Deportation flight delays, ICE’s last-minute adds leave Haitian officials scrambling

Haitian officials tasked with receiving migrants deported from the United States were forced to scramble Thursday after what was supposed to be a routine Immigration and Customs Enforcement charter flight turned chaotic.

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Global X Flight 6122 flight left Alexandria, Louisiana, for South Florida at 7:34 a.m. and was initially supposed to arrive in Cap-Haïtien at 12:22 p.m..

But after hours of unexplained delays, the flight did not leave Opa-locka Executive Airport until 5:10 p.m. It landed in Haiti after sunset at 7:05 p.m. amid heavy rain, long after Haitian government offices had closed for the day and after the deportees had spent more than 13 hours in shackles, not including the flying time.

“It’s a huge problem for us because we in Haiti work from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m.,” Jean Négot Bonheur Delva, the director general of the Office of National Migration, told the Miami Herald. “The latest time for us to receive an aircraft is 1 p.m. or 2 p.m. because it will take two to three hours of us to provide assistance to these immigrants.”

Delva said his staff was already mobilized as of 8 a.m., making preparations to receive the returning Haitian nationals.

“There is a cost,” he said, adding there are other costs associated with buses that had to be tapped to transport people. “It’s a problem for us; it’s demoralizing.”

Still, despite the weather, the returnees were welcomed backed with a band playing the patriotic Haitian anthem“Ayiti Cherie.” They were also offered a hot meal and handed documents that U.S. authorities had forwarded.

Haitian officials in the Office of National Migration were unable to fully process the deportees, who after arriving were being screened by police to ensure that none were wanted by police. After the Miami Herald exposed that deportees were being sent without information of their criminal records, DHS began highlighting those with criminal records on the manifest, officials said.

Delva said all of the airport employees had already left by the time the flight landed, and his staff plans to finish registering the returnees on Friday. Many are not from Cap-Haïtien and would need to find lodging or eventually cross a country where armed gangs control key roads.

Immigrant and human-rights advocates called the situation unacceptable, particularly given the dangers facing returning Haitians, including gang killings and surging kidnappings.

“By the time they leave the airport in Haiti, people, including families and children, will have to find their bearings and navigate their way to some semblance of safety in the darkness amidst extreme instability and insecurity,” said Savi Arvey, director of policy, refugee and immigrant rights at Human Rights First. “This administration seems to have no bottom when it comes to cruelty and for overtly sending people to danger.”

The Department of Homeland Security did not respond to a Herald request for comment.

Arvey said that the Trump administration is “showing egregious cruelty toward our Haitian community members still in the United States, subjecting them to extreme instability, surveillance, and precarity.”

The delayed flight was one of two crises that Haitian officials faced on Thursday with deportees being returned from the United States.

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Migration officials had been preparing to receive 71 people, but after arriving at the Cap-Haïtien airport, they learned that more than two dozen additional detainees had been added to the manifest, bringing the expected total to 98.

The sudden increase strained an already limited budget, and complicated what officials described as a laborious reception process.

Until now, detainees have received about $80 after their return to Haiti to help them get home. Haiti’s Office of National Migration had planned to increase the amount to $200 per deportee. But with the sudden increase in numbers at the last minute, officials no longer had enough money to provide the increased assistance or to cover lodging.

Then came another complication.

Thursday’s flight was the fourth deportation since the Department of Homeland Security increased the frequency from once a month to once a week, after the Supreme Court cleared the way for the Trump administration to terminate the program for more than 300,000 Haitians living in the United States.

Since then, hundreds of Haitians have been returned to a volatile Haiti, including U.S-born children traveling with deported parents and people who had been detained only days before being placed aboard the plane.

Some arrived without personal belongings. Among them was a former senior government official who had been detained with two cell phones and was sent back to Haiti with neither of them.

Other immigrant advocates have told the Herald that deportees have complained about missing money from their possessions following their ICE detentions.

“At this point, it is clear that extreme cruelty and the disregard for the lives of Haitian immigrants is an integral part of this administration fulfillment of project 2025 to eliminate as many Black people as a part of their ethnic cleansing agenda” said Guerline Jozef, executive director of the Haitian Bridge Alliance, an immigrant rights group.

Jozef condemned the administration’s decision to end deportation protections for Haitians who had been under Temporary Protected Status.

“The deportation of American babies of Haitian TPS holders into the very same conditions that the U.S. government warned people about is a crime against humanity,” Jozef said. “We call on the Haitian government to ask for a moratorium on these deportations as they are currently unable to protect or have to the infrastructure to guarantee the safety of those being sent to Haiti.”

Among the passengers on the ICE Air deportation flight was a deportee with medical issues, and a mother with what appeared to be a newborn baby, a Haiti staffer said.

Thursday’s flight came two days after The Bahamas also deported a group of Haitians. That flight too created problems for Haitian officials, who said they had not been notified in advance.

The lack of communication and the frequency of the flights are putting additional pressure on a reception system that officials say is being overwhelmed as they struggle to accommodate a growing number of deportees being returned to a country where gang violence has forced 1.5 million to flee their homes and made traveling between regions increasingly dangerous..

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This story was originally published September 10, 2026 at 6:48 PM.