The Biden administration ordered US government personnel and their family members to depart Haiti in late July 2023, citing the deteriorating security situation including kidnapping risks, crime, civil unrest, and inadequate healthcare infrastructure. The ordered departure — stronger than the previous voluntary departure advisory — reflected an assessment by American security officials that conditions in Haiti had become dangerous even for diplomats and government staff with security resources unavailable to ordinary residents.
The State Department’s ordered departure affected US Embassy staff in Port-au-Prince, reducing the American diplomatic presence to essential personnel only. The move was both a practical security measure and a symbolic indicator of how seriously the US government assessed the risks of operating in Haiti’s current environment.
The ordered departure came against a backdrop of ongoing discussions about the potential deployment of an international security mission to Haiti, with the US among the countries being asked to contribute to or support such a mission. The decision to reduce its own presence in Haiti while simultaneously being expected to support a security intervention created an obvious tension that the administration did not fully explain publicly.
Haitian civil society organizations and diaspora advocates noted the irony with some bitterness: the United States was withdrawing its personnel from a country whose security crisis was partly enabled by the flow of American weapons into Haitian gang networks and partly perpetuated by American political support for the Henry government. The ordered departure signaled American alarm about conditions in Haiti without representing any new commitment to changing them.