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The violent removal of Haitian asylum seekers from their encampments in Del Rio, Texas, in September, opened a critical window for reckoning with the centrality of racismand anti-Black racism in particularto the conduct and character of U.S. border policing. Photographs taken at the scene showed uniformed white agents in chaps and full riding gear as they drove Haitians away from U.S. territory. In one shot, captured by the photojournalist Paul Ratje, an agent lunges forward to grab a young mans shirt; the man, who has since been identified as Mirard Joseph, is carrying nothing more threatening than food for his wife and daughter.

The spectacle of heavily armed border guards abusing vulnerable migrants reminds us that the U.S.-Mexico border is not a neutral entity. Since it was established, following the U.S.-Mexican War, it has been an instrument of power and control. The images of the mounted border agents drew comparisons to slave patrols, which emerged in the early eighteenth century in the U.S. to enforce slave codes, catch escapees, and prevent Black revolt. These groups evolved into militias such as the Texas Rangers, which prosecuted war against the Karankawa, Cherokee, and Comanche tribal nations, pursued fugitive slaves into Mexico, and established control over ethnic Mexican communities. By 1835, when they were formally constituted as a law-enforcement agency, the Rangers had created a culture of policing in the service of white supremacy. (Working with the descendants of affected communities, Monica Muoz Martinez and others have recovered the record of Ranger atrocities, including the 1918 Porvenir Massacre, in which Rangers and local ranchers executed fifteen unarmed Tejanos.) Founded in 1924, the Border Patrol recruited directly from the Texas Rangers and incorporated the habits of using border security to enforce white racial primacy. During this early period, many agents were active in borderland chapters of the Ku Klux Klan.

The Del Rio images recalled photographs taken more than a century ago, of Texas Rangers posed triumphantly on horseback over the bodies of slain Mexicans. (Those images circulated widely, too, serving as sensational propaganda for white power.) They also called further back, to images of slave patrols. On Twitter, the N.A.A.C.P. paired Ratjes photograph with a nineteenth-century engraving of a mounted slave patrol. The symmetry between the two images is chilling. In the engraving, a white man in a riding costume leans forward with his whip raised. He is about to strike a Black fugitive, whose back is turned to him at much the same angle as the Haitian youth in the other photograph. The whips, the ropes, the horsesall of them have been marshalled for the sake of inflicting pain and fear. In both instances, the law of the land gives white men on horseback plenary power over Black people in flight for survival.

By calling up painful racial memory, the Del Rio photographs provoked an important dialogue about the rights and protections owed to migrant members of the Black diaspora. On September 21st, Representative Sheila Jackson Lee, of Texass Eighteenth District, in Houston, exercised her authority as an executive board member of the Congressional Black Caucus to call for an official inquiry into the events. On September 22nd, she and eight other C.B.C. members met with White House officials to express their concern that the Border Patrols actions were discriminatory and unlawful, and to remind them of their commitments to Haitian asylum seekers and members of the Haitian diaspora. These included the May, 2021, announcement of a new Temporary Protected Status for Haitians, made months before the assassination of President Jovenel Mose and a major earthquake further destabilized the country. The Department of Homeland Securitys inspector general declined to conduct an investigation. Instead, it referred the matter to Customs and Border Protections office of professional responsibility; the outcome of that investigation remains pending.

President Bidens response to demands for accountability was to join in the outrage. Calling the Del Rio photographs horrible, he announced a suspension of the use of horse patrols in migrant management in Del Rio. Even this effort at restraint proved illusory. On October 7th, the Facebook page of the Border Patrols Del Rio sector featured a photo of agents on horseback encircling a group of captured migrants. The accompanying text boasted about having made over 1,000 apprehensions across sector yesterday. Months after their dispersal, the U.S. has not accounted for the fate of the many thousands of Haitian and other migrants who populated the Del Rio encampment. As D.H.S. escalated its program of deportation flights, an estimated eight thousand entered Mexico to avoid the catastrophic consequences of forced return. Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas had the temerity to call these voluntary departures.

