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<div class="header reader-header reader-show-element"> <font
size="-2"><a class="domain reader-domain"
href="https://theintercept.com/2019/10/22/haiti-tps-earthquake-displacement-camps/">https://theintercept.com/2019/10/22/haiti-tps-earthquake-displacement-camps/</a></font>
<h1 class="reader-title">Counting Deaths in Haiti’s Displacement
Camps as “Progress”</h1>
<div class="credits reader-credits">Isabel Macdonald - October
22, 2019</div>
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<p><span data-shortcode-type="dropcap">S</span><u>ince
Haiti was</u> struck by a devastating earthquake in
2010, an estimated 59,000 Haitians have been granted
Temporary Protected Status, which allows the nationals
of countries designated unsafe due to “extraordinary
and temporary” conditions to live and work legally in
the United States. But in November 2017, the Trump
administration abruptly terminated TPS for Haitians,
setting off multiple battles in court. If the
government prevails, current Haitian TPS recipients —
many of whom have children who are U.S. citizens —
could be deported to a country that is now in the
midst of an escalating <a
href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/20/world/americas/Haiti-crisis-violence.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share">crisis</a>.</p>
<p>A federal judge, in temporarily blocking the policy
in April, found evidence that the decision was made in
“bad faith” by Trump’s Department of Homeland
Security, which went “fishing for reasons” to end
Haitians’ eligibility for TPS and ignored relevant
facts about the persistence of hazardous <a
href="https://chrgj.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/171025_Global-Justice-Clinic-Haiti-TPS-Report-web-version.pdf">conditions</a>
in the country. Haiti remains vulnerable to deadly
diseases like cholera, Hurricane Matthew only
exacerbated the post-earthquake housing crisis, and a
political <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world">standoff</a>
has caused widespread food and fuel shortages, forcing
hospitals to cut services or close entirely. In his <a
href="http://nipnlg.org/PDFs/practitioners/our_lit/impact_litigation/2019_12Apr_tps-haiti-prelim-injunt.pdf">ruling</a>,
U.S. District Judge William Kuntz also said there was
evidence to suggest that “a discriminatory purpose of
removing non-white immigrants from the United States
was a motivating factor behind the decision.” The
Trump administration is now <a
href="https://www.miamiherald.com/news/nation-world/world/americas/haiti/article235276197.html">appealing</a>
Kuntz’s injunction and defending the termination of
Haiti’s TPS designation in four separate <a
href="https://cliniclegal.org/resources/challenges-tps-terminations">lawsuits</a>.</p>
<p>In justifying its move to strip Haitians of their
protected status, the administration has seized on
statistics produced by the International Organization
for Migration, an intergovernmental agency that
counted <a
href="https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B1vnrUGGgVEeVGhvNXJKX1lkc0E/view">96
percent</a> fewer people living in camps for
internally displaced people in Haiti in 2016 than in
the immediate aftermath of the earthquake.</p>
<p>But according to a monthslong investigation by The
Intercept and Type Investigations, those statistics
profoundly distort the experiences of Haitians in the
wake of the earthquake, erasing evidence of persistent
suffering, dysfunction, and even death to present a
narrative of “progress” that justifies the return of
tens of thousands to dangerous conditions.</p>
<p>“Ninety-six percent of people displaced by the
earthquake … have left those camps,” James McCament,
as acting director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration
Services, wrote in an April 2017 <a
href="https://www.miamiherald.com/latest-news/article146104144.ece/binary/End-of-TPS-recommendation.pdf">memo</a>,
concluding, “Haiti has made significant progress in
recovering from the 2010 earthquake, and no longer
continues to meet the conditions for designation.”
While DHS had consistently extended Haiti’s TPS
designation by the maximum 18 months each time it came
up for renewal, McCament advised DHS to issue only a
six-month extension. The department’s then-secretary,
John Kelly, complied, also <a
href="https://www.dhs.gov/news/2017/05/22/secretary-kellys-statement-limited-extension-haitis-designation-temporary-protected">citing</a>
the 96 percent reduction in the population of IDP
camps as evidence of “progress.” When Kelly’s
successor, acting DHS Secretary Elaine Duke,
terminated Haiti’s TPS designation altogether that
November, she likewise <a
href="https://www.dhs.gov/news/2017/11/20/acting-secretary-elaine-duke-announcement-temporary-protected-status-haiti">cited</a>
this decrease to support her claim that the hazardous
conditions that led to Haiti’s designation no longer
existed.</p>
<p>When one of the lawsuits challenging this termination
went to <a
href="https://haitiantimes.com/2019/01/03/trial-to-begin-in-fight-to-challenge-trump-haiti-tps-decision/">trial</a>
in January, IOM’s statistics were the first item of
evidence that the lead attorney representing Trump,
Duke, and the U.S. government presented to support his
argument that the decision to terminate TPS for
Haitians was lawful and justified. During the trial,
another government attorney referred to the “decline
of the numbers of people living in camps” as “a sign
of progress.”</p>
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<div data-reactid="220">
<p>Interviews for this article with dozens of Haitians
who lived in IDP camps after losing their homes in the
2010 earthquake call these claims into question. We
found that the vast majority of these
earthquake-displaced Haitians still do not have safe
or adequate shelter and are now living in informal
settlements where they lack access to basic services.
Many of them, far from voluntarily leaving the camps,
were violently evicted. After examining the conditions
in just four of the 1,555 camps where displaced
Haitians lived, we found evidence that at least 32
individuals had died in these camps. Yet IOM does not
keep track of such deaths, the organization confirmed.
