Surge in Haitian migrants hasn’t hit Florida shores, so far. What happened?

The predictions were dire: Florida was on the verge of experiencing an onslaught of refugees from Haiti, driven by widespread gang-fueled lawlessness to make the perilous overwater voyage of hundreds of miles seeking safety in the U.S.

Gov. Ron DeSantis ordered the mobilization of Florida personnel and equipment to supplement the federal response from the Coast Guard and other agencies.

“Given the situation in Haiti,” the governor declared in his mid-March announcement, he ordered more than 250 law enforcement officers, National Guardsmen and soldiers from several state agencies to South Florida and the Keys. Such actions are necessary, his office said, “when a state faces the possibility of invasion.”

A month later, it turns out there hasn’t been an invasion — or a noticeable change in Haitians arriving in Florida by boat. There isn’t agreement about why it didn’t come to pass.

In March, DeSantis reiterated the warning about what could be on the way to Florida in a Fox News appearance and told a conservative podcast host he might send Haitian refugees arriving in Florida to Martha’s Vineyard, Mass., the way he did with Venezuelan asylum seekers in 2022.

Democratic elected officials were also concerned. A week after DeSantis’s move all the Democrats in the Florida congressional delegation warned about “the potential mass migration from Haiti to Florida.”

Their priority — advancing funding for a multinational security force for Haiti — was different, but they said action was needed to “help keep the Haitian people safe and Florida secure.”

No surge

The surge never happened.

“There’s no mass exodus,” said Ronald Surin, a former vice president of the Haitian Lawyers Association, an assessment shared in interviews with other Haitian American community leaders and elected officials in South Florida.

“We have not seen any Haitians coming over here,” said state Rep. Marie Woodson, a Hollywood Democrat.

MarieGuerda Nicolas, a psychologist and professor in the School of Education and Human Development at the University of Miami, is co-founder and president of the Ayiti Community Trust, a community foundation in Haiti.

“People in Haiti right now are not necessarily saying, ‘How do I get a boat to come to Miami?’ That’s not what people in Haiti are thinking about at all,” Nicolas said.

That does not mean the situation in Haiti has improved in the last month.

“Nothing has really changed. There has not been any peace,” said Surin, a Fort Lauderdale immigration lawyer and president of the Haitian American Democratic Club of Broward County. “People are still being kidnapped and women raped, housing destroyed, police stations and medical facilities, banks and all of those are still under control of gang violence.”

“The gangs remain very powerful,” he said.

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security, whose agencies include the Coast Guard, said via a spokesperson it is monitoring the situation.

“At this time, irregular migration flows through the Caribbean remain low. All irregular migration journeys, especially maritime routes, are extremely dangerous, unforgiving, and often result in loss of life,” an agency spokesperson said via email.

DeSantis himself acknowledged the absence of a surge.

“We have not seen a real strong, really any, uptick in vessels trying to come from Haiti to Florida,” he said on Monday during one of his regular soliloquies criticizing President Joe Biden’s immigration and border policies.

DeSantis credit?

DeSantis took some credit for the surge that didn’t materialize. The governor said his deployment of personnel and more than a dozen watercraft and aircraft, played a deterrent role when combined with the Coast Guard.

“It’s not like you’re gonna be able to get through that,” he said.

DeSantis said the state has “worked well with the Coast Guard,” but said it is understaffed, asserting the Biden administration “hasn’t provided enough resources.”

Overall, though, DeSantis said Haitians have gotten a message: Don’t try to make the voyage to Florida, because you’ll be stopped.

”When you know that’s gonna happen, it makes it much less likely that people are gonna want to go in and try to make that trip. That’s a pretty long trip from Haiti to Florida,” he said.

Haitian American Democrats said DeSantis’ moves had no effect on anyone who might have contemplated the 700-mile trip to Florida.

“The people on the coast do not pay any attention to what the governor of Florida does before they leave on a boat,” Surin said, dismissing the deployment of state forces offshore as meaningless.

Other Haitian American Democrats excoriated DeSantis.

“Despite the Governor’s anti-immigrant grandstanding, there has not been a significant surge of Haitians fleeing the island. The assertion that there would be a surge was either politically motivated fear mongering, or miscalculated conjecture,” state Rep. Dotie Joseph, a North Miami Democrat, said via text. “Many Haitians impacted by the violence in the capital are internally displaced to other areas within the country which are not currently dominated by the so-called gangs.”

