Even as the United Nations continues to crunch the numbers on the rippling effects of the Trump administration’s freeze on U.S. foreign assistance and gutting of the U.S. Agency for International Development, aid workers in a violence-wracked Haiti are already seeing the effects.
The U.N.’s humanitarian coordinator for Haiti, Ulrika Richardson, said the United States’ financial cut is already around $90 million — a figure, she acknowledges, that can quickly change due to waivers and ongoing litigation in U.S. courts. But already the drop in funding means there isn’t enough money to help Haitians who are being forcibly returned to Haiti resettle in the country, much less return to their homes.
And they aren’t the only people affected in a country where soaring gang violence led to the deaths of more than 5,600 people last year and a tripling of the number of people forced to flee their homes. More than a million people are now internally displaced in Haiti, where fresh attacks this week in the neighborhoods of Carrefour Feuilles, Delmas 30, Fort National, Tabarre and elsewhere in metropolitan Port-au-Prince led to another 13,000 being displaced.
“There’s an impact on our capacity to deliver humanitarian assistance,” Richardson said, “life-saving humanitarian assistance to Haitians that actually would prevent losing your life in the near future.”
On Wednesday, hours after the Trump administration was ordered to pay groups for past work under a federal judge’s order, nearly 10,000 awards from USAID and the State Department were terminated. Among those to receive termination letters was the UNAIDS program, which delivers care to HIV/AIDS patients around the world.
It was the latest blow to funding for U.S.-paid HIV-programs, which were also hit by freezes to the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief and terminations of USAID jobs. Other programs in Haiti, where 3,900 health care workers have been affected by the aid cuts after clinics were forced to shutter or lay off staff, and other U.N. agencies are feeling the pinch.
The U.S. is the single largest donor to Haiti as well as to the U.N. humanitarian system. In response to the funding cuts, Stéphane Dujarric, spokesman for Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said Thursday that the U.N. is “extremely grateful to the support that the United States has given throughout the years to the U.N.’s humanitarian and development work, which we feel has improved the state of the world and served, in a way, served the U.S. interests, right, for a safe and stable and prosperous world.
“We are looking at all the cuts that are being made and the impact,” he added.
Richardson said the cuts also affect the U.N.’s ability to provide assistance to those deported to Haiti from countries such as the Dominican Republic and the United States.
Earlier this month, a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement flight landed in Cap-Haïtien, a city to the north of the country, with 21 Haitians onboard. Upon arrival, all of the deportees were jailed, a government official with Haiti’s Office of National Migration told the Miami Herald at the time. The official said the U.N.’s International Organization for Migration could not provide assistance to the returning migrants, which left the government agency to do so with its paltry budget.
Richardson said the U.N. is also concerned with victims of sexual abuse and sexual violence.
The U.N. logged more than 6,400 cases of gender-based violence last year, the majority carried out by gang members who are increasingly weaponizing rape to control communities.
The U.N. has launched an appeal for $908 million to help 3.9 million people in Haiti this year. The amount is $234 million more than last year, which was less than 50 percent funded despite the worsening humanitarian situation.
While more than six million Haitians in dire need of humanitarian assistance, including food, water, health care and other basic services, the crisis is “unprecedented,” Richardson said.
“Every number… is a new record,” she said, adding that the hardship the population is going through is “really heartbreaking to see, to witness, to listen to.”
“The impact on children is devastating,” she added.
This week alone, as gangs advanced, automatic gunshots could be heard every night, forcing people to sleep on the streets or in makeshift sites with little protection.
“When there has been, let’s say, a night attack in one of the neighborhoods, which is literally a kilometer away, we see the next day how there are so many more people on the streets and people that try to sell their things that they normally would sell in other parts of the city, so that the space of where people feel safe is shrinking,” Richardson said. “I see it, I feel it, I hear it, and I’m out there every day.”
Some Haitians have been forced to flee several times while leaving behind elderly parents or relatives with disabilities, Richardson added.
“It’s really a heartbreaking situation that really needs to find an end.”