The evicted, the dangerously housed, and many of the
dead, we found, are counted in that 96 percent
decrease in camp population as evidence of “progress.”</p>
<p>IOM is now using the flawed system it developed in
Haiti to track people displaced by conflict and
disaster in a host of other <a
href="https://www.globaldtm.info/">countries</a>
around the world.</p>
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<div data-reactid="223">
<h3>Unrecorded Deaths</h3>
<p>Adeline Geffrard, her 1-year-old son, her parents,
her two sisters, and her brother were among the more
than 1.5 million Haitians IOM initially counted in
Haiti’s IDP camps. After the January 2010 earthquake
destroyed the Geffrards’ home in the Haitian capital
of Port-au-Prince, the seven members of Adeline’s
family took refuge in Parc Jean Marie Vincent, a
sports park that transformed into Haiti’s largest
displacement camp. The Geffrards fashioned a makeshift
tent out of a tarp they were given by an aid group.
Through constant exposure to the burning Caribbean
sun, however, the plastic sheet soon began to wear
through and rip, leaving the family with little
protection from the downpours of Haiti’s rainy season
that spring or the cyclones that hit the camp during
hurricane season that fall.</p>
<p>The camp where Adeline’s family lived was one of many
that formed in the immediate aftermath of the
earthquake, as survivors fleeing the debris of their
collapsing homes and neighborhoods took refuge on any
available piece of land in Port-au-Prince. According
to a 2010 <a
href="https://sites.tufts.edu/jha/archives/869">study</a>
of conditions in about 100 IDP camps in Haiti by
researchers from the City University of New York and
the Université d’État d’Haïti, only 10 percent of
families living in these camps had so much as a proper
tent for shelter; 90 percent were sleeping under tarps
or even bedsheets. Meanwhile, 40 percent of camps did
not have access to water, while 30 percent did not
have toilets of any kind. These conditions made camp
residents particularly vulnerable when cholera broke
out in Haiti in October 2010, after sewage from a base
housing infected United Nations peacekeepers made its
way into an important Haitian water source.</p>
<p>In the first few months after the earthquake, NGOs
occasionally distributed food staples such as rice to
residents of the camp in Parc Jean Marie Vincent.
“They would pass by and give us a bit of food,”
Adeline recalled. However, on more than one occasion,
she returned to her family’s tent empty-handed after
waiting in line because there wasn’t enough food to go
around. “We stood under the sun but didn’t get
anything,” she explained.</p>
<p>A 2010 <a
href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4048938/">study</a>
by Partners in Health showed that prior to the cholera
outbreak, medical services and water distribution in
Parc Jean Marie Vincent met the minimum <a
href="https://handbook.spherestandards.org/en/sphere/#ch001">standards</a>
identified in the Humanitarian Charter and Minimum
Standards in Disaster Response, an influential set of
guidelines developed by humanitarian NGOs. However,
the study also showed that “food, shelter, sanitation,
and security were below minimum accepted standard and
of major concern.” While the guidelines specify that
that there should be at least one toilet for every 50
people, there were only 115 latrines in the camp,
whose population was estimated to be about 48,000 in
the months after the earthquake. This amounted to
about one latrine for every 400 residents — just
one-eighth of the minimum needed to ensure basic
sanitation. Adeline still has a clear memory of these
latrines, which became so filthy that many residents
considered them unsafe. “They were all clogged,” she
recalled, scrunching up her nose in disgust. “[It was]
terrible.”</p>
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<blockquote data-reactid="224">
<p>When Adeline finally left the camp, in early 2014,
only five of the seven members of her family were
still alive.</p>
</blockquote>
<div data-reactid="226">
<p>When Adeline finally left the camp, in early 2014,
only five of the seven members of her family were
still alive. “I lost my big sister,” she said softly,
in Kreyòl, “and then I lost my father.” In December
2013, Adeline’s sister Ninese suddenly developed
terrible diarrhea and began vomiting. The family
brought her to a hospital, where a doctor confirmed
that she had cholera. After a week, Ninese appeared to
have gotten better and was released. However, her
symptoms returned. Ninese died in Parc Jean Marie
Vincent just as her family was making arrangements for
someone to drive her back to the hospital. She was 28.</p>
<p>A month later, Adeline’s father, Therus, went to the
hospital after displaying symptoms of cholera and
received treatment. “He was starting to feel a bit
better,” Adeline recalled, so like her sister, he
returned to the camp. A few days later, his symptoms,
too, were back with a vengeance. According to Adeline,
“He died right away.”</p>
<p>Dr. Louise Ivers, former senior health and policy
adviser at Partners in Health, which ran a cholera
treatment center in Parc Jean Marie Vincent, confirmed
by email that “we did have deaths.” She declined to
specify exactly how many cholera deaths occurred in
the camp, which has since been closed through a formal
relocation program administered by IOM. Ivers
explained that this was “ministry of health data” and
thus she would “not be able to share directly.”</p>
<p>Yet Dr. Patrick Dely, director of epidemiology at the
Haitian Ministry of Public Health and Population,
which tracks cholera deaths, said that his department
does not actually know how many residents of camps
like Parc Jean Marie Vincent died of cholera. The
department records both cholera deaths that occur in
institutional settings, such as hospitals and cholera
treatment centers, and those that occur in community
settings. But when asked about how many of those who
died of cholera were IDP camp residents, Dely
confirmed that his department “does not have the
data.”</p>
<p>In Mega 4, another camp in Port-au-Prince that IOM
has since closed through a relocation program, at
least 12 people died of cholera, according to François
Jesner, an elected member of the camp leadership
committee who worked for five months in a cholera
treatment center in the camp. As was the case in Parc
Jean Marie Vincent, residents of Mega 4 had access to
water, which was initially distributed for free, and
some health care facilities, including a maternity
clinic. But distribution of food staples only lasted a
few weeks, according to Fritz Belance, another Mega 4
resident and member of the camp leadership committee.