Tessa Petit, executive director of Florida Immigrant Coalition, was critical of DeSantis — and of the Biden administration for not denouncing DeSantis and doing more federally to help Haitians.

“Florida’s response to what is happening is a shameless attack on Haitians by Governor DeSantis stating the need to protect Florida against an invasion of Haitians,” she said Thursday in a telephone news conference.

Returned to Haiti

The U.S. Coast Guard, part of the Homeland Security Department, has reported encountering some, but not many, people attempting to leave Haiti by boat.

When its ships encounter boats carrying people from Haiti or other countries it intercepts them — and repatriates the people on board back to the countries from where they came, including Haiti.

“U.S. policy is to return noncitizens who do not have a fear of persecution or torture or a legal basis to enter the United States. Those interdicted at sea are subject to immediate repatriation pursuant to our longstanding policy and procedures. The United States returns or repatriates migrants interdicted at sea to The Bahamas, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and Haiti,” the homeland security spokesperson said.

The Department of Homeland Security and its component agencies such as the Coast Guard regularly warn people not to set out on the dangerous voyage, and publicizes cases in which it interdicts boats and repatriates those on board.

In March, for example, the Coast Guard Cutter Venturous repatriated 65 migrants to Haiti. They’d been found near the Bahamas.

Petit and representatives of other immigration advocacy groups, who joined several leaders of the U.S. House of Representatives Haiti Caucus in the telephone news conference, sharply criticized repatriation.

Deportations of Haitians who aren’t legally in the U.S. have been paused for now, but Petit said that policy should be expanded to include people interdicted at sea. Paul Namphy, lead organizer of Family Action Network Movement, said the U.S. should “not return Haitians to a country that is extremely fragile.”

Welcome refugees

As the situation was getting lots of attention, most American voters surveyed in a March 27 Quinnipiac University poll said they would welcome Haitian refugees.

The question was stark: “As you may know, Haiti is in the midst of a violent takeover by gangs. If Haitians flee to seek safety and attempt to reach U.S. shores, should the United States provide safe haven for Haitian refugees, or not?”

Among all voters surveyed, 55% said “yes” and 36% said “no.”

As with virtually all issues today, people are highly polarized.

Democrats, independents, people with four-year college degrees and those under age 50 heavily favored the U.S. granting safe haven for Haitian refugees.

Republicans were overwhelmingly opposed, and fewer than 50% of people 50 and older and people without four-year degrees said yes.

Among Democrats, 79% favored providing a safe haven and 14% were opposed. Independents were also supportive, 61-28%.

Among Republicans, 29% favored offering a safe haven for Haitian refugees and 65% were opposed.

U.S. Rep. Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick, a Broward-Palm Beach county Democrat and the only Haitian American member of Congress, said she was troubled by the politicization. “As we keep going back and forth with these political games, we see that Haitian lives are at stake.”

‘Haiti fatigue’

The March warnings about a possible surge of migrants came about two weeks after gang violence sharply escalated on Feb. 29.

News coverage was flush with pictures and videos of heavily armed young gang members controlling the streets in much of Port-au-Prince, the nation’s capital, and home to a third of Haiti’s population.

With the main airport closed, government and private flights were organized to get Americans out of the country, also generating lots of attention.

(DeSantis, who faulted the federal air evacuation efforts, also ordered evacuations by the state of Florida. From March 20 through April 2, the state Division of Emergency Management reported it had evacuated 220 Americans from Haiti to Florida. The effort reprised what the state did after the Oct. 7 Hamas terrorist attacks on Israel.)

In recent weeks, though, news coverage has dramatically decreased, as attention has turned to domestic stories, such as abortion rights, the presidential campaign and billion-dollar lottery jackpots.

It is still dominant for Haitian Americans, Woodson said, but more broadly there was “a lot of hype, and then the next thing you know everything dies out.”

Surin lamented what he said was probably “Haiti fatigue.”

“The Haitian people feel they are abandoned by the U.S., by the international community, by those nations who have claimed to be their friends,” Surin said. “They feel like attention is given to Ukraine and Gaza, rightfully so, but they are in kind of a similar predicament. But nobody is paying attention. There is no rescue.”

Anthony Man can be reached at aman@sunsentinel.com and can be found @browardpolitics on Bluesky, Threads, Facebook and Post.news.