Haiti May Be the First Foreign Policy Crisis of the Trump Administration

The timing could not be worse

The crisis in Haiti has gone from bad to worse.

On November 10, the interim prime minister of Haiti, Gary Conille, was fired by the council that put him in charge just a few months ago. That council was established with heavy U.S. and international support after Haiti's previous prime minister, Ariel Henry, was blocked from entering the country following a foreign trip. (He submitted a resignation letter from Los Angeles.) For his part, Henry took power following the 2021 assassination of the prime minister who preceded him.

Haiti has been in a perpetual political crisis since that 2021 assassination. In the political vacuum, organized criminal groups, commonly referred to as gangs, have asserted control over large swaths of Port-au-Prince, fomenting a security and humanitarian crisis throughout the country. In response to this crisis, the United States and other key international players, with the consent of the Haitian government and the backing of the United Nations, established what is known as the Multinational Security Support Mission (MSS).

This mission is led by a contingent of police from Kenya, and for a short while after their deployment, levels of violence decreased, and humanitarian access increased. But in the wake of the firing of interim Prime Minister Gary Conille less than two weeks ago, violence has increased sharply. According to my interview guest today, Renata Sengura of the International Crisis Group, gangs have sought to take advantage of the political vacuum in Haiti to assert their control and dominance. These gangs now control nearly all of Port-au-Prince, including neighborhoods that were once under the control of Haitian police.

Meanwhile, international efforts to get the security situation under control are faltering. The Kenyan-led multinational force has not been able to assert control, and the final neighborhoods of Port-au-Prince that were once protected by the Haitian police have now come under gang control. In part, this is because there are just too few international boots on the ground. Only about 380 police have deployed as part of this mission thus far—the expectation was that by now there would be over 2,000 such forces.

Amid this spiraling crisis, the United States, Kenya, and others are seeking to turn this Kenyan-led mission into a formal United Nations peacekeeping mission. Such a move would help the mission secure reliable funding—something that has stymied it thus far. But even if this happens, such a transition and mission may be slow to deploy.

The crisis just keeps getting worse—and is worsening at exactly the wrong moment.

It is not unreasonable to expect that large numbers of Haitian refugees may soon try to flee to the United States. This new refugee crisis may peak at exactly the same time that a new administration hostile to refugees and migrants takes power in Washington.

“Most of the migrants have been trying to go into the [Dominican Republic]. But in the past, we have seen a lot of people taking boats to try and reach Florida,” Renata Segura of the International Crisis Group tells me in a new episode of the Global Dispatches podcast. “And that’s something that could be happening if the violence gets even worse than what it is.”

This combination of a deepening security and humanitarian crisis in Haiti that leads to thousands of Haitians fleeing by boat to Florida may be the first major foreign policy crisis of the new Trump administration. We can’t predict precisely how the new administration will respond. But we do know with some certainty that the response will reflect the incoming administration’s cruel disposition toward refugees and migrants in general, and Haitians in particular.

Want to learn more?

A few days ago, I caught up with the Crisis Group’s Renata Segura for an episode of the podcast about Haiti’s deepening crisis. The full episode is freely available across all podcast listening platforms. You can access it on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and everywhere else.

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The full transcript is available immediately for our paying subscribers.

Mark Leon Goldberg: So, Renata, on Sunday, November 10th, the Transitional Council in Haiti dismissed the Interim Prime Minister Garry Conille. Since then, there has been an escalating spiral of violence and destruction that has wrought much of Haiti. Can I just have you explain and describe what has been going on since the dismissal of Garry Conille?

Renata Segura: Yeah, so this has been quite an intense week both in politics but also insecurity in Haiti. The dismissal of Conille was not really a surprise for anybody who had been following closely what’s going on in the politics of Haiti. There had been an increasing tension between him and the presidential council. We should note that the Presidential Council has nine members and a rotating presidency. The relationship between the Prime Minister Conille, who was just dismissed, and the current president was really difficult. There was a lot of fighting over who really was in control of the government, who should be the representative speaking to the international community, and a number of other things. When the dismissal came, it wasn’t a surprise, but it’s obviously something that just makes the state weaker, at least momentarily.

And the gangs clearly took that as a sign to really prove that they can raise the levels of violence and really paralyze the country again if they want to and when they want to.