“Then the Haitian government asked for that to stop,”
he recalled. On some level, Fritz considered the
decision reasonable; it seemed logical that people
should work to provide for their families. However,
“there was no work,” he said. “There were people who
couldn’t eat.” And as was the case in IDP camps across
Haiti, he explained, other services diminished after
the first year.</p>
<p>Life in Mega 4 took a particular toll on Fritz’s
mother, Gèze Belance. For nearly six years, Gèze lived
under the same tarp as her son. During this period,
Fritz recalled, his mother’s health declined
significantly, before her eventual death from an
apparent heart attack in September 2015.</p>
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<p>Clémane Joseph, who took refuge in Mega 4 with his
daughter Mickerlange Joseph and her son after their
home in Port-au-Prince was destroyed, also died in the
camp. Clémane had been injured during the earthquake,
when a concrete block fell on his foot as he escaped
from his home carrying his 1-year-old grandson in his
arms. During his years in the camp, the wound on
Clémane’s foot became increasingly infected. On
several occasions, his son Mara-Donal Joseph, a
motorcycle taxi driver, brought Clémane to a hospital
in Port-au-Prince. However, the hospital always
charged fees for these visits, and neither Mara-Donal
nor Mickerlange, whose meager earnings came from
selling used clothing and cigarettes, could afford to
keep paying. Mara-Donal remembered that his father’s
foot appeared very red and swollen. Then the wound
opened, and he could see the bones. “There were worms
inside,” Mara-Donal recalled. By late 2012, Clémane
was no longer able to walk. He died in Mega 4 on
December 28, 2014.</p>
<p>Twenty-nine-year-old Martineau Basil was also unable
to access the medical care he needed in the camp where
his family lived, according to his uncle Wilsson
Basil. After the Basils’ home in Port-au-Prince was
destroyed, the family took refuge in a camp in Champ
de Mars, a public plaza at the heart of the Haitian
capital. Martineau, who had suffered serious injuries
when a concrete wall fell on him during the
earthquake, died after less than a month in the camp,
according to Wilsson.</p>
<p>In Tabarre Issa, one of Haiti’s remaining IDP camps,
15 camp residents have died since 2010, according to
camp committee member Luxama Livenson. He cited poor
living conditions as an important factor in these
deaths in Tabarre Issa, where he says many residents
lack access to food, clean drinking water, and medical
care.</p>
<p>Given that conditions and services in other IDP camps
in Haiti were generally no better than those in
Tabarre Issa, Parc Jean Marie Vincent, or Mega 4, it
seems likely that many others died in the more than
1,500 camps that formed in the aftermath of the
earthquake. Many such deaths, including those of
Martineau Basil, Therus and Ninese Geffrard, Gèze
Belance, Clémane Joseph, and the 12 people who
reportedly died of cholera in Mega 4, are officially
counted as “progress” — part of that much-cited
reduction in camp population. Others, like those who
died in Tabarre Issa, are still being counted by IOM
as part of the population living in IDP camps.</p>
</div>
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<h3>Displacement Tracking Matrix</h3>
<p>Since the 2010 earthquake, IOM has collected data on
Haiti’s displaced population through a system called
the Displacement Tracking Matrix. According to
Emmanuelle Deryce, an IOM operations officer, the
first step the agency undertook in implementing this
tracking system was to register the residents of every
site IOM had identified as an IDP camp. The agency
gathered information about each household in the camp,
including the head of household, the total members,
and their contact information, and issued each family
an IDP registration card.</p>
<p>Whenever an IDP camp was closed through a relocation
program, IOM or its partner agencies carried out an
additional registration to determine who was still
living in the camp and thus eligible for assistance.
When IOM agents came to re-register the residents of
Mega 4, Mickerlange informed them about the death of
her father, who was identified on her family’s IDP
registration card as the head of her three-person
household. But that information might never have been
recorded. Humanitarian organizations often keep track
of deaths among the people they seek to assist, as
mortality rates are a common assessment measure.
However, Deryce confirmed that IOM has kept no records
of deaths in Haitian IDP camps like Mega 4.</p>
</div>
<blockquote data-reactid="241">
<p>“For us, the indicator is decrease of people in
camps. Because we want to close camps.”</p>
</blockquote>
<div data-reactid="243">
<p>“Here, we don’t really measure how a program is
working with the number of deaths,” a data analyst who
worked in IOM’s Haiti Mission explained in a recorded
interview cited in my Ph.D. <a
href="https://spectrum.library.concordia.ca/983850/">thesis</a>.
“For us, the indicator is decrease of people in camps.