Even as Biden introduced his Collaborative Migration Management Strategy, in July, which promises safe, orderly, and humane migration, his Administration has continued to defend Title 42, the Trump Administration order that enlists the governments of Central America and Mexico in a program tantamount to mass expulsion. This has had devastating consequences for Black migrants and other vulnerable populations. In late August, video recordings of National Guard and immigration police in Tapachula, Chiapas, captured images of Mexican agents throwing Haitian, Cuban, Central American, and South American women and children to the ground and delivering beatings to break up a migrant caravan. Last fall, Mexican immigration officials were deporting some three hundred migrants a day at the southern border with Guatemala, Haitians among them, as part of a partnership with the U.S. In early December, representatives of the several thousand Haitians encamped outside of a sports arena in Tapachula protested their subjection to hunger, assaults, and unsanitary conditions while awaiting processing by migration authorities. The reinstatement of the Trump-era Migrant Protection Protocols (Remain in Mexico) in Texas on December 2nd (in modified form) will only increase the displacement of Haitian and other vulnerable migrants to similar sites of confinement in Mexico.

To charges of human-rights abuses and failure, the Biden Administration, like others before it, answered weakly that they must follow the rule of law. But no law requires that people fleeing political violence and natural disaster should be met by the militarized cordon sanitaire in South Texas. We have so normalized the excessive use of force at the border that few questioned Governor Greg Abbotts September 22nd decision to briefly deploy hundreds of Border Patrol cars in a kilometres-long wall of steel against Haitians and other migrants huddled under border bridges and in makeshift camps near the Rio Grande. It was a costly stunt that will prolong state failure and human catastrophe.

The Del Rio photographs are shadowed by other violence that goes unseen and unrecorded by cameras. Immigration-law enforcement works by imposing privation and social isolation on those deemed alien and illegal: familial separation, physical and sexual abuse, and prolonged captivity. Migrants invoke international and civil-rights law to defend themselvesMirard Joseph, who appears in Ratjes Del Rio photograph, has filed a lawsuit against the federal governmentbut they most often confront these conditions alone and beyond any effective oversight. The Del Rio photographs should also make us look differently at the images we do seethe pictures of lawful violence that circulate in media coverage of the so-called migrant crisis. Scenes of migrants in chains, boarding buses on their way to deportation flights, have yet to cause the same anguish. Until someone you love is in chains or wearing an ankle monitor, it is possible to imagine that these are not dehumanizing or scarring.

Black civil-rights leaders and migrant organizations responded to the Del Rio photos with a broad campaign for racial justice. The UndocuBlack Network issued a statement that called for an end to the war on Black migrants. On September 22nd, the leaders of the Black Alliance for Just Immigration, the N.A.A.C.P., the National Urban League, and other groups wrote to President Biden to denounce his Administrations mistreatment of Haitian refugees, stating, of the Del Rio photographs, We are hard-pressed in the year 2021 to find more horrific, traumatizing and blatantly racist images. The images are distressing not only because they depict racial cruelty. They also cause harm by making Black migrants appear helpless, passive, and defeatedthe inverse mirror of the prevailing image of migrants as a criminal threat. This is an insidious message, because it is false and because it perpetuates misapprehension about the relationship between migrants and the nations they seek to enter. As the Haitian Bridge Alliance reminds us, these Haitian refugees are not strangers. They are kin to long-standing Haitian communities in the U.S. Black migrant-led campaigns to end deportations stand out from the cacophony of the border debates for their refusal to depict Haitian migrants as foreign; their call, Immigration Is a Black Issue, integrates them into a broader campaign for racial justice based in principles of equity and abolition.

The U.S. government has largely excluded migrant-led organizations from the process of policy reform. And yet migrant communities have been crucial protagonists in the most vital struggles of our difficult moment. One finds migrant-led organizations working to raise wages and worker-safety standards, fight racial and sexual discrimination, support vulnerable people during the pandemic, and address the harms of climate change. In Vermont, migrant dairy workers created the Milk with Dignity program, a platform of farmworkers rights that yielded landmark gains in health-care coverage, worker safety, and wage-theft prevention. In New York, migrants held a rolling hunger strike, the Fast for the Forgotten, to obtain a historic $2.1-billion pandemic-relief fund for undocumented workers. Food couriers in Manhattan secured protective legislation for those performing the dangerous tasks of fulfilling mobile-app orders. In my city of New Haven, Connecticut, the migrant-led Semilla Collective formed a food garage and community garden that fed hundreds of low-income and shut-in people during the pandemic.

