Towering over a dirt road in the coastal Haitian city of Cap-Haïtien is a large three-story building with “welcome” written in multiple languages. The facility is the Centre D’Accueil-Bedrock, a welcome center for Haitian immigrants who have been deported from the United States.
It’s there that the deportees, often arriving with very little to nothing at all, can find temporary refuge and support — a meal, a place to put their heads down and hygiene materials.
“We cannot turn our backs on those people who have suffered so much, from the time that they arrived here, through being in the detention center, being sent back to a country that they left for so many years,” said Dr. Geralde Gabeau of the Immigrant Family Services Institute in Mattapan, a national organization that led the effort with some Haitian partners on the ground.
The Supreme Court ruled in June that the Trump administration could roll back the protection for at least 330,000 Haitians nationwide. Temporary protected status for Haiti officially expired on July 27, stripping at least 19,000 people in Massachusetts of the status.
Those individuals now risk being detained and deported. Last year, more people lost parole status, and have also become effectively undocumented. The center in Haiti opened last Wednesday, a day ahead of a deportation flight from the U.S. The flights have been once a week, so far, but Washington is seeking to expand deportations to the capital Port-au-Prince, too.
The center hadn’t established a protocol yet with the local government to get people to the building before last week, but workers stopped by the police station where the deported immigrants are taken. There, they distributed emergency packages, with toothbrushes, towels and other basic items for more than a hundred individuals.
This week, the center will welcome its first group of people, working with Haiti’s Office National de la Migration, to get them transported there. Currently, some of the deported individuals can get one night at a local hotel, funded by Haiti’s government, but must leave early the next morning— not all can be accommodated.
Gabeau said that in Cap-Haïtien, the nation’s second largest city, there was no infrastructure for deported immigrants. She described the overcrowding and continued deportations as “adding gasoline on top of fire.”
Since Aug. 20, removal flights to Haiti increased from one flight per month to one flight per week, following the termination of temporary protected status, according to the Human Rights Watch’s ICE Flight Monitor.
Despite the increased deportations, the State Department still lists Haiti as a Level 4 — do not travel — country for Americans.
The hope is that people can stay for a couple of days while they find a way to reconnect with family members or friends in the country who are able to assist them. Many people are deported without cellphones, Gabeau said.
The caseworkers also help to reacclimate them by, for example, mentioning which areas aren’t safe to go to in the capital, which is run by gangs.
Gabeau met individuals from a detention center in Georgia who had just been deported, including an asylum seeker with an open case.
“We were making sure that they had some resources — the follow-up care [that’s] needed to be done for many of the people, because they get one night’s stay at a hotel and they have to be out by 11 o’clock the next day,” said Dr. Guerda Nicolas, a clinical psychologist at the University of Miami who co-founded the mental health nonprofit Rebati Sante Mentale. She visits Haiti monthly, and was there with Gabeau last week.
Nicolas met several people from last week’s deportation flight. “One individual was an elderly man who was completely blind, There was another person who was bipolar, was clearly in a state of a mental health crisis — then we had another young man who had been a part of foster care system in the United States and hadn’t been in Haiti since he was two.” Another young man had a number written down and asked if he could make a phone call — he didn’t have a phone.
The deportees who arrive at the center will also have access to a psychologist. Currently, the center can host 56 individuals per night but it’s trying to secure bunkbeds to accommodate more people.
A coalition of local and international partners — including Ayiti Home Link, United For Women Empowerment, the Fondation Alfred Beliard, and the AmCham’s Women Network — are supporting the center. Gabeau said the project has cost at least $100,000, and will continue to add staff.
