffickers. And then there’s Cap-Haitien, a city steeped in the country’s revolutionary history and recently the Trump administration’s top choice for deporting Haitian immigrants.
Since Haiti’s devastating earthquake in 2010, Cap-Haitien has become a major hub for internally displaced persons fleeing disaster and violence in other parts of the country. And more may soon arrive in the city after the Trump administration won a legal victory this month that lifted temporary deportation protections for hundreds of thousands of people in the United States.
Thursday marked the first deportation flight from the United States to Haiti since Temporary Protected Status (TPS), which protected some 350,000 Haitians living in the United States from deportation and gave them legal work authorization, was revoked. Haitian communities across the United States are now coming to terms with a new reality: they are vulnerable to the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown.
“It’s a great day to deport illegal aliens. Good morning America!” DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin posted on X Thursday morning, hours before the deportation flight to Haiti took off.
According to Haiti’s National Immigration Agency, 161 people disembarked from a charter flight in Cap-Haitien shortly after noon. Some knelt and kissed the ground, others covered their faces and hurried away from the assembled local press.
The question with Cap is how many more will follow. According to local residents, the city is already flooded.
“Cap Haitian alone can’t accommodate more people,” said Demonstein Reynold, a mechanic who lives in Cap. “We are not only receiving deportees from outside Haiti…Due to the political crisis, we are also receiving people from inland areas like Anche and Port-au-Prince.”
The city looks different these days than it did in years past. Road traffic is disrupted and garbage dumpsters are overflowing. The hospital visited by CNN was filled with patients queuing outside and mothers waiting in the heat, rocking their babies.
Louis-Ronald Espoir, administrator of the city’s Fort Saint-Michel hospital, said the city’s medical facilities were stretched to capacity. “As you can see for yourself here, despite the government’s best efforts, all hospitals in the region are full. If we are full with the current population, we would be lying if we said we could accommodate anyone else.”
Thursday’s flight comes as U.S. immigrant rights groups raise concerns about the risks of deporting people to the Caribbean country. Critics calling for more immigration restrictions have accused the Trump administration of not moving quickly enough to remove illegal immigrants.
The Trump administration has repeatedly maintained that Haiti is safe enough for Haitians to return, despite the State Department’s “do not travel” advisory and the Federal Aviation Administration’s ban on U.S. commercial flights.
Marin defended the decision to deport the Haitians in an interview on CNN’s “State of the Union” in June, arguing that the country would benefit from the returnees. The State Department’s “do not travel” advisory was issued out of concern for Americans, not Haitians, he said. “They kidnap or attempt to kidnap Americans because they feel their families have the money to pay the ransom.”
But the country’s kidnapping epidemic is overwhelmingly felt by Haitians, with gangs notorious for taking victims even from the very poor. This brutal business revolves around the capital, Port-au-Prince, where US deportation flights also land.
CNN has reached out to DHS for comment on Thursday’s flight to Cap-Haitien, why the passengers were deported, and whether any passengers have recently lost their TPS.
Cap-Haitien, on the other side of the country from Port-au-Prince, is considered largely safe from gang violence. But some worry that a flood of new entrants could destabilize an already crowded space.
Former mayor Angie Bell said she was encouraging people to come back, but the country needed to improve its ability to welcome people back. “We need more development because of the large number of people visiting, and we also need increased security as a precaution,” Bell said.
She estimates the city’s population has jumped to at least 800,000 from about 350,000 at the last census in 2003. “There are a lot of people working in the city but living in the suburbs because of the housing shortage,” she says.
The Haitian government and aid organizations such as the Office for International Migration are working to ease the burden on locals and help new arrivals disperse across the country. Deportees are typically provided with food and money for further travel, as well as a place to stay for a few nights and help finding family members.
But as population figures show, many have not moved from Cap-Haitien. And all the deportees won’t even know where to go. One of the passengers disembarking had never been to Haiti before, said Jean Negot Bonheur Delba, director of the Haitian Immigration Service, who met Thursday’s deportation flight at the airport.
Delva, who was born in the Dominican Republic to Haitian parents and immigrated to the United States, is unsure where to go next, adding, “I don’t know anything about Haiti.”
CNN’s Catherine Shoichet contributed reporting.
