By the end of 2023, an estimated 199,170 people had been forcibly returned to Haiti from the United States and the Dominican Republic, arriving in a country experiencing one of the worst security and humanitarian crises in its modern history. The scale of deportations — from a country that was itself telling its own personnel to leave Haiti — illustrated the profound contradiction at the heart of international policy toward Haitian migration.
The Dominican Republic was responsible for the majority of deportations, having dramatically escalated its enforcement operations in October 2023. New Dominican government measures tripled the rate of deportations, with thousands of Haitians and Haitian-descended individuals expelled weekly. Human rights organizations documented cases in which individuals who had lived in the Dominican Republic for decades, whose children were Dominican citizens, and who had no practical connection to Haiti were included in mass expulsions.
The United States continued its deportation flights to Haiti despite State Department advisories warning against travel to Haiti and an ordered departure of US government personnel. Civil rights organizations argued that returning Haitians to a country the US government itself considered too dangerous for its own employees was legally and morally indefensible.
Deportees arriving at the Port-au-Prince airport described finding themselves in a country they had left years or decades earlier, often with no family connections remaining, no housing, and no means of survival in an environment that was simultaneously experiencing acute food insecurity, gang violence, and humanitarian emergency. The International Organization for Migration provided reception services at the airport but could not address the fundamental impossibility of the situation confronting thousands of people being returned to a country that could not safely absorb them.