Police probe possible suicide of Haitian student wearing ICE monitor

At least 30 Haitians detained in Springfield, including two pastors

Pierre Damas Bel was 20 when he was killed on Monday morning after pulling his 20-year-old Toyota off the side of Interstate-70 outside Springfield and walking into traffic, where he was struck by a passing semi-truck, according to police reports cited by The Guardian. Police are investigating his death as a possible suicide.

Bel, who was born in Haiti, had been forced to wear an electronic ankle bracelet attached by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents this summer. In a July Instagram post, he wrote: “I’m walking through the streets of the United States with a GPS monitor on my leg, carrying a feeling of shame and humiliation that I never imagined I would experience.”

His father, Pierres Ronal Bel, said in a written statement: “After my son was outfitted with an ankle monitor, he felt like he was treated like an animal.” He went on to describe how wearing the bracelet interfered with his son’s ability to play soccer and had led to bullying and taunts of being “a criminal.”

During last fall’s high school soccer season, Bel wore the number 11 shirt for the Springfield Wildcats, scoring two goals and providing three assists. The Guardian described him as one of a growing number of skilled Haitian student athletes putting the city’s sports teams on the map. Bel also received an award from the U.S. Army’s junior reserve officer training corps. According to his Instagram account, he was in his first month of studying physiology and neuroscience at Wright State University, a suburban college 20 minutes from Springfield, worked part-time at a Texas Roadhouse restaurant and had hoped to go on to medical school.

Bel was born in Haiti. Springfield is a city of 60,000 people. In June, the Supreme Court revoked temporary protected status for 350,000 Haitians, removing their ability to legally reside in the U.S. The Guardian reported that ICE officers have become a common presence along the city’s main streets and in parking lots where Haitian-owned businesses operate.

The Guardian reported that Haitian churches had seen a huge attendance fall-off and that ICE had detained at least 30 Haitians, including two church pastors, in recent weeks. The Guardian also reported that, for the most part, agents were stopping Haitians who were driving on the streets or taking them directly from their homes.

“ICE is getting increasingly aggressive. On Saturday, they boxed in a car around the corner from my house and detained the man driving it,” Marjory Wentworth, a community advocate for Haitian immigrants in Springfield, told The Guardian. She later confirmed that the man was a Haitian national. “It’s frightening.”

Pastor Gilbert Joubert Adrien and a second Haitian man were detained at a gas station on 20 August. The Guardian reported that Adrien’s wife and children — aged seven and 15 — were without a breadwinner after his detention. He was being held at the Butler County Jail, an hour’s drive south of Springfield, which The Guardian reported had been criticized for receiving large amounts of federal dollars in return for holding hundreds of detainees for ICE. A second, unnamed pastor was detained on 25 August and transferred to a facility out-of-state, according to local activists. The local activists said neither man had criminal records at the time of their arrests.

In a single day last month, 57 people, including children, were deported from the U.S. to Haiti, according to The Guardian, citing the Miami Herald. One deportee, identified only as William, came to the U.S. in 2023 after crossing the border with Mexico with an I-94 entry document and headed straight to Springfield. He asked The Guardian not to use his real name as he was attempting to mount a legal case to be returned to the U.S. In Ohio, William worked two jobs — at an Amazon warehouse and at a metal fabrication company an hour’s drive from his home. Last March, he married a woman from Springfield, whom he met at a local church.

At his regular ICE check-in last May, however, William was detained by agents, shackled, put on a plane and flown back to Port Haïtien in northern Haiti alongside more than 160 other Haitian men. “They wouldn’t tell us where they were taking us. All we had to eat was bread and water,” he recalled of his detention and deportation flight. “I kept telling them: ‘Please don’t send us back to Haiti; anywhere else.’”

The couple had spent around $11,000 on immigration lawyers whom they hoped would help William. His wife said the family paid an attorney $8,000 who was supposed to meet them at the ICE check-in on 21 May; at 11pm the night before, she said, they received a call saying the attorney’s flight was delayed and she would send another attorney on their behalf. “This person was from a law office we never heard of, she knew nothing about our case; she was just a stand-in. When we got there, she did nothing. She didn’t tell them that we were married and had an I-130 immigration application,” she said. The Guardian reported that being married to a U.S. citizen does not prevent a non-US spouse from being deported.

The Guardian reported that the security situation in Haiti had worsened in recent weeks. Forty-seven people were massacred and 50 more kidnapped from a farming community outside Port-au-Prince on 23 August, in what The Guardian described as the worst single violent incident in Haiti in several years. The Guardian also reported that in February, three people were killed in Ouanaminthe, a border town of 115,000 people in Haiti’s north-east and William’s hometown, by a machete-wielding man, before the attacker was lynched.

ICE’s social media channels have prominently displayed promises of returnees receiving $2,600 in return for self-deporting, The Guardian reported. Once back in Haiti, William said he immediately realized he would be targeted by what he described as a growing presence of gang members hunting returnees from the U.S. “It was so bad that I had to leave again. My mother pleaded with me to get out of Haiti,” he said.

Within weeks, William fled Haiti for a second time, The Guardian reported, despite what the report described as widespread persecution and the deportation of over 100,000 Haitians there. The Guardian reported that he now lives in an unadorned room in the Dominican Republic. “When I spoke to him over the phone from his mother’s house, I could hear gunfire in the background,” his wife said.

In Springfield, the Haitian-owned Keket restaurant, where just months ago people crowded together to watch their national team play in the World Cup for the first time in 52 years, is now shuttered “due to ICE activities,” a former worker who asked not to be identified told The Guardian. The Guardian reported that the large strip malls around Springfield, which once bustled with Haitians picking up food from cafes and groceries, were quiet again.

In the U.S., the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline can be reached by call or text at 988, or online at 988lifeline.org.