With no path to formal political rights, migrants have also crafted powerful, affirmative responses to the failures of immigration and economic policies. In transit through Mexico, migrants have made their journeys into protest marches against the cacera de migrantesmigrant-huntingstaged in the face of the extraordinary forces marshalled against them. During the worst years of the Trump era, migrant-led organizations, including the National Day Laborer Organizing Network, drafted the Migrant Justice Platform, conceived as an open-source unity blueprint for reconceptualizing migration governance. It departs from legislative strategies for comprehensive immigration reform, by linking migration policy to the defense of labor rights and the repair of civic institutions. Like the abolitionists before them, theirs is a political project based in solidarity and an abiding appreciation for liberty. Like our most radical futurists, they are calling forth horizontal social relations made for the global age. Freedom from the kind of violence and misery on exhibit in Del Rio is unthinkable right now only because we have made it so.

Read more:
Del Rio and the Call for Migrant Justice - The New Yorker

In January of 2021, as President BidenJoe BidenPredictions of disaster for Democrats aren't guarantees of midterm failure A review of President Biden's first year on border policy Vilsack accuses China of breaking commitments in Trump-era trade deal MORE and his team transitioned from the campaign to the White House, addressing U.S. border policy was top priority. A year later, the lasting impact of those initial decisions is undeniable the Biden administrations policies and actions on the border created a crisis, and his continued inaction allowed it to devastate our immigration system.

In the opening days of President Bidens first year, the main goal of his administration centered around reversing the policies of former President TrumpDonald TrumpPredictions of disaster for Democrats aren't guarantees of midterm failure A review of President Biden's first year on border policy Hannity after Jan. 6 texted McEnany 'no more stolen election talk' in five-point plan for Trump MORE. Instead of reviewing policies based on their effectiveness, the Biden administration blindly canceled President Trumps policies without first analyzing the impact the removal of those policies would have on our border communities.

On the very first day, the Biden administration effectively terminated the Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP), also known as the Remain in Mexico policy. The policy allowed for asylum seekers to wait in Mexico until the time came for them to appear at an immigration hearing. This program reduced the number of border apprehensions by 64% over a four-month span in 2019 and was a major component of the Trump administrations efforts to combat illegal immigration. Earlier this year, I sent a letter to Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro MayorkasAlejandro MayorkasDemocrats calls on Biden administration to ease entry to US for at-risk Afghans A review of President Biden's first year on border policy Rift grows between Biden and immigration advocates MORE questioning the administrations rationale for suspending the MPP. While a court order required the Biden administration to reinstate the program, the administration continues to fight the use of this effective strategy through legal challenges.

President Biden also issued other executive orders (EOs) that reinstated catch-and-release measures, a controversial practice terminated under the Trump administration that allows undocumented migrants to enter the United States without a visa. President Bidens policies gave undocumented immigrants traveling with children an ability to remain indefinitely in the United States, and many warned that this policy would incentivize human trafficking of children across the border. These warnings proved true as Border Patrol agents encountered almost 19,000 unaccompanied children two months later in March, five times the number encountered in the same month of 2020.

Another policy targeted by President Biden was border wall system construction. After the federal government had already paid for much of the wall system, the president canceled the project, which not only wasted millions of taxpayer dollars, but also left our border vulnerable.

The administrations actions quickly led to a surge of migrants on the border. Within weeks of President Bidens inauguration, U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) encounters with family units at the southwest border increased 400 percent compared to months prior to election day, prompting leaders from across the political spectrum to warn the White House of an impending border crisis.

We are writing to express our deep concern that your recent sweeping border security and immigration enforcement policy rollbacks are causing a new crisis at our southwest border, undercutting the rule of law, and damaging the integrity of our territorial borders, my colleagues on the Committee on Homeland Security and I wrote to the president in early February, 2021.

Despite the warnings, however, President Biden chose to ignore the crisis he and his administration had created as details of the humanitarian crisis became publicly known. Border Patrol agents reported that the Biden administration had become the biggest facilitator of human smuggling across the border. Drug smuggling exploded as Border Patrol agents seized more fentanyl by April 2021 than in all of 2020 combined. Suspected or known terrorists were reported to have been apprehended while attempting to sneak into the United States during the crisis.

