At least 40 Haitian migrants died and many more were injured after a boat they were on caught fire off Haiti’s northern coast, the International Organization for Migration (IOM) reported on Friday. The boat, carrying at least 80 people and heading to Turks and Caicos, departed from Cap-Haïtien around 4 a.m. Wednesday and caught fire near Labadee. The Haitian coast guard rescued over 40 survivors, according to the IOM.
Grégoire Goodstein, the IOM’s chief in Haiti, stated, “This devastating event highlights the risks faced by children, women, and men migrating through irregular routes, demonstrating the crucial need for safe and legal pathways to migration.”
The incident occurred the same week a second group of Kenyan police officers arrived in Port-au-Prince as part of a U.N.-backed mission to combat gangs controlling much of the city and to facilitate new elections. From January to May, gangs killed at least 3,250 people in Haiti, up over 30 percent from the previous five months, forcing more than 570,000 to flee their homes, the U.N. office in Haiti reported.
These security challenges have worsened Haiti’s humanitarian crisis, with half the population suffering from acute hunger. Goodstein commented, “Haiti’s socioeconomic situation is in agony. The extreme violence over the past months has only brought Haitians to resort to desperate measures even more.”
More than 86,000 migrants have been forcibly returned to Haiti this year by neighboring countries, the IOM said. Recently arrived Kenyan police officers have begun street patrols with the Haitian National Police, but operations to pacify gang-controlled neighborhoods have not yet started. U.S. ambassador to Haiti Dennis B. Hankins expects these operations to begin soon.
As violence increases, Haitians often take to the sea to seek refuge, making risky trips on unfit vessels. The Turks and Caicos Islands are a common destination, along with the Bahamas and Florida. On Thursday, the U.S. Coast Guard and the Royal Bahamas Defense Force suspended the search for 60 Haitian migrants who left the Bahamas for Florida on July 4 on a boat with engine issues.
The IOM notes the difficulty in tracking deaths at sea due to “the remote nature of maritime routes, the secrecy in which boats set out and the lack of information on trajectories.” IOM spokesman Antoine Lemonnier explained, “Many, many boats leave [Haiti]. Many are intercepted by foreign coast guards … and probably many are dying and we will never know about it.”
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