Todd Bensman, senior national security fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies, said the Biden administration’s compliance in scuttling Haiti’s elections back in 2021 has resulted in the chaos currently unfolding in the Caribbean country as armed gangs have taken over.
In 2021, thousands of Haitians were deported back to Haiti from a Del Rio, Texas migrant camp allegedly in exchange for the country’s elections to be postponed at the request of unelected leader Ariel Henry, who has served as the acting Haiti Prime Minister and the acting president of Haiti since July 2021 after the assassination of President Jovenel Moïse.
“What’s happening in Haiti today – despite underlying systemic problems in Haiti for many years, decades, and even hundreds of years – can be laid right at the doorstep at the White House. Decisions that it made two years ago with the migrant camp crisis under the Del Rio, Texas bridge. What we’re seeing today is a result of that decision,” Bensman explained on Monday’s episode of The Michael Patrick Leahy Show.
Bensman said the U.S. had to have permission from Haiti to accept migrants from the Del Rio camp, which is how the deal between Henry and the State Department was made.
“You have this terrible crisis. It had international media all over it. In the midterm elections of 2022, just ahead, the administration realized it had to absolutely kill that camp, close it down, liquidate it, scrape it off. And the way that they decided to do it was with air deportations because nothing frightens a Haitian more than the prospect of being flown back to Haiti after all they’ve paid to get this far,” Bensman explained. “So there they all were. They knew that they were going to start doing these air deportations, but you have to have the permission of Haiti to cooperate, to take them at the airport. And for that deal, they said, we’re going to install Ariel Henry as the dictator. Remember, Haiti had just had its prior prime minister assassinated, and they were going to have elections and Henry took over.”
“And the deal was, ‘I’ll accept all of your deportations and cooperate with you. And don’t worry about those elections, we’ll do those later.’ And of course, the Americans never pressed him on it, never required him to do it, and for two years straight after that, Haiti descended into this spiral that we see today,” Bensman added.
Bensman said Haiti needed to hold elections in 2022 for the Haitian people to have a connection with those who govern the nation; however, he noted that the Biden administration made decisions that “all but guaranteed” the country would not get “any election at all.”
“Haiti needed to have these elections. There needed to be a new connection made between the Haitian people and the people that govern them, that they believed was honest and represented them and wasn’t the result of some foreign power intervention,” Bensman explained. “That’s what they needed. That’s what they were supposed to have gotten but unfortunately, the Biden administration made decisions that all but guaranteed they would not get that kind of an election or any election at all, really. That’s when things just went to hell in a handbasket over there.”
Bensman, who wrote about the 2021 deal between the State Department and Henry in his book Overrun: How Joe Biden Unleashed the Greatest Border Crisis in U.S. History, said he received information about the deal from former U.S. Special Envoy for Haiti Dan Foote.
Foote, who resigned two months after being appointed special envoy due to his disagreements with the State Department’s deal with Henry, also appeared on Monday’s edition of The Michael Patrick Leahy Show where he reiterated Bensman’s points.
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Kaitlin Housler is a reporter at The Tennessee Star and The Star News Network. Follow Kaitlin on X / Twitter.
Photo “Haitians” by United Nations Photo. CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.