However, the administration continued to remain silent as human smuggling and drug trafficking continued to reach record highs until the crisis reached a breaking point in September when thousands of Haitian migrants camped at the border. When those migrants were met by Border Patrol agents, who attempted to gain control of the situation, many attempted to rush across the border and were met by agents on horseback. During the encounter, an agent was photographed using his reins to control the horse he was riding, leading to a photo that media outlets began using to falsely accuse the agents of using whips to strike immigrants.

Instead of supporting the agents who were performing their duties under very difficult circumstances, the Biden administration helped promote this false narrative even after the photographer who took the photos refuted the claims.Instead of taking responsibility for the dozens of actions they took to create the crisis, the administration chose to blame everyone else including the officers who were charged with protecting our border while working overtime to provide care for the influx of unaccompanied children.

One year ago, President Biden implemented a border strategy based on overturning President Trumps actions without regard to the impact on the border. His actions signaled that the border was open with catch-and-release policies and weakened security, and he ignored warnings of the crisis for months.When the crisis reached a pivotal moment, he betrayed the law enforcement agents who were performing their duty to our nation.

President Bidens policies have completely failed the American people, but it is not too late for him to change course.To secure the border President Biden must reimplement the proven policies he scrapped and begin supporting our law enforcement agents on the border. If he chooses not to, his legacy on the border will remain what it is at the end of his first year a complete and total failure.

Michael GuestMichael Patrick GuestDHS considering asylum for migrants whose cases were terminated under Trump I visited the border and the vice president should too The Hill's Morning Report - Presented by Facebook - Senate path uncertain after House approves Jan. 6 panel MORErepresents the 3rd District of Mississippi and is vice ranking member of the Committee on Homeland Security.

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A review of President Biden's first year on border policy | TheHill - The Hill

The government of Cyprus says that it has already received more than 700 applications for asylum so far this year. The island nation, which has seen a spike in irregular arrivals in recent years, says it is encountering a "migration crisis", propelled by Turkey.

More than 700 people have filed an application for asylum in Cyprus since the start of the year, according to a report in the Cypriot daily Phileleftheros on Wednesday, January 19.

Last year,the Greek-administered part of the island received close to 13,500asylum applications, according to the Phileleftheros. From all the applications submitted in recent years, the authorities reviewed a record number of 16,549 applications in 2021. Currently, 19,000 applications are reportedly still pending.

The Greek-administered part of the island, which is part of the EU and has a population of 1.2 million, had one of the highest numbers of asylum applications per capita in the entire EU in 2020, according to the bloc's official statistics.

The Cypriot immigration authorities say they are overstretched and struggle to deal with the unabatated flow of migrants to the island.

Also read: Riot police fire warning shots at migrants in Cyprus

The island's two reception centers, one near the capital Nicosia and the other near the port city of Larnaca, are both notoriously overcrowded. Most of the newcomers have been forced to sleep outside the camps, reported the Phileleftheros.

The newspaper says that Interior Minister Nicos Nourisis is planning to ask for EU funding to build another camp on its eastern shores, where the asylum applications could be processed faster.

In November 2021, Cypriot authorities sought to get the European Commissions approval to suspend asylum seekers' applications for all the 'irregular migrants,' claiming that they are facing a 'demographic change' and 'acute socio-economic effects.'

Also Read: Cyprus: Hundreds transferred after coronavirus outbreak at an overcrowded migrant camp

Most migrants arrive on Cyprus by boat from the Turkish mainland. They come ashore in the Turkish-Cypriot north of the island and then pass through a porous 'green line' a buffer zone patrolled by the UN peacekeeping forces that splits the island between the Turkish Cypriot part and the internationally recognized Greek Cypriot southern part.

The Phileleftheros report claimed thatgangs of smugglers charged between 300 to 500 (340 to 567 dollars) for smugglingmigrantsacross the dividing line into the Greek-Cypriot south, where they then can apply for asylum in the EU, reports dpa.

Moreover, Cyprus blames Turkey for allowing irregular migrants to cross from the north.

"Turkeys stance has led to the creation ... of a new migration route in the eastern Mediterranean, which disproportionally burdens Cyprus, and places enormous strain on the national asylum system," said the nation's foreign and interior ministries in a joint statement to the EU Parliament in February 2021. The ministries said they would raise "the extent of the migration crisis faced by Cyprus" in Brussels to ensure the government "receives the assistance required to effectively address it."

