When the U.S. Coast Guard stopped a rickety sailboat carrying more than 150 Haitian migrants, including several children, off the coast of Florida, it averted what might have been a catastrophe.
The wooden boat, which had run aground south of Miami’s Boca Chita Key, was packed with at least 150 adults, children, and even infants who had little room to move on the floor.
The sailboat was intercepted on Thursday morning, and the U.S. Coast Guard, Miami-Dade police, and other law enforcement agencies were on the scene.
Before moving closer tossing the migrants life jackets and water, the US agencies sent out four boats to encircle the rickety sailboat.
According to officials, the migrants were moved from the “overloaded and unsafe sailing vessel” to the Coast Guard cutter crews.
Four people were taken by the Miami Fire Department to Homestead Hospital for medical attention.
After that, the migrants will be returned to their country of origin, according to the US Coast Guard.
In the past year, thousands of Haitians have left their country due to a failing economy, an increase in gang-related violence, and kidnappings.
Local resident Carl Ball was out fishing when he noticed the crammed sailboat with passengers, and the authorities were on the scene in no time.
Ball told Local 10 that as he travelled south, he noticed a sailboat with its sails spread out and an MDFR boat next to it. “They were up there on the deck standing.”
The origin of the migrants has not been confirmed by authorities, but it is widely thought that they are from Haiti, where gang violence and kidnappings are a problem, and millions of people’s everyday lives are threatened by a lack of gasoline and electricity.
Haitian gangs have disrupted operations at the nation’s three main oil ports in addition to their bloody clashes in Port-au-Prince, where at least 234 people have been murdered or injured in the Cite Soleil neighbourhood since early July.
Armed groups frequently block access to the facilities, stopping the importation of fuel.
Human rights advocates in Haiti claim that those who are fleeing feel that risking their lives on a crowded boat is safer than remaining in their own country.
Ball stated, “You’ve got to wonder how desperate they must be to go aboard a boat like that with that many people in it.”
You feel so bad for those people, I know.
The severe political, health, and safety conditions in Haiti are well documented, according to Miami-Dade County Commissioner Jean Monestime, a Haitian-American.
Many of the Haitians entering the United States are undoubtedly refugees from political unrest.
My hope is that President Biden, his team, and our judicial system will treat these immigrants humanely.
The Biden administration’s immigration policy, which restricted who Homeland Security officers could deport, is currently not being reinstated by the Supreme Court.
The direction, which was put into place in a memo in September, told officers to prioritise deporting illegal immigrants who pose the most risk to public safety or national security.
A Texas judge rejected the order last month, stating that it was illegal and that the administration had gone beyond the “bounds set by Congress.”
The top court placed the matter for oral arguments during the first week of December in its order on Thursday, leaving the policy countrywide frozen.
The result was a 5-4 decision in favour of the conservative Justice Amy Coney Barrett, who agreed with the liberal Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson that the Biden administration should have been allowed to implement the instruction.
After Justice Stephen Breyer’s retirement on June 30, Jackson joined the court, and this is her first official vote since then.
In what appeared to be the largest group yet in a growing migration from crisis-hit Haiti, a boat carrying 842 Haitians its route to the United States ended up instead on the shore of central Cuba in May.
According to American authorities, the quantity of Haitian migrants captured in and near American territories in the Caribbean has risen.
A sail freighter carrying 153 Haitian migrants was reportedly detained in May by the U.S. Coast Guard near the Florida Keys.
A boat capsized northwest of Puerto Rico earlier in May, when the Coast Guard uncovered 11 dead women and saved 36 additional Haitian migrants.
The 68 migrants were saved just days before in dangerous waters between Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic, which shares the island of Hispaniola with Haiti.
More than 130 Haitian migrants were discovered onboard a boat in April by the U.S. Coast Guard close to the Bahamas. 140 migrants arrived in the Florida Keys a month earlier.
Since October, U.S. Coast Guard sailors have detained nearly 4,500 Haitians. In overcrowded boats, people were making attempts to land in the Florida Keys.
Since mid-March, more than 3,000 of these migrants have been discovered, indicating that the spring migration has accelerated.
Residents of Haiti are struggling with a gasoline and electricity crisis.
They are compelled to resort to the illicit market, where it is easy to find gasoline and diesel, but it costs six times as much as what the government has established.
The only place you can’t find fuel is at a gas station, according to law professor Yvon Janvier.
The least wealthy citizens of Jeremie are compelled to travel on foot because there is little legal fuel available and prices on the black market are skyrocketing.
According to Janvier, “it’s pretty simple: no fuel, no electricity” because diesel-burning facilities in Haiti provide the great bulk of the country’s energy.
There are “enormous challenges in getting gasoline to certain provincial towns,” according to Jose Davilmar, administrative director of the nation’s state power provider (EDH).
Most recently, three boats carrying fuel were unable to dock due to bandit retribution at Cite Soleil.
Gangs have taken control of the movement of products to half the country with just two short kilometres (1.2 miles) of national highway in Martissant, a destitute suburb of Port-au-Prince.
Since June 2021, armed groups have complete control over the only paved route access to Haiti’s southern provinces.
Entire parts of the country must use gas-powered generators to keep the lights on in the absence of electricity from power facilities.
Life has become difficult for people who cannot afford their own generator.
Joseph Stevenson, a painter living in Jacmel on the southern coast of Haiti, has to check with his neighbours to see who has electricity whenever he needs to charge his phone.
The artist explains, “Sometimes I have to go all the way downtown to receive just a few percent of a charge.”
“In the twenty-first century, can you picture that?”
Due to the increased cost of gas, Cap-Haitien, Haiti’s second-largest city, has seen pubs and restaurants with generators restrict their hours of operation in order to stay open.
Patrick Almonor, the mayor of the northern city, issues a warning that the medical facilities have been severely impacted by the power outages.
Since the EDH stopped supplying energy to the city over six months ago, hospitals are operating at a slower pace and providing fewer services, according to Almonor.
According to doctor Kinsky Hippolyte, certain health centres in Les Cayes, the third-largest city, are only open a few hours a day.
The crisis is mostly brought on by a lack of electricity, but there are also logistical issues with getting supplies of equipment and medicine 200 kilometres to the north from the capital.
The southern peninsula of Haiti experiences extremely high inflation, as does the rest of the country.
The Southwest has seen the cost of several food items double since the start of the year, despite a nationwide price increase of more than 25%.
Even locally produced goods are becoming more expensive, according to Hippolyte.
For instance, farmers may sell their lemons for more money in order to purchase imported rice.
Despite feeling fortunate in comparison to the nation’s poorest, the doctor is nonetheless required to “restrict (his) travels due to the expense of gasoline.”
The World Food Programme estimates that nearly half of Haiti’s 11 million people are already food insecure, with 1.3 million of them on the edge of starvation.
This country’s rising poverty rate is also exacerbated by social instability.