Because we want to close camps.”</p>
<p>This data analyst, who spoke to me on condition of
anonymity for my doctoral research, did not respond to
follow-up questions for this article. However, on a
three-way Skype call, Deryce and Giuseppe Loprete,
IOM’s chief of mission in Haiti, elaborated on the
procedure IOM uses to count decreases in the number of
Haitians living in camps. Deryce explained that IOM
staff she referred to as “enumerators” regularly visit
Haiti’s remaining camps and count the number of
shelters in each site. “We continue visiting sites on
a regular basis,” she said. “If people reduce, we make
sure we’re able to track that.”</p>
<p>“We also have our drones,” Loprete added, explaining
that unmanned aerial vehicles are “a very powerful
tool” to help the agency find out if camps “for some
reason expanded or reduced.”</p>
<p>In late 2010, when IOM published its first report
based on the data it gathered through the Displacement
Tracking Matrix, the agency estimated that 1.5 million
people were living in 1,555 IDP camps throughout
Haiti. As of this past January, when IOM published its
most recent report on Haiti, just 23 camps remained
open, housing fewer than 35,000 Haitians. The agency
thus <a
href="https://haiti.iom.int/sites/default/files/documents_files/DTM%20Haiti%202010_Round%2033_ENG.PDF">concluded</a>
that there had been a “reduction of 99 percent of
sites and 98 percent of IDPs identified in 2010.”</p>
<h3>Forced Evictions</h3>
<p>Most of the decrease IOM counted in camp residents
occurred within the first few years after the
earthquake. Yet these relocations hardly appear to be
signs of progress. Household <a
href="https://canada-haiti.ca/content/new-report-housing-haiti-authored-mark-schuller">surveys</a>
have shown that most families who left Haiti’s IDP
camps during this period either felt compelled to
leave due to the appalling conditions or were forcibly
evicted.</p>
<p>In February 2011, IOM carried out a <a
href="https://reliefweb.int/report/haiti/internally-displaced-persons-idp-return-survey-initial-results-march-2011">survey</a>
of 1,033 households that had lived in camps that
closed within a year of the disaster. Evictions were
the most frequently cited reason that survey
respondents gave for leaving the camps, followed by
rain or hurricanes, poor conditions, and crime or
insecurity. Of the former camp residents who responded
to the survey, 25 percent reported that their
households were still living in a tent or makeshift
shelter, and another 29 percent said they had moved
into a house that was in need of repair. Only 42
percent of respondents reported that their families
were living in an undamaged house.</p>
<p>Of the more than 1,500 camps that have closed since
2010, at least 177 — or about 12 percent — were closed
through evictions, according to an April 2018 IOM <a
href="https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/6491990-DTM-Haiti-Round-32.html">report</a>.
IOM estimated that such evictions — many of which were
<a
href="https://www.amnestyusa.org/reports/nowhere-to-go-forced-evictions-in-haitis-displacement-camps/">carried
out</a> violently at the behest of private
landlords, often with the complicity or active
involvement of local Haitian authorities — have driven
60,570 Haitians out of IDP camps.</p>
<p>Among those who were violently evicted was
60-year-old Maude Maselus. After the earthquake
destroyed the house she rented in Port-au-Prince,
Maude took refuge in a camp not far from the rubble of
her home in Delmas 17, a relatively central
neighborhood in the Haitian capital. For more than a
year and a half, she lived under a tarp in the camp,
which was located on private land.</p>
</div>
<blockquote data-reactid="244">
<p>The armed men ordered them to the ground. Then they
began beating people.</p>
</blockquote>
<div data-reactid="246">
<p>However, one day in August 2011, a representative
from the mayor’s office arrived in the camp. “He came
with many leaders who were well armed, to crush our
homes,” recalled Maude, who said she barely had time
to salvage her meager belongings before the gun-toting
men ordered her to dismantle her tent. Some camp
residents panicked and began to run. The armed men
ordered them to the ground. Then they began beating
people.</p>
<p>Jean-Alex Jacques, who lived in the same camp in
Delmas 17 with his girlfriend, referred to what
happened that day as a <em>deplasman fosè</em> — a
forced displacement. A slight man who is now 32,
Jean-Alex said he was badly beaten by the gunmen, who
forced him and his girlfriend, along with <a
href="https://youtu.be/c4i3yXR5tDQ">hundreds of
others</a>, to leave the camp.</p>
<p>Like many others who were evicted that day, Maude,
Jean-Alex, and his girlfriend have since moved to
Corail, an informal settlement north of the Haitian
capital. Maude erected a makeshift tent there with the
same tarp she’d used in the camp, on a dusty patch of
land just a few meters from a similar shelter where
Jean-Alex and his girlfriend now live with their
4-year-old daughter.</p>
<p>Corail is located on a <a
href="http://haitigrassrootswatch.squarespace.com/31controverseEng">wind-swept
plain</a> that is prone to flooding during the rainy
season. The area was sparsely populated before 2010,
when the Haitian government declared it public domain.
Individuals who claim to be the land’s prior owners
maintain that the government never compensated them,
leaving <a
href="https://www.reuters.com/article/us-haiti-landrights-quake/in-haitis-city-without-a-government-residents-want-land-titles-taxation-idUSKCN1P60IQ">unresolved
questions</a> about tenants’ tenure. Yet despite
this uncertainty, and the lack of basic services like
running water and electricity, hundreds of thousands
of Haitians have migrated to informal settlements here
over the past nine years, to stake claim to a piece of
land or purchase a plot from someone who claimed it
first. Canaan, the largest of these settlements, is
now estimated to have a <a
href="https://www.vqronline.org/reporting-articles/2017/04/they-call-it-canaan">population</a>
of more than 200,000.</p>
<p>IOM initially identified Canaan and two other
informal settlements in the area as IDP camps and
counted their residents as part of the country’s
displaced population. However, at the request of the
Haitian government in 2013, when IOM estimated that
there were more than 64,000 people living in these
settlements, the agency <a
href="https://displacement.iom.int/system/tdf/reports/01_IOM%20DTM_Haiti_Round%2017_EN_20140110_0.pdf?file=1&type=node&id=223">stopped
counting</a> their residents as IDPs. While the <a
href="http://cepr.net/blogs/haiti-relief-and-reconstruction-watch/iom-reports-big-drop-in-idp-population-after-removing-3-areas-from-official-camp-list">rationale</a>
for this request was that the settlements had the
characteristics of “new neighborhoods needing urban
planning with a long term view,” the reclassification
made residents even more vulnerable to eviction.</p>
</div>
<div data-reactid="249">
<p>We also found indications that IOM’s tally of
Haitians evicted from IDP camps may be incomplete.