Turkey, hosting more than 3.6 million Syrian refugees, "could flood the island if wanted," Corina Drousiotou from the Cyprus Refugee Council toldnews agencyAFP in December.

With dpa, AFP

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More than 700 migrants have reached Cyprus this year - InfoMigrants

Visiting Assistant Professor of Film Studies Jeff Bemiss is an Oscar-shortlisted writer/director who has created short films, features, and documentaries. Most recently, Bemiss co-directed Missing in Brooks County, which will premiere on PBSs Independent Lens on January 31 at 10:00 p.m. Eastern (check local listings). The film also will be available to stream on the PBS Video app. The feature documentaryco-directed with Lisa Molomot and executive produced by Abigail Disney/Fork Films and Engel Entertainmentshines a light on the missing migrant crisis in South Texas. It is an ITVS co-production with funding provided by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

As part of Trinitys Film Studies Program since 2013, Bemiss teaches an introduction to film production, in addition to courses on screenwriting, advanced filmmaking, and editing. Documentary is having a golden period right now, Bemiss said, noting the recent mainstream success of documentary films in theaters and online streaming services. With documentary, students have the best chance to create successful films that an audience will respond to. Documentary presents you with the storyyou just have to recognize it and figure out how to tell it.

Below, Bemiss discusses his filmmaking experiences and how he uses them to teach Trinity students.

I was 8 years old when Star Wars came out and it set my imagination on fire. It sent a generation of students to film school and I was one of them. Theres no one route to becoming a filmmaker; generally, you either work your way up from a production assistant, or you can just direct something, which was the more independent path that I took. I made a 30-minute scripted film a few years out of college, The Book and the Rose, which became one of 10 semi-finalists for the Oscar for best short film. Since then Ive worked on various projects and I started teaching. At some point, I got tired of waiting for permission to do work, in the form of financial backing and investors, so I got interested in documentary. Scripted film takes an enormous amount of money for casting and locations to even start. With documentary, if you have an idea and a camera, you can just begin. I kind of got hooked on it.

I had met my co-director on the film, Lisa Molomot, at Trinitywe were both teaching here and we wanted to work together. A little while after she left for Arizona, I heard a radio documentary about a forensic scientist named Lori Baker at Baylor University, who was doing the work of exhuming anonymous migrants buried in south Texas. She was trying to identify them to bring closure to their families who had no idea what happened to them. I was very moved by it for some reason; I do have some family from Mexico. Lisa and I reached out to Dr. Baker, who invited us to Texas and took us to Brooks County; its not even a border county, but thats where the problem is. It went from what we thought would be a short profile of this forensic scientist to a four-year endeavor to document and film what was going on in Brooks County.

The key to most documentaries is access. Building trust with the participants in the film was slow-going at the beginning. This was not the film we set out to make. When it did pivot, it became a process of finding the story. We made 15 trips in total to Brooks Countyusually for about two to three weeks each trip. It got really complicated; we met volunteers and activists, judges, undertakers, sheriffs, and most of all we met families of the missing. We filmed for about four years. PBS came in as a co-producer on the film, which was like a rescue. When they came on board, it allowed us to finish the film properly, which we were struggling to do at the time.

I think maybe a few thousand people have seen the film on the festival circuit. When PBS broadcasts it and it goes up on the PBS website, it will be seen by millions. Most people dont know whats happening in Brooks County, and when they see it, they may be shocked. Its not an overtly political film. We give everyone their say, and viewers can make up their own mindsthey just need to see whats happening.

It means a great deal to us to be able to reach an audience and we feel PBS is the right platform for this film. Its free, so anyone can see it. Film has an incredible capacity to teach and to educate. One thing it also does very well is deliver an emotional experience. If you can provide learning at the same time, to me thats the ultimate achievement. This film allows people to witness something they dont witness in their everyday life, and I think its message is urgent. People are dying; this was the worst year ever for migrant deaths on our southwest border.

I always try to bring my work back to the classroom. This past semester, in Introduction to Film Studies, we watched two documentaries, one of which was Missing in Brooks County. It made for an interesting discussion because the students were in the room with the filmmaker. It changes the kinds of learning and discussions you can have. It gave students a perspective on not just the study of film, but living the life of a filmmaker.

