The Trump administration’s decision to continue deportation flights to Haiti even as the COVID-19 pandemic was spreading drew sharp international criticism in 2020, particularly after reports emerged that deportees who had tested positive for COVID-19 were being placed on flights to Haiti, potentially seeding the virus in a country with virtually no capacity to manage additional transmission chains.
ICE deportation flights to Haiti had continued through the early weeks of the pandemic, defying calls from Haitian authorities and international health organizations to suspend forced returns to a country in the grip of both a health emergency and a political and humanitarian crisis. Haitian government officials expressed concern about the arrival of deportees in numbers that their reception and quarantine facilities were not equipped to handle.
Arrival testing of deportees at Haitian airports revealed positive cases among those being returned, confirming the fears of public health officials that the flights were contributing to COVID spread. The Haitian government lacked the capacity to effectively quarantine and monitor all arriving deportees, creating a genuine public health risk.
Civil rights organizations in the United States condemned the deportations as both cruel and epidemiologically irresponsible, calling for an immediate halt to all removal flights to Haiti for the duration of the pandemic. They argued that returning people to a country experiencing a humanitarian crisis while a global pandemic was spreading represented a failure of both humanitarian and public health responsibility.