Although Mega 4, for example, was formally closed
through a relocation program, camp leaders and former
residents say they were nonetheless forced out at
gunpoint.</p>
<p>Officially, many of the larger camps were closed
through cash grant programs, which offered residents a
one-year rental subsidy, paid by organizations like
IOM. As these agencies feared that individuals who
were not camp residents might try to seek payment, the
final registration <a
href="https://admin.concern.net/sites/default/files/media/migrated/evaluation_of_the_rental_support_cash_grant_applied_to_return_and_relocation_programs_in_haiti.pdf">was
often</a> carried out at night, with the assistance
of police or U.N. soldiers who typically cordoned off
camp perimeters so nobody who wasn’t already inside
could enter. During this final registration, residents
were often ordered to take down their tarp shelters
before tractors leveled all the campsites.</p>
<p>During the closure of Mega 4, Fritz said, some camp
residents were also beaten by the police. He explained
that a number of residents were calling for a more
durable solution than a one-year subsidy. When IOM
announced its plans to close Mega 4 through cash
grants they saw as insufficient, residents protested,
and some refused to leave. IOM returned several times
to Mega 4 in the lead-up to the camp’s closure. “The
last journey they made, the National Police came,”
Fritz recalled. “They came around midnight, 1 in the
morning, while people were asleep.” Fritz said camp
residents who resisted removal that night were beaten.</p>
<p>Mara-Donal’s mother-in-law, Trinidad Paul, was among
the Mega 4 residents reluctant to leave the camp. “It
was the police who came and forced us out,” she said.
“They came and beat people. That’s what made us
leave.” Trinidad remembers hearing a particularly loud
burst of gunfire that night, which she later learned
was the cops firing warning shots in the air. “The
noise frightened me,” she recalled. She said she hid
in her tent, lying flat on her stomach, her heart
racing.</p>
<p>It was in the midst of this police operation that
Fritz’s mother, Gèze, died of an apparent heart
attack. Fritz said her sudden death occurred after she
was woken up by the loud blast of gunfire. “This huge
noise shocked us all,” added the soft-spoken camp
leader. He was at Gèze’s side when she died.</p>
<p>Asked about the closure of Mega 4, an IOM
spokesperson confirmed that the final registration of
camp residents took place around 2 a.m. with the
assistance of Haitian and U.N. police officers. The
organization disputed allegations of violence against
camp residents and said that no loss of life occurred
that night.</p>
</div>
<div data-reactid="252">
<h3>Backward, Not Forward</h3>
<p>Relocation programs like the one IOM used to close
Mega 4 offered families a means of securing safe
rental accommodation — if only temporarily. While
these programs — which were also administered by
various international charity groups, including the
Red Cross and World Vision — varied slightly depending
on which agency ran them, they all followed the same
basic model. To access the one-year rent subsidy, each
eligible family was responsible for identifying an
available property on the private market that met
basic safety standards and negotiating the rent with
the landlord. Once the property was approved by the
administering agency, the family signed a one-year
lease with the landlord, who received the subsidy
upfront. The amount allocated for this payment was
generally $500 for the full year; only if the rent
cost less did the family get to keep any of the
subsidy for themselves.</p>
<p>When IOM closed Mega 4, Mickerlange and her child
were still living in the makeshift tent they had
shared with Clémane before he died. The young mother,
now 31, expected to receive a subsidy. However, she
said, once she informed an IOM agent about her
father’s death, “the agent took the card and said the
card wasn’t valid anymore.” Without an IDP card,
Mickerlange recalled an IOM representative telling
her, they “couldn’t do anything for me.” She said the
IOM agent promised to follow up with her but never
returned. “The tractors came, [but] we never got the
money,” she said.</p>
<p>Asked about the scenario Mickerlange described, the
IOM spokesperson said that “for any individual who may
have felt left out or neglected,” there was a
grievance process led by the Tabarre mayor’s office
that “Mrs. Joseph could have undergone to address any
wrongdoing.”</p>
<p>According to Mickerlange, however, she did go through
the grievance process and was nevertheless denied
benefits.</p>
<p>Her brother Mara-Donal, who lived in a separate tarp
shelter in Mega 4 with his wife and kids, did receive
a rental subsidy. With that assistance, Mara-Donal,
his wife, Phara, and their three children moved back
to Petite Place Cazeau, the middle-class neighborhood
of Port-au-Prince where they lived before the
earthquake. It was a success — for a time. After the
one-year subsidy ended, they were unable to afford
their rent and had to move out.</p>
</div>
<blockquote data-reactid="253">
<p>“The state is not present, international
organizations aren’t present. … It’s as if we’re a
pack of animals.”</p>
</blockquote>
<div data-reactid="255">
<p>In 2012, a consultancy firm called the WolfGroup
carried out a phone survey of households that received
subsidies for an evaluation commissioned by the
Haitian government and organizations involved in
administering the grant programs. Based on information
collected about each household’s income, savings, and
debt loads, the evaluators <a
href="http://www.ijdh.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/Haiti-Rental-Grant-Evaluation-the-WolfGroup.pdf">assessed</a>
that 60 percent of surveyed families would not be able
to afford their rent after the end of the subsidy.</p>
<p>As the evaluation emphasized, these programs were
“not intended as a long-term solution.” Rather, they
were supposed to provide “a short-term ‘boost’ to get
grantees into a safe rental solution and develop their
own solution for the mid-term.” Yet the evaluators
also pointed out that Haitians still living in camps
at the advent of these programs were members of “the
poorest urban class in Haiti with the least options.”
