US to resume deportations to Haiti

[Hannah Bell]

Less than a year after the Haiti earthquake killed hundreds of thousands of people, the US government is quietly preparing to resume deportations to the cholera-gripped country.

US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) authorities announced December 10 that the agency is preparing to resume deportations, on a mass scale. Last week, ICE officials said the agency had rounded up more than 350 Haitians to be deported in January.

Thus far, the government has said it is limiting deportations to people with criminal convictions—which can range from felony offenses to the most minor violations—and estimates that at least 700 Haitians will be deported over the next year.

The quake killed as many as 300,000, or 2 percent of the population, and exposed the country’s ruling elite as criminal, beholden to US imperialism, and utterly incapable of mounting a humanitarian response. Nearly a year on, at least 1 million people—one in every ten Haitian citizens—remain homeless as a result of the disaster.

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2010/dec2010/hait-d22.shtml