Their Future, Their Voice: USCRI...
Today, USCRI is proud to launch Their Future, Their Voice: Centering Displaced Children in Global Protection and Policy, a new...
READ FULL STORYPort-au-Prince, Haiti’s capital, is a sprawling metropolis. Home to nearly two million residents, in 2025 it had only one working fire hydrant.
I came across this statistic while researching Haiti’s humanitarian crisis for an upcoming country conditions report (we last wrote one on Haiti in 2024). In speaking with experts both in Haiti and neighboring countries, I was struck by how precarious daily life in Haiti is. Port-au-Prince’s singular fire hydrant is symbolic of both the routine cruelties and extreme acts of violence that Haiti’s citizens are subjected to.
Fire hydrants are crucial to public safety. Without them, firefighters do not have the infrastructure or access to water needed to adequately extinguish most fires. Haiti’s firefighters are asked not only to fight fires without water, but to do so in a climate embroiled in violence and insecurity. Haiti’s gangs—who control an estimated 80-90% of the capital—are known to blaze hospitals, homes, and cultural centers.
Firefighters are called to service in zones where gangs actively lay siege. They do so without armored vehicles or bulletproof vests. They are often ambushed, sometimes killed. Some of Haiti’s fire departments have stopped being able to service areas of the country, the roads blocked by gangs.
Haiti’s deteriorating infrastructure and public order reflect years of political instability, institutional erosion, and insecurity. The assassination of President Jovenel Moïse in July 2021 deepened the country’s political crisis, while armed gangs were able to expand their control under intensified violence, particularly in and around the capital. More than 1.5 million people have been displaced. At least 16,000 people have been killed.
Gang violence in Haiti is designed to inflict as much pain as possible. The perpetrators of this violence have no consideration for vulnerable populations, like children and the elderly. Hospitals, for example, are often attacked. In one incident, gangs shot up the neonatal unit at a hospital, firing at the incubators and injuring newborn babies. In 2024, a gang massacred 207 people, targeting elderly Vodou practitioners in Port-au-Prince’s Cité Soleil neighborhood. The gang’s leader wrongly blamed them for the death of his son, and extracted retribution with impunity. In another incident, a gang member ripped a baby from their mother’s arms, throwing the child—alive—into a fire. The mother wandered around in shock for two days, eventually dying from the trauma at a police station.
These stories are not exceptional, but representative of the collapse of law and order in Haiti, of the violence that haunts daily life. Haiti’s humanitarian crisis is comparable to a civil war in its scale of suffering, yet it receives little if any international attention of late.
Despite this, Haiti’s story is not one of victimhood. Haiti is a country with a long history of resistance. After a successful rebellion against French colonial rule, it became the first Black republic in the early 1800s. France, however, required the new nation to pay for its freedom. Facing war and a loss of the country’s freedom as the alternative, Haiti’s then President was forced to agree to compensate the slave masters they had overthrown for the value of their “lost property.” In real terms, the sum amounts to a $21 billion USD loss. Many scholars credit this ransom—which at one point ate up three-quarters of the national budget—as a driving force underlying Haiti’s ongoing humanitarian crisis.
Migration is its own form of resistance. Hundreds of thousands of Haitians have left the country in search of a safer future than the one wrought by the legacy of colonialism and foreign intervention. They cross the Caribbean in crowded boats, risking interdiction at sea and return by the U.S. Government. They are the inheritors of the rebellion that founded their country, putting their lives on the line in aspirations of freedom.
Haitian asylum seekers are not asking to be saved: they are asking us to respect their human right to seek safety and opportunity elsewhere. But recent decisions of the U.S. Government, including the termination of Haitians’ Temporary Protected Status (TPS), threaten that right.
At the end of June 2026, the U.S. Supreme Court will decide on the future of Haiti’s TPS. Depending on how the court rules, it could impact millions beyond just Haitians. If the Court decides in favor of the U.S. Government, hundreds of thousands of Haitians could be stripped of their right to live and work in the United States. Deporting them would be a violation of international law. Citing states’ non-refoulement obligations not to return people to a place where their life would be threatened, United Nations’ officials have urged states not to return people to Haiti.
Removing people to a place where they could face persecution or serious harm is both illegal and immoral. It also represents the same logic that forced Haiti to pay France for its freedom. It is a logic that denies Haitians their humanity and refuses to reckon with the terror of living in constant fear.
It is long past time that the international community stop asking Haitians to survive atrocity after atrocity and instead respect their dignity. Protecting their right to seek asylum, seek safety, and a new start is a crucial first step.
If you have expertise on country conditions in Haiti – through lived experience or professional credentials– I would love to chat with you! We are also looking to talk with Haitian immigrants based in the U.S. Please email [email protected] if you are interested.
