According to the United Nations migration agency, internal displacement in Haiti, largely caused by gang violence, has tripled in the last year and now stands at over 1 million people, a record in the Caribbean country.
The International Organization for Migration (IOM) reported on Tuesday that “relentless gang violence” in the capital Port-au-Prince has led to a near doubling of displacement there and a collapse in health care and other services, as well as worsening food insecurity. Haiti is one of the poorest countries in the world.
“The latest data shows that 1,041,000 people, many of them multiply displaced, are struggling with a worsening humanitarian crisis,” the Geneva-based agency said in a statement. Children make up more than half of those displaced.
The figure represents a tripling of displacement from 315,000 in December 2023, the IOM said.
The agency’s spokesman, Kennedy Okoth, told a U.N. briefing in Geneva that the forced repatriation of about 200,000 people – mostly from the neighboring Dominican Republic – to Haiti last year had worsened the crisis. Both countries share the Caribbean island of Hispaniola.
Okoth said the number of displacement sites in Port-au-Prince increased from 73 to 108 last year.
At least 110 people were killed in the Haiti slum Cite Soleil when a gang leader attacked elderly people he suspected of using witchcraft to cause his child’s illness, according to the National Human Rights Defense Network.
The outgoing administration of US President Joe Biden has strongly supported and expanded a temporary status program that allows some foreign nationals from countries such as El Salvador, Haiti and Venezuela to remain in the United States.
US President-elect Donald Trump and his vice president JD Vance have suggested they would scale back use of the program and policies granting temporary status while pushing ahead with mass deportations. U.S. federal rules would allow extensions to be terminated early, although this has never happened before.
Asked whether the IOM had concerns about possible changes to these U.S. protections, Okoth declined to comment on a specific country.
But he said that “deportations or forced returns to countries already facing growing security and humanitarian challenges will not be beneficial to the group.”