There is also a special course, FILM 309, where we make one film in one semester together as a class. On day one, we have no idea what were going to do. We pitch ideas, we vote on them, we go out and make the film, we finish it, and we market it. The short film Coaching Colburn was produced by a previous class, and it premiered at the Big Sky Film Festival, then went all around the world. It was also part of the Trinity Film Festival at Cinestudio, both gems of the college.

Teaching is wonderful because it allows me to share my passion for filmmaking every single day. It keeps me fresh and invigorated. If I have a discouraging day with my own film projects, I always have the classroom and my students to lift me up. And of course, watching students go into the film industry and become storytellers in this medium is one of the great joys of teaching.

Not every student in a filmmaking class at Trinity is going to become a filmmaker or media creator. However, they will all go on to become media consumers. I like to balance the classes with liberal arts learning and technical learning. We do things in filmmaking that focus on the idea and the expression of the idea. Its not just cameras and editingits writing, collaborating, and critical thinking, which are all part of the traditional core liberal arts pursuits that will take any student further in life. Liberal arts can teach the value of the idea and the expression of the idea. I think thats valuable in everything, not just in film.

Missing in Brooks County will premiere on PBSs Independent Lens on January 31 at 10:00 p.m. Eastern (check local listings). See the trailer below. The film also will be available to stream on the PBS Video app. For more information on Bemiss and his other projects, visit http://www.unit-of-light.com.

To learn more about film studies at Trinity, click here.

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Q&A: Documentary by Visiting Assistant Professor of Film Studies Jeff Bemiss Airing on PBS - Trinity College

Children crowded the LOuverture Cleary School near Port-au-Prince following the Jan. 12, 2010 earthquake. (Photo: George M. Martell, The Catholic Foundation, via CNS)

CAMBRIA HEIGHTS Late last summer, tens of thousands of Haitian migrants surged across the Texas-Mexico border, fleeing the ravages of a devastating earthquake back home and seeking refuge in the U.S.

An estimated 30,000 of them huddled in encampments beneath the International Bridge at Del Rio, Texas. But most had not been displaced by the recent 7.2-magnitude quake, Aug. 14, 2021, on the western portion of Haiti.

Their plight began 12 years ago, on Jan. 12, in the aftermath of the slightly smaller, but much deadlier, 7.0-magnitude earthquake, centered near the nations capital, Port-au-Prince.

In the 2021 quake, 2,050 lives were lost in Haitis mostly rural Tiburon Peninsula.

But in 2010, an estimated 300,000 died in and around the densely populated urban capital.

Haitian Catholics in the Diocese of Brooklyn believe that the disaster in 2010 created a leadership void that has given way to widespread political corruption, lawlessness, and violence in the streets and countryside ever since.

What happened to Haiti on Jan. 12, 2010, is a catalyst for everything that has happened since, said Elsie Saint Louis, who leads Haitian Americans United for Progress (HAUP), based in Hollis, Queens.

We lost 300,000-plus people, she said. It weakened all of our institutions. It weakened our government. It weakened our churches. We lost everything.

Lamentations

Saint Louis was among a few dozen Catholics who attended a special evening Mass on Jan. 12 to honor the lives lost in 2010. It was held at Sacred Heart Parish Church in Cambria Heights, Queens, which is her parish.

The celebrant was Father Hilaire Belizaire, the pastor, who is also the director of the dioceses Haitian Apostolate. Concelebrant was Father Daniel O. Kingsley, administrator of St. Clare Parish in Rosedale, Queens.

Father Kingsleys mother is from Haiti, so he has a deep connection to the nations people, their culture, and the plights they endure. Father Kingsley, who was a seminarian in the Diocese of Brooklyn at the time, shared his memories of Jan. 12, 2010, a day of solemnity for Haitians everywhere.

I remember being in the dentists office, he recalled. I was minding my own business, and I saw a woman who just got off the phone. She started screaming and yelling. She probably received the worst news of her life.

It was shocking. What do you do when someone has received the worst news?

Father Belizaire also shared his memories of that day and what he, and other Haitians in the U.S., felt numbness, helplessness, powerlessness, and hopelessness.

I can vividly recall that period of time when I was waiting for a sign, a phone call from my loved ones whom I had not heard from in days, he said. The pain became more agonizing.

Eventually, hope replaced despair as Catholics turned to their faith and channeled their emotions into relief efforts.

