More than half of the people in Haiti are facing severe hunger, with at least 8,000, specifically among those displaced and living in tent camps, facing starvation. Gang violence killed 5600 people in 2024, with more than one million people displaced. The violence, death, hunger and displacement are a result of weak U.S. gun laws and weak enforcement that enriches manufacturers and dealers and enables illegal gun trafficking across the Caribbean.
Similarly, trafficking guns across the border with Mexico fuels gang violence across Latin America, which is a leading cause of migrants pleading for asylum at our borders. We destroy their countries, and then we treat them with heartless disregard, casual cruelty, and abuse, when they take the initiative to seek a new life.
Heartless disregard for human life and dignity actually defines the current administration. We fought WWII in part because of Nazi concentration camps. We engaged in the Cold War in part because of Stalin's gulags. Now we are shipping people to the 21st Century version of concentration camps and gulags, the prisons in El Salvador, without due process or any hope of ever getting out. The current administration calls the expelled all kinds of names (terrorist, criminal, gang member), without proof, because there was no legal process to provide proof. In the case of Kilmar Garcia, the wrongfully expelled man from Maryland, there was proof that he does not belong to a gang, and yet he was still expelled. Stalin and Hitler did the same thing. Rule of law is one of the pillars of our democracy and makes our country great. No more.
If we look the other way when they take away the most vulnerable, the Venezuelans and Salvadorans, and all of the people from Africa and Asia that they expelled to Costa Rica and Panama without due process, then we embolden them to take away more rights from more people. The fight to prevent extra-judiciary expulsions, and detentions, is an existential fight for the soul of this country.
The current administration and the sycophantic media and influencers that follow it would have us believe that all of the expelled and detained are criminals. They are not, and the narrative is self-serving and scapegoating. Statistically, immigrants, including undocumented immigrants, are less likely to commit crimes than US citizens. The very small number of violent crimes they cite where migrants are responsible are horrific, and still they cite the same ones over and over. This does not translate into collective guilt. Hitler and Stalin also scapegoated vulnerable populations to justify extra-judicial expulsions, detentions, and killing, in order to consolidate power with their base of support. It's a well-known playbook, and once we recognize that their end game is to consolidate their own power and wealth, we can make sense of literally everything they are doing.
The administration announced this week that it plans to designate Haiti's gangs as foreign terrorists. At face value this could be a good thing, opening up the possibility of additional sanctions, as well as holding arms dealers and manufacturers accountable. But Quixote Center cannot support it, because this is the same designation they gave to the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua, which they used as an excuse to expel Venezuelans to Salvadoran gulags without due process. We support sanctions against proven gang members and those who finance them. We support all legal measures to hold those responsible for weapons trafficking accountable. We do not support suspension of due process or rule of law.
Our partners in Gros Morne have been victims of gangs operating in the Artibonite department, in the North, and the insecurity has complicated their agro-forestry operations at the Grepen Center. We think that the best way to support them now is what we are doing: maintain operations at Grepen Center so that locals still have access to seedlings and crop diversification, and inject cash into the economy, through our campaign to support deportees and displaced persons, to stem hunger and provide a market for local produce.
Tomorrow, Thursday April 24 at 1 pm we are co-hosting a webinar on gun trafficking to Haiti and human rights violations. You can register here to learn more about the issue and what can be done.
You can sign our petition to the Department of Homeland Security to end weapons trafficking to Haiti here.
You can donate here to our campaign to support displaced persons and deportees in Haiti.
We thank each of you for your support for those most desperate, despite what must be your own sense of vulnerability and confusion about what will happen next in our own country.
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