An Immigration and Customs Enforcement charter left south Florida on Thursday morning and landed at Cap-Haïtien in northern Haiti carrying 57 people. Among them were several children born in the United States and Brazil. According to information passed to Haitian authorities before the aircraft arrived, the youngest person on board was one year old and born in the United States, which makes that child an American citizen.

It was the second deportation flight from the United States to Haiti in seven days. Until recently they ran roughly once a month.

A citizen child is not, legally, being deported

This distinction is the heart of the story and it is regularly lost in the coverage, so it is worth stating plainly.

A US citizen cannot be deported. What happens is that a parent is removed and the parent decides — or is asked to decide, sometimes at short notice — whether the child travels with them or stays behind with another relative or in state care. On paper this is a family’s own choice. In practice a mother holding a one-year-old is choosing between taking the child to a country in the middle of an armed collapse and leaving the child in another country without her.

The legal effect is that no court order is needed to put a citizen child on the plane, and no record is created describing it as the removal of a citizen. The child appears on the manifest as an accompanying minor. That is why the number of American children who have left the country this way is not published anywhere: the system does not count it as an event.

Why the flights land at Cap-Haïtien

Haiti’s main international airport is in Port-au-Prince, and it is effectively closed to this traffic. US aviation regulators have restricted most American civil flights below 10,000 feet around the capital because armed groups have fired on aircraft; several planes have been hit since late 2025.

So the flights go to Cap-Haïtien, the second city, roughly 200 kilometres north over mountains that are themselves not safely passable in parts. People deported to a city they may have no connection to are then expected to make their own way onward.

The same day the American charter arrived, the Bahamas returned 104 people to the same airport. Haiti’s National Office of Migration recorded 161 arrivals in a single day in a city already absorbing large numbers of people displaced from the capital.

What changed to make this possible

Temporary Protected Status is a designation that allows nationals of a country in crisis to remain in the United States without a permanent immigration status. Haitians held it for years. Once the designation ended, several hundred thousand people who had been lawfully present became removable, and the administration has said it intends to move from monthly flights to weekly ones.

Haiti’s migration office noted that those on the first flight of this new phase, on 20 August, were not former TPS holders. That group included people removed for entering without authorisation and people who had completed prison sentences — and, according to Haitian officials, some who had never lived in Haiti and were considered Haitian only through a parent.

In Springfield, Ohio, a city with a large Haitian community that became a target of political attacks during the last presidential campaign, immigration agents have stepped up enforcement operations in the same period.

The argument on each side

The administration’s position is that removal orders are court orders, that a country cannot maintain an immigration system in which those orders are not carried out, and that the protected status was always described as temporary.

The objection from lawyers and Haitian-American organisations is not usually that removals should never happen. It is about the destination. Aid agencies describe large parts of Haiti as controlled by armed groups, with a hunger emergency affecting millions and a health system that has largely stopped functioning. Sending anyone there, the argument runs, is a different act from sending someone to a country that works — and sending a one-year-old American citizen there is different again.

Sources

Haiti’s National Office of Migration (ONM); The Haitian Times; Associated Press; CBS News; Miami Herald; US Federal Aviation Administration notices.