Father Belizaire tells a story about how, while performing missionary work in Haiti following the 2010 quake, he was at the ruins of the Sacred Heart Church in Turgeau, where only a large crucifix remained standing. A TV reporter on the scene asked, on camera: Where was God in all this?

An old lady who was close by overheard him and pointed her finger toward the crucifix, Father Belizaire recalled. Here, she said. He is here in the midst of our suffering.

Christian faith does not mean believing in impossible things, Father Belizaire said. Faith is not hoping the worst wont happen. It is knowing that there is no tragedy which cannot be redeemed.

Hope Beset by Crises

Saint Louis said disaster is nothing new to the Caribbean island nation where she was born.

But the ones following 2010 have only made things worse, like Hurricane Matthew in 2016. Last year, Tropical Depression Grace hampered rescue and recovery efforts in the aftermath of the Aug. 14 earthquake. There have been mudslides and floods.

Following all the disasters, sympathetic nations responded with relief supplies and lots of cash, but much of it has been pillaged via political corruption and lawlessness, Saint Louis said.

Roving gangs routinely hijack relief-supply convoys and commit kidnappings for ransom, including the well-publicized recent abduction of a group of U.S.-based missionaries.

Yes, she continued, the world reached out; the world was generous. But all that generosity did not reach Haiti. So it did not help Haiti rebuild. Which brings us again now to this migrant crisis.

COVID Exacerbates Problems

The COVID-19 pandemic provided even more turmoil for Haiti.

Last year, the government led by President Jovenel Mose delayed accepting 130,000 doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine made in India following reports that in rare cases, the vaccine may cause blood clots. When officials in Haiti finally decided to send for the medicine, they were told the doses couldnt be spared because a sudden COVID-19 surge in India had reached alarming levels.

By the end of May, Haiti experienced its own jump in COVID-19 cases. The nations supreme court chief justice, Ren Sylvestre, died of the disease in June. Anxiety grew in early July as Haiti was plunged into more chaos with the assassination of President Mose.

Finally, in late August, just a couple of weeks after the latest earthquake, Haiti started getting shipments of the Moderna vaccine from the U.S., but many people refused them out of distrust of their government, according to reports.

Although deaths have remained low, as of Jan. 14, Haiti is the fourth-least vaccinated country in the world with 0.7% of the population fully vaccinated, reported The Multilateral Leaders Task Force on COVID, which is a group that tracks and monitors specific global and country-level gaps in vaccine distribution.

An 11-Country Journey

Saint Louiss organization, HAUP, helps migrants navigate the process of getting their papers in order to be in the U.S. legally. For many, its a long process, added to the heap of struggles theyve faced over the past 12 years.

They immigrated to South America because they had nowhere to go from Haiti, Saint Louis said. They were fine in Chile, but they had to migrate again because of COVID.

The migrants rushed across Central America and Mexico to the U.S. border because, according to reports, they were led to believe, erroneously, that the U.S. had opened its doors to them.

Theyve been through a lot, Saint Louis said. These people walked through 11 countries to get here.

Immigration officials cleared the camps beneath the International Bridge at Del Rio. Many were deported, some remain in detention centers, but others have been allowed to continue their journeys into the U.S.

A few thousand have already reached Brooklyn and Queens, providing lots of work for HAUP and other groups. Saint Louis urged New Yorkers to learn the stories of these migrants and to share them with elected officials here. She also appealed for financial support for Haitian-led and Haitian-serving community-based organizations.

She recounted how in September, she joined a delegation going to Texas from the diocese to meet the recently arrived Haitian refugees. The goal was to assess their needs to determine how they could be helped in New York.

The group included HAUP, Catholic Charities, and the Haitian Apostolate, represented by Father Belizaire, who was born in Cap-Haitien, Haiti.

Before the delegation was about to board flights back to New York, it made a detour upon learning of two busloads of Haitian migrants that had just arrived at a temporary holding facility in Houston.

They were not told where they were going when they got off the bus, Saint Louis said. They didnt know if they were going to be transferred or if they were going to be taken to the plane. But then they saw a man in a collar Father Hilaire who spoke their language.

And I remember the cries of joy when father told them, Youre here; youre not going to prison, youre not being returned. You are safe.

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Catholics Are Urged to Help Reverse Crippling Legacy of 2010 Haiti Quake - The Tablet Catholic Newspaper