They noted that the circumstances of these households,
most of which live on less than $2 a day, was “a
reflection of the broader economic problems in Haiti,”
including high rates of unemployment and
underemployment. Since this evaluation, Haiti’s
economy has further <a
href="http://www.jamaicaobserver.com/business-report/haiti-central-bank-governor-concerned-about-depreciation-of-local-currency_166509?profile=1056">deteriorated</a>,
as a significant depreciation of the country’s
currency and soaring inflation has hit Haitian
families with a dramatic spike in prices of even such
basic staples as rice.</p>
<p>Now, amid a political <a
href="https://nacla.org/news/2019/09/26/shooting-haitian-parliament-surprises-few-anti-government-protests-continue">standoff</a>
between the U.S.-backed government of Jovenel Moïse
and various groups calling for his resignation over
charges of corruption, many Haitian communities are
also experiencing food insecurity, fuel <a
href="https://www.miamiherald.com/news/nation-world/world/americas/haiti/article235718952.html">shortages</a>,
and power <a
href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/20/world/americas/Haiti-crisis-violence.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share">outages</a>.
Schools and businesses have closed, aid deliveries
have been suspended, and hospitals have been forced to
cut services. Over the past few weeks, as thousands of
Haitians have taken to the streets to protest, at
least 30 people have been <a
href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/20/world/americas/Haiti-crisis-violence.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share">killed</a>,
including 15 who were killed by the police. Some
Haitians <a
href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/20/world/americas/Haiti-crisis-violence.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share">say</a>
conditions in their country are worse than anything
they’ve previously experienced.</p>
<p>Since 2010, the cost of rent in Port-au-Prince,
already high relative to the meager incomes of many
Haitian families, has skyrocketed. The Haitian
government has <a
href="https://web.archive.org/web/20100207005409/http:/www.theage.com.au/world/haitians-angry-over-slow-aid-20100204-ng2g.html">estimated</a>
that 250,000 homes collapsed in the earthquake or were
destroyed beyond repair, exacerbating a housing
shortage that existed even before the disaster.</p>
<p>Many subsidy recipients suggested that the grants
themselves contributed to the spike in housing prices.
The majority of participants in the WolfGroup’s <a
href="http://www.ijdh.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/Haiti-Rental-Grant-Evaluation-the-WolfGroup.pdf">survey</a>
believed that landlords raised rental prices because
they were aware that an international organization
would be paying the rent. A subsequent external <a
href="https://admin.concern.net/sites/default/files/media/migrated/evaluation_of_the_rental_support_cash_grant_applied_to_return_and_relocation_programs_in_haiti.pdf">evaluation</a>
identified “inflation of the price of rental housing”
as a potential negative consequence of these programs.
The consultants hired to carry out this 2014
evaluation also raised concerns that families who left
IDP camps with the assistance of grants might have
since moved into the new informal settlements north of
Port-au-Prince.</p>
</div>
<div data-reactid="269">
<p>Mara-Donal and Phara moved to one of the most remote
of these settlements in 2016. Unable to afford the
rising cost of rent in Port-au-Prince, they decided to
buy a small plot of land in the settlement, which is
called Village Philadelphie. Originally, they’d
planned to build themselves a proper home, but more
than two years later, they’re still living under the
same tarps, wood, and tin sheets that formed their
tent in Mega 4. Mara-Donal said that the same
difficulties they confronted in the camp have
continued to plague them in Village Philadelphie.
There’s no potable water station in the area, so the
family has to buy water by the bucket from a truck and
treat it themselves to ensure that it is safe to
drink. Nor is there electricity, or streetlights, or a
medical clinic. “The state is not present,
international organizations aren’t present,”
Mara-Donal observed. “There’s nothing. There’s no
infrastructure there for us.”</p>
<p>“It’s as if we’re a pack of animals,” he added.</p>
<p>According to Phara, life in Village Philadelphie is
in some ways more difficult than it was in the camp.
She reports that it was easier to access potable water
in Mega 4, where aid organizations often distributed
chlorination tablets. There was a free maternity
clinic in the camp, where her youngest child, Clara,
was born, but Village Philadelphie is so far from any
public hospital or clinic that Phara has found it
difficult to access health care at all. This has been
an acute concern, since Clara has repeatedly been sick
with pneumonia since they arrived in the settlement.</p>
<p>In Mega 4, Phara ran a small business, making and
selling pastries. She continued this business in front
of the house her family rented through IOM’s grant
program. However, since their move to Village
Philadelphie, Phara’s business has gone bust. There
were simply too few capable of buying her pastries in
the remote, impoverished settlement. Phara soon
realized that she was spending more on ingredients
than she was bringing in.</p>
</div>
<div data-reactid="279">
<p>As the family’s financial situation has worsened,
they have had to cut back on basic necessities. Before
the earthquake, they ate three meals a day, according
to Phara, who says they typically managed this even in
the camp. However, since their arrival in Village
Philadelphie, they have only been able to afford one
meal a day.</p>
<p>Her mother, Trinidad, who also received a grant from
IOM, lives next door to Phara and Mara-Donal’s family.
