Secretary Blinken’s involvement with Haiti dates back at least 1994, when he wrote several of President Clinton’s remarks in the lead-up to that year’s U.S. invasion of Haiti, in his capacity as a speechwriter for the National Security Council.

According to the Department of Homeland Security, at least 4,000 of the migrants who set up camp in Del Rio, Texas, have been deported to Haiti. Thousands more await their fate in U.S. government custody. But the Biden administration had already been carrying out deportations to Haiti throughout 2021, in contradiction of its own policy that Haiti could not handle returns due to “serious security concerns, social unrest, an increase in human rights abuses, crippling poverty, and lack of basic resources … exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic.” The situation was only made worse by the assassination of Haitian President Jovenel Moïse in July and the August earthquake in southwestern Haiti that killed at least 2,200 people. Hundreds of human-rights organizations signed a letter before the Del Rio crisis, in late August, imploring the administration to stop deportations, which cause “additional harm to and pressure on an already-overburdened country.”

Not the preferred nomenclature but a key distinction. Most of those being deported from the U.S.-Mexico border have not lived in Haiti for years, but most recently in South America, where they moved seeking opportunity in the wake of the catastrophic 2010 earthquake. Some are children who do not have Haitian citizenship, but rather hold passports from Brazil, Chile, and Venezuela. This puts a further burden on their families, who can almost certainly not afford to move back to their childrens’ countries of citizenship and would have to undergo a complicated and expensive process of getting their children papers in Haiti.

For instance, the State Department recently alerted: “Since September 2, the U.S. Embassy in Port-au-Prince has observed increased violent gang and kidnapping activity throughout the Port-au-Prince metropolitan area,” and “restricted its staff from non-official travel” in certain areas. These areas included all of downtown Port-au-Prince, the road leading to and from the international airport (where deportees arrive), and all the areas one would have to pass through to drive anywhere else in the country from the capital including the neighborhoods of Martissant and Cite Soleil and the neighboring cities of Croix-des-Bouquets and Carrefour.

This is perhaps the most intriguing statement in Foote’s letter. To my knowledge, no one has reported out the specific examples of “editing” that the ex-special envoy was referring to. If you know what he’s talking about, you can contact me at katzonearth@gmail.com or via Signal at +1-540-999-8238.

For what it is worth, State Department spokesman Ned Price disputed Foote’s account, saying in a prepared statement: “There have been multiple senior-level policy conversations on Haiti, where all proposals, including those led by Special Envoy Foote, were fully considered in a rigorous and transparent policy process. Some of those proposals were determined to be harmful to our commitment to the promotion of democracy in Haiti and were rejected during the policy process. For him to say his proposals were ignored is simply false.” Price did not address Foote’s allegation that his recommendations were altered.

Haiti’s most influential gang at present is led by former police officer Jimmy “Barbecue” Cherizier, who forged close ties with the slain President Moïse and his allies. Gangsters allied with the Haitian government are also suspected of involvement in a spate of political massacres, as detailed in an April report from Harvard Law School.

As the head of Haiti’s immigration office told the New York Times on Sept. 19: “The Haitian state is not really able to receive these deportees … Will we have all those logistics? Will we have enough to feed these people?”

It is notable that even in a letter protesting the administration’s anti-immigrant policy, Foote still feels the need to warn of the only consequence Americans on the whole will be sure to pay attention to: the threat of more immigration from Haiti.

These two sentences are presumably a reference to the CRSHC, a broad-based commission of Haitian civil society organizations with an extremely long name that laid out a road map for a transitional government in the wake of the presidential assassination. (Days before Moïse’s murder, his constitutional successor, the head of Haiti’s supreme court, died of COVID-19.) The U.S. government, which as Foote notes really holds the reins of power in Haiti, has so far ignored the commission and its pact in favor of, as Rep. Andy Levin (D-Mich.) has said, “propping up … the de facto government of [Prime Minister] Ariel Henry.” Foote has more on that upcoming.

This was the boldest part of Foote’s letter. I can’t remember a U.S. diplomat speaking this candidly about foreign—which I, and most others, read as specifically American—influence in Haitian politics. There are countless examples that could be described as “puppeteering” over the last century, from the puppet presidencies under the U.S. occupation of 1915-1934 to the CIA’s role in the 1991 coup that overthrew the pro-poor presidency of Jean-Bertrand Aristide. More recently, it includes the election that brought Moïse’s faction to power. That would be the post-quake election of 2010-2011, in which Hillary Clinton, in her role as Barack Obama’s secretary of state, flew to Port-au-Prince to pressure then-President René Préval to throw his party’s candidate out of a second-round runoff in favor of the pro-American-investment pop star Michel Martelly. Three successive administrations—Obama, Trump, and Biden—looked the other way as Martelly and his chosen successor, Moïse, oversaw a wave of corruption and repression reminiscent of the Duvalier dictatorship. It is going too far to call Haiti’s current leaders puppets of the United States, but, as Foote is signaling, you cannot understand Haitian politics without understanding the ways in which the U.S. keeps its thumb on the scale.

Henry is treated as if he is Haiti’s leader (he addressed the General Assembly of the United Nations via a remote feed this week). But the 71-year-old neurosurgeon, who was a leader of the U.S.-backed movement that opposed Aristide in the lead up to his second overthrow in 2004, has no electoral legitimacy. Moïse nominated him to serve as his prime minister (the number-two position in Haiti) two days before his assassination, but no ratification vote took place (nor could have, as Moïse had allowed parliament to lapse without allowing for new elections to be held). He owes his position to one fact: that on July 17, the “Core Group”—made up of the U.S., Brazilian, French, EU, German, and Spanish ambassadors to Haiti, as well as representatives of the OAS and UN—called on him to form a new government. As Foote notes, this is contrary to the recommendations of the CRSHC.

This “again” is a blaring siren. An amazing thing for a U.S. diplomat to say.

See: Haiti in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries

Several of the officials copied on the letter have notable past experience in Haiti. Brian Nichols directed the State Department’s Office of Caribbean Affairs from 2004 to 2007, beginning in the year of the second coup against Aristide, and was part of the negotiations that set up the U.N. peacekeeping mission that remained until 2017. Ken Merten was U.S. ambassador to Port-au-Prince during the 2010 earthquake.