“I don’t know anything about Haiti,” Jay Dabelus said in English, minutes after stepping off a deportation flight in Cap-Haïtien on Thursday, August 27, 2026. “I was born in The Bahamas and had been living in the USA for twenty-something years.”
Dabelus is a professional boxer. He told the Miami Herald he was six when he came to Florida, and that he had been ranked first among the state’s amateurs before turning pro eight years ago. He lived in Lauderhill and was once covered by Temporary Protected Status. He had spent three months in deportation proceedings when ICE put him on the plane.
Now he is in a country where, he said, “I don’t have any resources, family members or people to aid me.” He said he wants to get to the Bahamas and pick his boxing career back up. “Everything that I have and have received in life is from Florida, from the United States,” he said.
Fifty-seven people, two minors
The charter carried 57 people, the Herald reported. Haiti’s National Office of Migration, cited by Africanews, said two of them were minors. The Herald put the number of children higher, including several born in the United States and Brazil, the youngest a 3-year-old born in the U.S. Their parents called it “scandalous” that U.S.-born children were being sent to Haiti.
The plane landed in Cap-Haïtien shortly after 11:30 a.m. rather than in Port-au-Prince, because gang violence has made the capital’s main airport too dangerous. As on earlier flights, Africanews noted, several deportees covered their faces when they got off.
It was the second flight in a week. The first, on August 20, brought more than 160 people; the Herald said it included over a dozen individuals with criminal records for sex crimes involving children. Both flights followed the end of Temporary Protected Status for some 350,000 Haitians living in the United States, according to Africanews. The Herald said U.S. officials had warned Haitian authorities the previous month to expect more removals after the Supreme Court let President Donald Trump end the designation while court challenges continue.
A DHS spokesperson would not confirm any schedule. “For operational security and the safety of our personnel, we would never disclose information about our deportation flights,” the spokesperson said, adding that Temporary Protected Status “is exactly that, temporary.”
The ground they landed on
The flight arrived days after a gang attack in Haiti that left 47 people dead and more than 50 kidnapped, Africanews reported. The Herald tied that violence to the mountain farming community of Kenscoff near the capital.
Northern Haiti has been spared the worst of the fighting. Locals told the Herald, though, that the deportation flights and the number of Haitians fleeing violence are straining resources there. More than half of the country’s nearly 12 million people need humanitarian assistance.
Savi Arvey, policy director for refugee and immigrant rights at Human Rights First, said the U.S. is “knowingly sending people, including children, back into danger in Haiti.” She counted it as the 9th flight this year.
Sources
- U.S. deports dozens to Haiti as migrants arrive in unfamiliar country | Africanews
- ICE sends second deportation flight to Haiti in a week. There are kids aboard | Miami Herald (via Yahoo News)
