That the U.S. government bears this moral responsibility is clear, if unreported. Let’s start with a major prosecution witness: the former U.S. ambassador to Haiti, Dan Foote. He warned nearly five years ago that U.S. policy was a dangerous failure, and in September 2021 he resigned in protest, ending a distinguished 23-year State Department career. His blistering resignation letter, which became public, argued that the repeated efforts by the U.S. (and other outside powers) to intervene in Haiti’s political life had “consistently produced catastrophic results,” and he warned of “calamitous consequences to come.” 

That calamity is here. The 330,000 Haitians who now face deportation have been here legally under the Temporary Protected Status, or TPS, program, which Congress established by law in 1990. The U.S. media are, to their credit, reporting that the Haitians who are in the U.S. are overwhelmingly hardworking and law-abiding. Haitian health workers and home aides for the elderly are indispensable in certain places, such as Florida, New York City, and Boston. The Republican governor of Ohio has defended the Haitian factory workers in his state, the same people who Donald Trump and J.D. Vance lied about, despicably asserting that they were eating cats and dogs.

The U.S. press is also explaining how dangerous Haiti is now, as violent gangs control much of the capital, Port-au-Prince, and are expanding their reach. Some 1.5 million people have had to flee their homes for safety, more than a tenth of the population. The situation is so perilous that the American media has understandably rarely sent journalists there. Fortunately, there are brave and skilled Haitian reporters on the scene, such as Widlore Mérancourt and Magdela Louis, who are producing chilling accounts of massacres. What’s more, the gangs are already kidnapping returning deportees, assuming, correctly, that they have more money than those who did not leave.

But the U.S. media is missing American complicity in the crisis, which should not exclusively be blamed on Donald Trump. Even when Democrats ran the State Department, U.S. policy was a growing disaster.

First, it may sound unbelievable given the grim news in recent years, but the truth is that Haitians are not a violent people. As late as 2012, the murder rate there was 6.9 per 100,000, one of the lowest in the Americas (and the same as Long Beach, California). As ex-Ambassador Foote told me: “Just look at Haitian communities here in the U.S. They are not violent.” But over the years, Haiti has been dominated by a small, selfish economic elite, which is often allied with a ruthless political class. In the past decade or so, some of that elite helped fund and arm the emerging gangs, in order to maintain their hold on power. The chronic political and economic crisis deepened, especially after President Jovenel Moise was assassinated in July 2021. The gangs have exploded in size, using powerful weapons smuggled in from Florida to outgun the beleaguered, underpaid local police. 

All the while, the U.S. State Department contributed to the deepening crisis. Outsiders may be surprised at just how prominent and powerful a political figure the U.S. ambassador is in Haiti. Haitians are politically conscious, especially in the capital, and they scrutinize the American envoy’s statements and apparent preferences as part of their political analysis. Foote says, “Everyone including the shoeshine guy pays attention.” And one U.S. ambassador after another stood behind the increasingly corrupt Haitian elite. 

Here’s just one example of blatant U.S. interference, which I witnessed firsthand in January 2016. The outgoing president, Michel Martelly, who had been a favorite of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, tried to impose his handpicked successor in scheduled elections, even though Haitian voters had been enraged by Martelly’s massive corruption. The State Department—this was still the Obama administration—tried to pressure Haitians to accept the results of the tainted balloting, and only massive street demonstrations forced the U.S. to back down, at least for a time. 

But American meddling only got worse. Starting in 2018, a popular mass movement rocked the country, as huge marches blasted government corruption and demanded that the president resign and that democracy be respected. The protesters also called for an end to U.S. engerans, the Haitian word for “interference.” Popular resistance reached a peak in November 2019, when a nationwide strike paralyzed the country for more than two months. The strike, in the Haitian language, was called “Peyi Lok” or “Country Lockdown.”

The U.S. State Department ignored the protests. Its motivations, under both the Trump and Biden administrations, are still something of a mystery. Were U.S. officials supporting Haiti’s ruling elites by instinct? In the mistaken view that those elites could maintain “stability?” Or were American officials just plain stupid?

Foote arrived in Haiti as the U.S. special envoy in July 2021. He had been stationed there 10 years earlier, so he knew his way around. He was immediately surprised to hear from his local Haitian contacts that the State Department had not been talking to them during the long political upheaval. “I was astounded to find that the Embassy had not been regularly meeting with opposition figures and members of civil society,” he told me.

He has other examples of foreign meddling. As the U.S. ambassador, he chaired meetings of the Core Group, which consisted of the major outside powers. “As the most significant foreign aid giver, the U.S. chaired the meetings,” he said. “There were of course no Haitians in the room, because heaven help us that Haitians should be allowed in to decide the future of their own country.”

Foote could see right away that the State Department wanted to impose its own choice as Haiti’s interim leader, a suspicious character named Dr. Ariel Henry. Foote, based on his previous experience, had other ideas: “I wanted to convene meetings of a broad range of Haitian civil society, so that they could among themselves devise a Haitian-led political accord that would plan a transition to holding fair elections and establishing a new government.”

It took Foote only three months to see that his efforts were doomed. In September 2021, he drafted his resignation letter to Secretary of State Anthony Blinken. That letter, which is only five paragraphs long, is an eloquent indictment of American arrogance that deserves to be widely known, and it made him a hero in Haiti. Here is part of it: “But what our Haitian friends really want, and need, is the opportunity to chart their own course, without international puppeteering and favored candidates but with genuine support for that course. I do not believe that Haiti can enjoy stability until her citizens have the dignity of freely choosing their own leaders fairly and acceptably.”

Today, Foote argues that Haiti would be better off if his recommendation had been followed: “We would have moved forward with a Haitian-led political accord,” he says, “and worked with an interim provisional government. The Haitian people might not have trusted us at the beginning, with good reason, but they could have come to trust the process. Things there would not have gotten worse. Instead, over the last few years Haiti has lost political control of the country to the gangs, which have gotten significantly more powerful because under the unpopular government that the U.S. imposed the state and the rule of law have collapsed.” 

Foote is blunt about American responsibility for Haiti’s present crisis. “We caused it,” he says. “The United States’s foreign policy caused it. We messed this up. And we’re taking no responsibility for it.”