More than 100 Haitian migrants land in Key West. They spent seven days at sea
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A group of more than 100 migrants from Haiti arrived off Key West in a sailboat early Wednesday morning, according to the Monroe County Sheriff’s Office.
The boat landed about 100 yards off the 1800 Atlantic condominiums near Higgs Beach around 3:40 a.m., according to the sheriff’s office. About 117 people — 87 males and 30 females, including some children — were on the vessel, according to a dispatch provided to the Herald by the agency.
One child and one adult were taken to Lower Keys Medical Center to be treated for non-life threatening injuries, according to the dispatch.
The people told authorities that they were at sea for seven days, according to the sheriff’s office.
All of the people were turned over to the U.S. Border Patrol. Adam Hoffner, assistant chief patrol agent for the Border Patrol’s Miami sector, told the Herald the people will be taken to the agency’s facilities in Marathon, in the Middle Keys, and Dania Beach, in Broward County.
U.S. authorities have not indicated where the sailboat departed from, but locals in northwest Haiti said it launched from the village of LaVallée on Île de Latortue, an island off their coast.
While migrant landings by people fleeing Cuba are a frequent occurrence in the Keys, boats traversing to the island chain from Haiti are much less common.
Arrivals from Cuba are usually smaller groups on makeshift boats. Typically, people coming from Haiti are on overloaded vessels like the one that came Wednesday.
The last arrival from Haiti to the Keys was in February 2023, when 114 people came ashore in the small Upper Keys community of Tavernier.
Wednesday’s landing comes amid an ongoing executive order by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis issued in January 2023 that sent an influx of state law enforcement officers and National Guard soldiers to help patrol the seas and skies for incoming migrants.
The order was in response to a surge in migrant arrivals from Cuba and Haiti that taxed Monroe County Sheriff’s Office deputies and Keys-assigned Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission officers who were usually the first to respond to the landings, which were happening sometimes several times per day between late 2022 and early 2023.
Landings have dwindled since then, but boats do still get through — as evidenced by Wednesday’s arrival.
Since March, the DeSantis administration had been anticipating an exodus from Haiti to the shores of South Florida because of ongoing gang violence that has plagued the country.
Until Wednesday, however, that had not materialized.
Additionally, it has been the violence and gang control within the country that has prevented more people from leaving. That’s because getting from Port-au-Prince to Haiti’s northwest coast is a highly treacherous journey, and requires entering several gang territories.
The violence in Haiti has gotten so severe that armed gangs now control more than 80 percent of the country’s capital of Port-au-Prince.
On Tuesday, a group of 200 elite anti-terrorist forces and support staff from Kenya arrived in Haiti as part of a multi-international security mission to regain control of the situation.
READ MORE: ‘Lay down your guns,’ Haiti’s prime minister tells gangs as Kenyan forces arrive
But while the number of Haitians arriving by sea to South Florida’s shores had tapered off, that has not been the case for the Turks and Caicos — a popular destination for those leaving from the north coast of Haiti and opting not to take the longer, riskier voyage to the United States.
Concerns about a flood of Haitian migrants inundating the island chain led the British government to also beef up maritime patrols, along with the Bahamas and U.S. Coast Guard.
Last year, the overseas British archipelago logged 4,016 undocumented Haitians, according to government statistics obtained by the Herald. This year alone, 865 Haitians have arrived in the island with a population of roughly 40,000 inhabitants.
Immigration rights advocates on Wednesday called on both the DeSantis and Biden administrations to provide humane treatment and support to the arriving Haitian migrants. They noted that chaos continues to unfold in Haiti, driving desperate people to flee, even as a group of specialized police from Kenyan begin leading a Multinational Security Support mission to help police tackle ruthless armed gangs.
They also asked the Department of Homeland Security to re-designate Temporary Protected Status for Haiti in order to prevent Haitians already in the U.S. from being deported.
The Florida Immigrant Coalition said it “opposes any measure that prevents individuals from applying for asylum, or other protections, and being deported back to Haiti.”
“We must focus on providing immediate assistance and ensuring the safety and well-being of those arriving on our shores. These are people fleeing unimaginable violence and deprivation. They need our help, not further displacement,” said Yareliz Mendez-Zamora, Federal Campaign Lead at FLIC.
