Boat smuggling Haitians stopped in Fort Pierce. Hundreds of Cubans land in the Keys
A large fishing boat carried 25 people from Haiti to shore in Fort Pierce Thursday in what federal authorities say was a human-smuggling operation.
The landing was one of dozens this week, mostly in the Florida Keys, in which nearly 300 migrants arrived in South Florida. The region is the endpoint of the largest exodus from Cuba in nearly a decade and from Haiti since the early 2000s, as both nations are experiencing political and economic turmoil — and Haiti’s security situation is becoming more dangerous by the day.
The U.S. Border Patrol said in a statement released on Twitter that the Fort Pierce landing is under investigation. On Tuesday, smugglers abandoned 12 people from Haiti on a small island off Mona Island in Puerto Rico. They were rescued by a U.S. Coast Guard crew, the agency said.
Patrolling for migrants and smugglers turned tragic Thursday when a boat crew from U.S. Customs and Border Protection Air and Marine Operations exchanged gunfire with two men on another vessel that the agency said was involved in drug smuggling about 14 miles off Puerto Rico’s southwest coast.
One agent was shot and killed and two others were wounded. The wounded agents remained in the hospital Friday night, said Bob Brisley, a Customs spokesman.
“Out of respect for the family’s wishes, at this time U.S. Customs and Border Protection is not publicly releasing the name of the agent who died,” Brisley said in an email Friday.
The majority of the other South Florida landings this week were not smuggling endeavors, but rather migrants taking to the seas mostly on homemade rustic vessels or small fishing boats.
A total of 55 Cubans arrived in various areas of the Keys Wednesday.
On Tuesday, 150 people from Cuba made landfall in several large groups in small islands off the Lower Keys, the Border Patrol said. Twenty-one people arrived in the Keys on Monday, following a weekend that saw 85 people from Cuba reach the island chain, according to the Border Patrol.
At sea, the Coast Guard has already stopped more than 2,000 people from Cuba along the Florida Straits since the beginning of October. The agency tracks migration by the fiscal year, which begins Oct. 1 and ends in September. If maritime migration from Cuba continues at this pace, numbers will more than double the 6,182 people intercepted at sea last fiscal year, which was already the busiest South Florida-based Coast Guard crews had been in eight years.
A policy that allowed Cubans who set foot on U.S. soil to stay in the country and apply for permanent residency ended in early 2017, meaning all of those stopped on land or on the ocean are supposed to be sent back to their homeland.
But, because of the massive size of the latest exodus, most of those who’ve made landfall in the past year have been released to family and/or friends with orders to report to immigration officials.
Technically, they are being processed for removal, but sources say it could take years before someone is actually placed on a plane and sent back to Cuba. And, the Cuban government has not accepted deportation flights from the United States since 2020.
Those stopped at sea, however, are almost all being sent back to Cuba almost immediately. On Thursday, a cutter returned 95 people to Cuba who were caught in multiple migration attempts off the Keys this week, the Coast Guard said.
While Haitian migrant boats are not reaching U.S. shores at nearly the frequency as vessels from Cuba, the Coast Guard stopped more than 7,000 people from Haiti en route to the United States last fiscal year. Rather than arriving in small groups aboard small boats like people coming from Cuba, Haitian migrants are taking to the sea, sometimes more than 100 at a time, packed on larger freighter-type boats.
On Friday evening, the Coast Guard stopped an “overloaded” migrant boat offshore of the Middle Keys city of Marathon, said Petty Officer Nicole Groll. The nationalities of those on board the vessel were not immediately known, Groll said.
This story was originally published November 18, 2022 at 7:59 PM.
