The United States is deporting families with U.S.-citizen infants into a country at war.
A second charter flight in eight days carried 57 people — 51 men, six women — into Cap-Haïtien International Airport on Thursday. On board, alongside former Temporary Protected Status holders and recipients of humanitarian parole whose protection has now been revoked, were families whose immigration proceedings are still pending. A one-year-old born in the United States came with her parents. Other children on the flight were born in Brazil. The Haitian National Migration Office confirmed the varied immigration backgrounds to local press. Haitian authorities said the flights would become more frequent.
Eight days before Thursday, the first post-TPS removal flight from Alexandria carried 161 passengers into the same airport. Together, the two flights have moved 218 people from U.S. detention into Haiti in eight days. DHS is reportedly placing ankle monitors on Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio, so immigration cases can continue while the people wearing them are tracked through their removal proceedings. This is a system that has decided what it is doing.
The country they are landing in is not what most Americans picture when they hear the word “deportation.” It is a country where the Viv Ansanm gang coalition now controls most of the approaches to Port-au-Prince. Less than a week before the second flight, members of that coalition attacked Kenscoff — a mountain commune directly above the capital — killing at least 47 people and abducting more than 50, including children. At least five of the dead were children. Twenty-two victims were reportedly executed inside a religious compound where they had taken shelter. The gang’s leadership is now openly using the hostages as leverage. The Haitian National Police replaced the head of its Kenscoff jurisdiction on Thursday — Chief Commissioner Jean-Pierre Ketler Mauriceau taking over from Inspector Nikenson Cadet — and opened investigations into whether complicity or negligence within the security forces had allowed armed men into central Kenscoff. Police spokesman Garry Desrosiers told a Thursday news conference that operational details could not be discussed publicly. Replacing a local commander is not a rescue operation.
The displacement from that single attack was 2,647 people from 702 households, according to the International Organization for Migration. Most of them were absorbed into host families in neighboring Pétionville rather than into displacement sites, because the displacement infrastructure that exists for an event that displaced thousands is just three organized sites. Neighbors opening their homes held the line. The community-led response was real. The U.N. counted 3,050 killings and 1,401 injuries across Haiti in the first six months of 2026 alone. Those are the kinds of numbers that attach to a war zone. They are not the kinds of numbers that belong on the receiving end of a U.S. charter flight.
You, who decided this — whoever in the cabinet room, whoever at DHS, whoever signed off on ending TPS in a country with these numbers — the cross you may or may not claim has had something to say about this for a long time. The Torah says it twice, with a force that turns the memory of slavery itself into the moral reason: “You shall not wrong or oppress a resident alien, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt.” “You shall love the alien as yourself, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt.” Jesus gathered the nations before him in Matthew 25 and named the failure: “I was a stranger and you did not welcome me.” Pope Francis, on the dock at Lampedusa in 2013, named the failure of our age as the globalization of indifference: “We have become used to the suffering of others: it doesn’t affect me; it doesn’t concern me; it’s none of my business.” His Fratelli Tutti names what you are doing without softening it: “Migrants… possess the same intrinsic dignity as any person… For Christians, this way of thinking and acting is unacceptable, since it sets certain political preferences above deep convictions of our faith.” You do not get to keep the cross and the policy. You do not get to say “ordo amoris” and mean “send them back to a country at war.” Óscar Romero, the night before they killed him for it, told the soldiers of his country in the name of God and the suffering people: ¡cese la represión! Stop the repression. Yours is the same order. Stop.
The thread that runs from the federal courtroom through the Aug. 20 first flight through the Aug. 28 second flight through the ankle monitors in Springfield through the gang attack in Kenscoff through the hostage crisis that has produced no public action in days is one continuous decision. It does not bend toward the people at its receiving end. The deportation machine is older than any one of you — TPS termination itself was first attempted by the previous administration — and no party has a monopoly on the sin of sending people back into harm. We built this. We — the country, the tradition, the readers of this column and the writer of it — built, over decades, the country at the receiving end of these flights, in our name. The 57 people on Thursday’s flight did not choose it. We did.
The second flight makes the geography legible. U.S. policy ends in Cap-Haïtien. It ends in a country with 3,050 dead in six months, a gang coalition running attacks on mountain towns above the capital, a police force replacing its own commanders, and a hostage crisis entering the window where kidnappings either resolve or become atrocities. Sending families with U.S.-citizen infants into that country, on flights whose frequency the receiving government has publicly committed to increasing, is a policy choice. It is not a humanitarian one. The door of return is still open. The decision can be reversed. The next flight does not have to land.