The United States deported a Brazilian boy born in 2021 to Haiti on August 27, together with his parents, both Haitian. The International Organization for Migration (IOM) told the Brazilian newspaper Folha de S.Paulo that the child was removed along with his parents, and the account was confirmed by Nathalye Cotrino, a senior researcher at Human Rights Watch (HRW) who monitored the arrival in Cap-Haitien of the flight carrying 57 deportees. The boy landed in the poorest country in the Americas, which Folha describes as one of the most dangerous in the world, with widespread armed violence and a failed state.
The case follows directly from the end of Temporary Protected Status (TPS), a US humanitarian program that allowed 330,000 Haitians to live legally in the country, many of them admitted under President Joe Biden. In late July, the US Supreme Court upheld President Donald Trump's decision to terminate the benefit. Since then, deportation flights to Haiti, previously monthly, have become weekly, according to Folha.
What the case exposes for Brazil
For Brazil, the episode opens an unfamiliar consular front. Children born on Brazilian soil are Brazilian nationals under the country's birthright citizenship rule, and Folha reports that the case illustrates a trend likely to grow: many Haitian families living in the United States have children born in Brazil, a legacy of the years when Brazil was a destination for part of the migration wave that opened after the 2010 earthquake. The business daily Valor Econômico devoted a report to the theme: the deportation of children from the US to third countries creates dilemmas for Latin American governments. None of the reports consulted records any official Brazilian government response to this specific case so far.
The family's path shows how the crackdown reached people who were living legally in the country. According to Folha, the parents, the Brazilian boy, an older brother born in Haiti and a younger sibling born in the United States lived in New York, the second-largest center of the Haitian community in the country after Florida, and held TPS. When they lost the benefit, they tried to move to Canada, where they would request asylum, but were detained and returned to the United States. They then came into the custody of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the federal immigration agency, until being deported to Haiti.
Weekly flights to a country in collapse
The flight that carried the family was the second US deportation flight to Haiti in a single week, as reported by the Miami Herald and the Associated Press. According to the AP, the children aboard belonged to two families, and the plane landed shortly after 11:30 a.m. in Cap-Haitien, Haiti's second-largest city, because the airport in Port-au-Prince is considered too dangerous. The agency also reported that the US government kept a ban on commercial flights to the capital through early September because of gang violence. The program Democracy Now reported that US-born children were also aboard the same flight. The map of interests is clear: Washington is accelerating removals, Ottawa has become an escape route for families trying to claim asylum before deportation, and Haiti, without effective state control over its capital, is absorbing returnees days after a massacre by armed gangs. According to the Miami Herald, the country received 164 deported people that day, counting a separate flight sent by the Bahamas.
With weekly flights underway and 330,000 Haitians losing TPS protection, Folha expects cases like this to multiply. HRW monitored the arrivals in Cap-Haitien, and the IOM confirmed the presence of the Brazilian child on the flight. The question the episode leaves open is how Brasília and other Latin American capitals will exercise consular protection for citizens caught by removals to a country in collapse.