(CNN) — Haiti’s northern coast is where the country faces the vast Atlantic with all its baggage. There’s Labadie, the private resort open only to American cruise ships and foreign holiday makers. Just next door is Ile de la Tortue, an infamous way station for human traffickers. And then there’s Cap-Haitien, a city steeped in the country’s revolutionary history – and more recently, the first-choice destination for the Trump administration to deport Haitian migrants.
Since Haiti’s devastating earthquake in 2010, Cap-Haitien has been a major hub for internally displaced people fleeing disaster and violence in other parts of the country. And after the Trump administration’s legal victory this month to remove temporary deportation protections from hundreds of thousands of people in the United States, the city may soon see many more arrivals.
Thursday marked the first deportation flight to Haiti from the US since the revocation of Temporary Protected Status (TPS), which had protected about 350,000 Haitians in the US from deportation and given them legal work permits. Now Haitian communities across the US are coming to terms with the new reality that they’re vulnerable to the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown.
“It’s a great day to deport illegal aliens. Good morning America!” DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin posted on X Thursday morning, hours before the deportation flight to Haiti took off.
A little after noon, 161 people descended from the charter flight in Cap-Haitien, according to Haiti’s National Migration Office. Some fell to their knees to kiss the ground, others covered their faces and hurried away from the gathered local press.
The question in Cap is how many more will follow. Locals say the city is already inundated.
“Cap-Haitian alone can’t receive more people,” said Demonstène Reynold, a mechanic living in Cap. “We’re not just receiving deportees from outside of Haiti … due to the political crisis, we have people from Hinche and Port-au-Prince, from the interior of the country.”
The city these days looks different from years past. Street traffic is snarled, trash collection sites overflow. A hospital visited by CNN was overwhelmed with patients queuing outdoors, mothers rocking babies in the heat as they waited.
Louis Ronald Espoir, an administrator at the city’s Hospital Fort Saint Michel, said the city’s medical facilities are at capacity. “As you can see here with your own eyes, all the hospitals in the region are full despite the best efforts of the government. If they’re full with the current population, I’d be lying to say we can take in anyone else.”
Thursday’s flight comes as immigrant rights advocates in the US raise concerns about the dangers of deporting people to the Caribbean nation. Critics, who want more immigration restrictions, have accused the Trump administration of not removing undocumented immigrants quickly enough.
The Trump administration has repeatedly argued that Haiti is safe enough for Haitians to be returned to, despite a State Department “Do not travel” advisory and a Federal Aviation Administration ban on US commercial flights there.
In a June interview on CNN’s “State of the Union,” Mullin defended the decision to send Haitians back and argued that the country would benefit from the returnees. The State Department’s “do not travel” advisory was issued out of concern for Americans, not Haitians, he said, “because they are kidnapping or trying to kidnap individuals from the United States because they feel like they – their family has the money to pay the ransom.”
But the country’s kidnapping epidemic has been overwhelmingly felt by Haitians, with gangs notorious for taking victims from among even the very poor. The brutal business is centered around capital Port-au-Prince, where US deportation flights have also landed.
CNN is seeking comment from DHS about Thursday’s flight to Cap-Haitien, why the passengers onboard were deported and whether any of them are among those who recently lost TPS.
On the far side of the country from Port-au-Prince, Cap-Haitien is considered largely safe from gang violence. But some worry a large influx of newcomers could destabilize an already crowded place.
Angie Bell, the city’s former mayor, says she encourages people to come back – but that the country needs to build its ability to welcome them. “We need much more development, and we need more security as a preventative measure, with so many people coming in,” Bell says.
She estimates that the city’s population has shot up from around 350,000 people in the last census in 2003, to at least 800,000. “Because of the lack of housing, we have a lot of people that are working in the city but living in the outskirts,” she said.
The Haitian government and aid organizations like the International Office for Migration are working to ease the burden on locals and help new arrivals disperse across the country. Deportees are typically offered food and some money for their onward travel, as well as a place to stay for a few nights and assistance in locating family members.
But as the population numbers suggest, many are not moving on from Cap-Haitien. And not all the deportees will even know where to go. According to the head of Haiti’s migration agency, Jean Négot Bonheur Delva, who met Thursday’s deportation flight at the airport, one of the disembarking passengers had never been to Haiti before.
Born in the Dominican Republic to Haitian parents before moving to the US, it was unclear where he should go next, Delva said, adding, “he knows nothing of Haiti.”
Reporting contributed by CNN’s Catherine Shoichet.
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