Like her daughter, Trinidad has found it much harder
to make a living in the settlement than in the camp,
where she also ran a small business, reselling items
such as candles and cooking gas. Procuring the types
of goods she sold in Mega 4 would be much more
expensive in Village Philadelphie due to the
additional travel costs required to get to the nearest
market, so Trinidad hasn’t been able to restart her
business.</p>
<p>The frame of the tiny shelter where Trinidad lives
with her youngest son, Fritz, and her 1-year-old
granddaughter, Carlene, is made out of the same wood
beams as the tarp shelter where they lived in the
camp. However, as Village Philadelphie is often hit by
strong winds, Trinidad had to fortify her shelter with
something sturdier. So she sold her IOM tarp to raise
money to buy some tin sheets. Yet these flimsy tin
walls are already badly rusted and don’t keep out the
rain. And she doesn’t have money to buy any new
materials. “The water comes in there,” she said,
pointing to a hole in the wall above a thin single
mattress where she sleeps at night with Carlene, who
she said had been sick with diarrhea for three months.
“When the rain falls, the entire bed is soaked.”
Village Philadelphie is also farther than Mega 4 from
Fritz’s school, making it much more expensive to get
there by public transit. “Mega 4 was better than
here!” she exclaimed, gazing at the hole in the wall,
which she had tried to cover with a pair of laminated
food guide posters. “We’ve gone backward, not forward!
This place is not good for us at all, at all, at all.”</p>
</div>
<div data-reactid="290">
<p>A <a
href="http://www.ijdh.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/Haitis-Housing-Crisis-Jan-2014-fact-sheet.pdf">study</a>
carried out by the Institute for Justice and Democracy
in Haiti found that many other families who left the
camps through rental subsidies had also ended up in
worse conditions. Forty-four families who moved out of
six IDP camps in Port-au-Prince through a cash grant
program run by the Haitian government were surveyed at
three different stages of the program. The last of
these surveys was administered in 2013, when 92
percent of these families’ rental subsidies had ended.
A substantial majority reported that their living
situation and food security were worse than before the
earthquake. Thirty-seven percent reported that their
access to clean water was worse than it was in the
camps, 29 percent said their access to medical care
was worse, and 37 percent reported that they ate less
well than in the camps.</p>
<p>Even as a temporary fix, the rental subsidies were
only offered to a minority of the families consigned
to IDP camps. Of the more than 1.5 million Haitians
IOM originally counted in these camps, only 302,116 —
less than 20 percent — left through a subsidy program,
<a
href="https://haiti.iom.int/sites/default/files/documents_files/DTM%20Haiti%202010_Round%2033_ENG.PDF">according
to</a> IOM.</p>
<p>The vast majority of Haiti’s former IDP camp
residents — like Adeline’s family, whose surviving
members fled Parc Jean Marie Vincent after her sister
and father died — were simply no longer living in an
IDP camp when IOM and its drones returned to recount
Haiti’s displaced population. By April 2018, IOM <a
href="https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/6491990-DTM-Haiti-Round-32.html">reported</a>
that there had been 1,143,108 such disappearances,
which the agency refers to as “spontaneous returns” —
accounting for three-quarters of the decrease the
agency has counted.</p>
</div>
<blockquote data-reactid="291">
<p>The agency does not know how many individuals it
tallies as “spontaneous returns” actually died in the
camps.</p>
</blockquote>
<div data-reactid="293">
<p>Deryce, the IOM operations officer, confirmed that
the agency does not know how many individuals it
tallies as “spontaneous returns” actually died in the
camps. Nor does IOM know how many members of
households that left through evictions or rental
subsidies died in the camps. As part of the final
registration IOM carries out in camps it closes
through rental subsidy programs, the agency has a
questionnaire it uses to gather information about each
family who leaves. The questionnaire does not ask a
basic question: whether any members of the family died
in the camp. As Loprete, IOM’s chief of mission in
Haiti, explained, “We did not know of instances of
deaths. We never received any notifications of deaths.
… We did not really track deaths.”</p>
<p>Asked whether IOM nevertheless considers the decrease
in IDP camp population to be a sign of progress, IOM’s
spokesperson insisted that it did: “Progress towards
finding durable solutions for all earthquake victims
continues. It progressed from 96 percent in 2017 to 98
percent in mid-2019. Out of the original 1,555 IDP
sites, only 22 will remain open at the end of 2019.
This translates into solutions for 98 percent of
initial caseload of persons displaced by the 2010
earthquake.”</p>
<p>IOM eventually closed Parc Jean Marie Vincent through
a rent subsidy program. However, because none of the
Geffrards were still living in the camp when IOM
launched the program, neither Adeline nor any of her
surviving family members were able to access
assistance. Adeline, now 28, currently lives with her
spouse and three kids in Pernier 47, a suburb of
Port-au-Prince, in the house of acquaintances who are
temporarily living elsewhere and saw “we were in a
very difficult situation,” she explained. She has no
idea where her family will go when the owners of the
home return.</p>
</div>
<div data-reactid="296">
<h3>The Scale of the Crisis</h3>
<p>To this day, very little of the housing that was
destroyed in the 2010 earthquake has been rebuilt. And
the housing crisis was exacerbated by Hurricane
Matthew in 2016, which <a
href="https://www.refugeesinternational.org/reports/2017/4/6/haiti">displaced</a>
an estimated 175,000. Many Haitian families continue
to lack access to adequate shelter, which places them
at risk in the event of yet another disaster. This is
a particular concern because Haiti is in the midst of
its annual hurricane season, and experts have <a
href="https://www.noaa.gov/media-release/noaa-increases-chance-for-above-normal-hurricane-season">predicted</a>
more storms than usual before the season ends in late
November.</p>
<p>Conditions remain particularly unsafe for Haitians
who remain in IDP camps, where many women and girls
have been <a
href="https://www.madre.org/press-publications/press-release/gender-based-violence-against-haitian-women-girls-internal">raped
or sexually assaulted</a>. As of April 2018, when
IOM <a
href="https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/6491990-DTM-Haiti-Round-32.html">published</a>
its latest report on conditions in Haiti’s remaining
camps, the vast majority of these camps did not have
access to water, and three did not have so much as a
single latrine. In many others, IOM reported that the
latrines were so full that they constituted a health
risk.</p>
<p>Electricity is available to those who can afford it
in parts of Canaan, the former IDP camp, where the
Haitian government and various international
organizations have invested in building some basic
infrastructure, including a <a
href="https://reliefweb.int/report/haiti/iom-completes-first-road-massive-displacement-settlement-haiti">paved
road</a>, and a private hospital has also opened.
