As the Trump administration prepares to start deporting at least 1,000 Haitians per month back to Haiti, following termination of the Temporary Protected Status (TPS) affecting some 300,000 Haitians in the U.S., that country’s provisional electoral council has announced the date for presidential elections, the first round of which will take place on December 13, followed by a March 2027 runoff. This is not a “Haitian” decision but rather Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s, who months ago demanded that a date be set for elections and ensured the installation of current prime minister Fils-Aimé to oversee them. The State Department now claims that seven of Haiti’s ten departments are safe enough to hold elections, but insists that the much-advertised Gang Suppression Force (GSF), mandated by the UN Security Council in Sept. 2025, is now deployed and will be able to improve Haiti’s security situation. But the GSF so far has only 1,000 of the 5,500-strong force it is supposed to have and is not expected to be fully operational until December, still lacking funding and manpower.
Meanwhile, gangs continue to run rampant in the three departments labeled unsafe: the West department where the capital Port-au-Prince is located (population 3.5 million); the Artibonite (Haiti’s “breadbasket,” population 1.5 million) and the South, population 800,000. Gangs now control 90% of Port-au-Prince, and as one observer pointed out, the idea of “safety” is relative as conditions are constantly shifting depending on where gangs have taken control, which new gangs have emerged and what new neighborhoods they’ve seized, etc. Fifty percent of Haiti’s electorate live in the three “unsafe” departments, so how is voting supposed to take place there?
Despite some useful opposition from Democrats, the U.S. Congress has shown itself to be as useless on Haiti policy as it is on other crucial foreign policy issues. A bipartisan congressional delegation, led by House Foreign Affairs Committee chairman Brian Mast (R-FL), just concluded a visit to Port-au-Prince, the first such visit in a decade. Nota bene. Mast supports ending TPS and sending Haitians back, even though he admitted in an interview with Fox News that what he saw in Haiti horrified him. He reported in graphic detail what he learned about the bestial, satanic character of the gangs that carry out horrific crimes of torture and killing. “Some of these areas are like Afghanistan,” he said, “and it is probably the poorest place I’ve ever been through in my life…That is what these gangs are.”
