{"id":7649,"date":"2022-09-15T11:47:55","date_gmt":"2022-09-15T05:47:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.bnc24.com\/en\/?p=7649"},"modified":"2022-09-15T11:47:55","modified_gmt":"2022-09-15T05:47:55","slug":"bidens-dirty-deal-sold-out-haitian-democracy-for-migrant-deportations-former-envoy-says","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bnc24.com\/en\/national\/2022\/09\/15\/news\/7649\/","title":{"rendered":"Biden\u2019s dirty deal sold out Haitian democracy for migrant deportations, former envoy says"},"content":{"rendered":"
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The ex-envoy to Haiti says that Biden supports Haitian Prime Minister Ariel Henry (above) because he accepted deportees from the southern border.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

WASHINGTON, Broadcasting news corporation : The Biden administration scuttled Haiti\u2019s plans for free elections and backed a de facto dictator in exchange for his willingness to accept deportees, America\u2019s former envoy to the country says. Daniel Foote, the Biden- appointed former US special envoy to Haiti, says the administration has supported Dr. Ariel Henry \u2014 who took power as both acting prime minister and acting president after the assassination of President Jovenel Moise \u2014 because he was willing to accept Haitian migrants who have rushed the US border. Henry was supposed to have organized new elections by now. But in September 2021, a large group of Haitian migrants camped in Del Rio, Texas, and images of the encampment \u2014 including border agents on horseback trying to prevent them from crossing the river \u2014 caused a political headache for President Biden. Henry agreed to take in deported Haitians, Foote says, and the Biden administration stopped pushing for democracy on the Caribbean nation. \u201cI am confident that the chief reason they did that is his [Henry\u2019s] malleability and the fact that he agreed that he would take all the deportees that they wanted to send. It wasn\u2019t long after that .\u2009.\u2009. we started putting them on planes,\u201d Foote told me in an interview for my forthcoming book, \u201cOverrun: How Joe Biden Unleashed the Greatest Border Crisis in U.S. History.\u201d \u201cThe US carried out a non-democratic transfer of power. We were just kicking the can down the road so that we don\u2019t upset the vote moving toward the midterms.\u201d On the morning of July 7, 2021, two dozen armed men stormed the Haitian presidential compound, killing President Moise with 12 shots and wounding his wife. The case remains unsolved, though reports by The New York Times and CNN show that Henry is close to one of the men accused of the murder, Joseph Felix Badio. Henry has denied any involvement. Henry was supposed to oversee the work of a \u201cProvisional Electoral Council\u201d that was organizing Haiti\u2019s long overdue presidential and parliamentary elections set for November 2021. But nearly a year later, Henry remains Haiti\u2019s US-backed chief of state. No elections have taken place. Meanwhile, the country\u2019s bicameral National Assembly legislature, which is supposed to provide ratifying checks or balances on executive branch power, is defunct, as is the nation\u2019s supreme court.
\nHenry is a leader with no domestic checks on power \u2014 a dictator. Foote, who was appointed envoy shortly after the assassination, thinks the Del Rio encampment is why Biden officials have looked the other way.
\nStarting on about Sept. 18, 2021, a massive and squalid encampment that would quickly peak at some 17,000 mostly Haitian immigrants suddenly formed on the Texas side of the Rio Grande under the bridge between Del Rio in Texas and Ciudad Acuna in Mexico. White House advisers viewed the Texas encampment crisis as a serious political threat to Democratic prospects in the 2022 midterm elections. The Biden administration decided to deport most of the Haitians by air from Laughlin Air Force Base outside Del Rio. But this required formal Haitian approval. Henry agreed. The first of what would be 58 flights from the Del Rio camp carrying nearly 9,000 Haitians from Texas started landing in Port-au-Prince on about Sept.\u200220, and on Sept. 27, Henry abolished the Provisional Electoral Council ahead of the elections. He could not have done such a thing without American backing and the effective anointment of Henry to indefinite power, says Foote, whose input senior State Department officials told him they did not want because the decision was already made. On Sept. 22, Foote resigned over this undermining of Haitian democracy, his departure falsely reported as stemming only from moral objections to the air expulsions from Del Rio. \u201cThe biggest reason\u201d he resigned, Foote told me for \u201cOverrun,\u201d was the Biden government\u2019s morally reprehensible backing of Henry to power by scuttling the democracy-restoration processes in exchange for Henry\u2019s agreement to accept the deportation flights from Texas. \u201cI believe they were terrified of immigration as an issue in the midterms and beyond,\u201d Foote says. In its haste to scuttle Haitian democracy, Foote noted, the Biden administration showed no fealty to its most exalted immigration policy ideals: its dedication to addressing so-called \u201croot causes\u201d of emigration to the American border, such as poverty, violence, and poor governance. \u201cWe\u2019re just adding to the human tragedy in a place where the state has already failed, and creating more demand for emigration by doing that,\u201d Foote says. \u201cWhereas, if we did it like reasonable adults and thought through the best way to do it, we could address the drivers of emigration and minimize the amount of emigration.\u201d Biden also faces critics in his own party. In March, seven US members of Congress pushed Biden to withdraw support for Haiti\u2019s Prime Minister Ariel Henry and instead push for a transitional government. \u201cIf we look at what are the reasons behind [the immigration], it really comes down to the political instability that\u2019s increasing the crime going on in Haiti,\u201d Haitian-American Rep. Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick (D-Fla.) said to Reuters. But an agreeable strongman is preferable to an elected government that might block the flights. As The Wall Street Journal reported last year, \u201cSome of Mr. Biden\u2019s top advisers, who favored the mass deportations, said images of the migrants under the bridge weeks after the chaotic withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan could add to the criticism that the administration was losing control of tough situations.\u201d Amid electoral setbacks in Virginia and New Jersey for Democrats at the time and the \u201cdisarray\u201d of the Del Rio camp, The Washington Post reported, the White House found itself under pressure to \u201cavoid further scenes of chaos at the border.\u201d Top moderate advisers viewed the crisis \u201calmost entirely from a political lens,\u201d the paper reported. And even though the Biden administration had bashed Donald Trump\u2019s policies, it knew that air deportations were highly effective at deterring illegal migration. By the end of September 2021, some 8,000 Haitians had been deported and the camp was mostly forgotten by the media. The Biden administration made a show of ending the Del Rio flights under pressure from the party\u2019s liberal progressive wing, which was outraged by them. But in December 2021, as the number of Haitians began to climb again, the administration restarted the Haitian deportation flights. Henry was still there to accept more than 10,000 returned Haitians from January through April 2022. No new similar camp of Haitians has ever formed again. Henry still has not reestablished the Provisional Electoral Council. NEWS COLLECTED FROM NEW YORK POST.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

WASHINGTON, Broadcasting news corporation : The Biden administration scuttled Haiti\u2019s plans for free elections and backed a de facto dictator in exchange for his willingness to accept deportees, America\u2019s former envoy to the country says. Daniel Foote, the Biden- appointed former US special envoy to Haiti, says the administration has supported Dr. Ariel Henry \u2014 …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":7650,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7649","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-national"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bnc24.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7649","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bnc24.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bnc24.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bnc24.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bnc24.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7649"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.bnc24.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7649\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7651,"href":"https:\/\/www.bnc24.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7649\/revisions\/7651"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bnc24.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7650"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bnc24.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7649"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bnc24.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7649"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bnc24.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7649"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}