However, access to such services remains a major
problem for residents of other informal settlements
north of Port-au-Prince. Given the uncertainty of land
tenure, residents are at risk of being evicted from
whatever makeshift homes they have been able to build
for themselves. Many former camp residents have
already been violently evicted from their new homes in
Canaan, <a
href="https://www.amnestyusa.org/files/amr360012015en.pdf">according
to</a> Amnesty International.</p>
<p>Given that many Haitians continue to lack access to
clean drinking water, quality medical care, and proper
waste disposal services, deadly water-borne diseases
like cholera remain a major risk. Since 2010, more
than 9,700 Haitians have died from <a
href="https://www.cdc.gov/globalhealth/countries/haiti/what/eliminating-cholera-haiti.html">cholera</a>,
and 819,000 have contracted the disease. Moreover,
cholera has become endemic in Haiti, <a
href="https://www.doctorswithoutborders.org/what-we-do/news-stories/news/haiti-fighting-spread-mosquito-borne-diseases">according
to</a> Doctors Without Borders. While suspected new
cholera cases have <a
href="http://mspp.gouv.ht/site/downloads/Profil%20statistique%20Cholera%20%2031SE%202019.pdf">declined</a>
significantly since the height of the epidemic in
2011, the U.N. has <a
href="https://www.humanitarianresponse.info/sites/www.humanitarianresponse.info/files/documents/files/ht-unct-cholerafactsheet24april2017.pdf">warned</a>
that Haiti remains “extremely vulnerable” to the
disease. The U.S. Agency for International Development
has also <a
href="https://www.usaid.gov/haiti/food-assistance">documented</a>
growing food insecurity in the country.</p>
<p>For these reasons, USCIS researchers determined that
Haiti continued to meet the conditions for TPS when
the country’s designation came up for renewal in 2017.
As the authors of an internal <a
href="https://www.nipnlg.org/PDFs/practitioners/our_lit/impact_litigation/2018_16Apr_foia-tps-haiti.pdf">USCIS
report</a> emphasized that October, “Many of the
conditions prompting the original January 2010 TPS
designation persist, and the country remains
vulnerable to external shocks and internal fragility.”</p>
</div>
<div data-reactid="307">
<p>However, the following month, DHS terminated Haiti’s
TPS designation. In a press release announcing the
decision, Duke, then-acting DHS secretary, <a
href="https://www.dhs.gov/news/2017/11/20/acting-secretary-elaine-duke-announcement-temporary-protected-status-haiti">claimed</a>,
“The extraordinary but temporary conditions caused by
the 2010 earthquake no longer exist.” The very first
data point Duke cited to support this claim was the
decrease IOM counted in the number of Haitians living
in IDP camps — from which at least 60,500 were
evicted, and where an untold number died.</p>
<p>While IOM began developing its data collection system
in Iraq, Loprete explained that “Haiti was always sort
of a pilot or pioneer for this tool,” noting, “We can
use it of course for other disasters.”</p>
<p>Already, IOM is using the Displacement Tracking
Matrix to monitor people displaced by disasters in <a
href="https://www.globaldtm.info/yemen/">Yemen</a>,
<a href="https://www.globaldtm.info/el-salvador/">El
Salvador</a>, <a
href="https://www.globaldtm.info/honduras/">Honduras</a>,
the <a
href="http://www.globaldtm.info/democratic-republic-of-congo/">Democratic
Republic of Congo</a>, <a
href="https://www.globaldtm.info/sudan/">Sudan</a>,
and <a href="https://www.globaldtm.info/somalia/">Somalia</a>.
The agency has also <a
href="https://unfccc.int/files/adaptation/groups_committees/loss_and_damage_executive_committee/application/pdf/excom_wim_aa6_iom_submission_submitted_16_may_2016_1.pdf">promoted</a>
the system as an important tool for tracking
populations displaced by the climate crisis. IOM <a
href="https://emergencymanual.iom.int/entry/19108">describes</a>
it as a service that “plays an essential role in
providing primary data and information on
displacement” to humanitarian agencies and governments
and thus helps them to “deliver services and respond
to needs in a timely manner.”</p>
<p>Yet the central role that the Displacement Tracking
Matrix has played in the Trump administration’s
official rationale for terminating Haitians’
eligibility for TPS also suggests that the tool may
contribute to underestimating the impact of disasters,
whether earthquakes, wars, or climate change. By
failing to track deaths, while ignoring the fate of
displaced people who end up in informal settlements
with higher risks and fewer services than IDP camps
themselves, this tool risks producing highly distorted
data that downplays the scale and severity of
contemporary crises of displacement. Such a flawed
system of data collection may be convenient for
governments “fishing for reasons,” in Judge Kuntz’s
words, to close their borders to asylum-seekers. But
it also has the potential to undermine humanitarian
responses that are urgently needed at a time when more
than 70 million people are forcibly displaced around
the world, more than at any time in recorded history.</p>
<p><em>With reporting assistance from Jeremy Dupin and
Yvon Vilius.</em></p>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
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