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US-expelled Haitians fuel charter flight business to Latin America

Published:Tuesday | June 14, 2022 | 9:10 AM
Etienne Ilienses checks her family's papers for a flight to Chile, at the Toussaint Louverture International Airport, in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, Sunday, January 30, 2022. Ilienses said she was sent back to Haiti from Texas on December 14 and talked to the AP before flying to Santiago with her three children on a January 30 charter flight on SKY. “To get to the USA, I braved hell,” she said. Still, she did not dismiss doing it again “because Haiti offers nothing to its children. We are forced to suffer humiliations, affronts everywhere." (AP Photo/Odelyn Joseph)

SANTIAGO, Chile (AP) — With jokes, upbeat Caribbean music and vacation scenes of sun-kissed beaches and palm trees, Haitian influencers on YouTube and TikTok advertise charter flights to South America.

But they are not targeting tourists.

Instead, they are touts for a thriving, little-known shadow industry that is profiting from the United States government sending people back to Haiti, a country besieged by gang violence.

More than a dozen South American travel agencies have rented planes from low-budget Latin American airlines — some of them as large as 238-seat Airbuses — and then sold tickets at premium prices.

Many of the customers are Haitians who had been living in Chile and Brazil before they made their way to the Texas border in September, only to be expelled by the Biden administration and prevented from seeking asylum.

They are using the charter flights to flee Haiti again and return to South America.

Some, clearly, plan to make another try to enter the United States.

Rodolfo Noriega of the National Coordinator of Immigrants in Chile said Haitians are being exploited by businesses taking advantage of their desperation. They “are at the end of a chain of powerful businesses making money from this circuit of Haitian migration,” he said.

The airlines and travel agencies say they work within the legal norms of the countries where they are operating from and are simply providing a service to the Haitian Diaspora in South America.

The thriving business model was revealed in an eight-month investigation by The Associated Press in partnership with the University of California, Berkeley's Human Rights Center and its Investigative Reporting Program.

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