Coast Guard stops Haitian migrant boat with 64 people on board
The U.S. Coast Guard stopped a Haitian migrant boat between Cuba and the Bahamas with 64 people on board.
The Coast Guard said in a statement on Twitter that the vessel with 49 males and 15 females was interdicted Wednesday about 64 miles northwest of Cuba. Children were among the group, said Petty Officer Nicole Groll, a Coast Guard spokeswoman.
South Florida and the Bahamas are experiencing a surge in maritime migration from Haiti and Cuba, with people from both nations hoping for better lives taking to the seas in numbers not seen in several years. The Coast Guard said maritime migration from Haiti to the United States is the busiest it’s been since 2004 — with 3,795 stopped at sea since Oct. 1, Groll said Thursday.
The Coast Guard hasn’t been as busy interdicting Cuban migrants at sea since 2017, the last year of the “wet-foot, dry-foot” policy that allowed people from Cuba to stay in the country if they set foot on U.S. land. Those caught at sea were returned to Cuba.
The boat stopped Wednesday was the first one from Haiti encountered by the Coast Guard since a Coast Guard plane spotted a vessel with 36 people from Haiti on board the Wednesday before. That group was taken into custody by the Royal Turks and Caicos Island Police, according to the Coast Guard.
Sources say the brief lull in migrant activity from Haiti is due in part to a fuel shortage on the island.
Before last week, the Coast Guard stopped a sailboat packed with 132 people from Haiti about 95 miles southwest of Andros Island in the Bahamas.
Miami Herald Caribbean correspondent Jacqueline Charles contributed to this report.
