Immigrants from Haiti, who breached the U.S.-Mexico border fence, line up to be processed by U.S. Border Patrol May 20, 2022 in Yuma, Arizona.
Mario Tama/Getty Images/Getty Images North America
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Mario Tama/Getty Images/Getty Images North America
As often happens in the world of immigration, the news first spread on social networks. On TikTok and Facebook, Haitians posted videos of themselves fleeing the country by plane.
And not just any planes, but on charter planes, whose sole purpose seems to be to help people migrate.
In New Jersey, Pierre avidly watched video after video. He and his wife fled Haiti in 2016 after his father survived an assassination attempt, leaving their three children behind.
They had been trying to find them ever since, and these thefts represented an opportunity. In September 2023, Pierre decides that the risk is worth it. He paid nearly $8,000 for his children, ages 10, 13 and 18, to take a charter flight from Haiti to Nicaragua.
They traveled with an acquaintance and, once there, traveled on foot, by bus and by car to the US border. Once in the United States, they would seek asylum.
“Everyone, my fellow Haitians, was talking about planes and enjoying them,” he said. “The price was high, but we had no choice.” NPR is not identifying Pierre by his full name because he fears speaking out could harm his asylum application, which remains unresolved.
Nicaragua as a landing strip to the United States
Pierre’s children are among hundreds of thousands of migrants who have used charter planes since 2022 to reach the United States, according to immigration analysts. These migrants arrive by plane in Nicaragua and, from there, head north.
The Biden administration accuses these charter companies of collaborating with global human trafficking networks and is taking steps to crack down on them and their leaders.
“These charter companies work with criminal organizations. Often, they are part of criminal organizations,” says Blas Nuñez-Neto, deputy aide to President Biden and senior advisor for migration and southwest border coordination.
He says some migrants pay up to $70,000 for the trip from their home countries to the United States, with much of the money going to charter companies.
Nuñez-Neto also claims that Nicaragua knowingly serves as a launching pad for migrants trying to reach the United States.
“Nicaragua’s authoritarian regime has essentially become a human trafficking entity in itself,” says Nuñez-Neto.
Nicaragua does not intend for migrants to stay in the country, he said, noting that the government requires most of them to leave within 96 hours.
The Nicaraguan government has not responded to NPR’s repeated attempts to address allegations that it facilitates human trafficking. In a recent speech, Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega accused the United States to engage in a war against migrants.
Migration as political retaliation
The phenomenon of migrants taking charter planes began in late 2021 when Nicaragua removed its visa requirements for Cubans. The following year, tens of thousands of Cubans traveled to Nicaragua and, from there, paid smugglers to help them make their way to the U.S. border.
Analysts say charter flights serve two purposes for the Nicaraguan government: They bring in millions of dollars in revenue through landing fees, airport taxes and hotel stays, and serve as retaliation against the United States. United States, which imposed economic sanctions on Nicaragua due to political repression. .
“Nicaragua realized that this was a way – to use that term – of weaponizing migration. Basically, using migration as a way to directly attack the United States by sending thousands of migrants,” says Manuel Orozo, director of the Migration, Remittances and Development program at the Inter-American Dialogue, a Washington-based think tank.
During a six-month period last year, Orozco counted more than 14 daily flights from Haiti, mostly A320 planes, seating between 140 and 170 passengers. While most of the migrants who took charter flights to Nicaragua came from Haiti and Cuba, some also came from faraway countries like India and Mauritania.
Orozco says the charter companies that facilitate their trips tend to be small, with fleets of fewer than 20 planes, and are based around the world, including Libya and Romania.
Adam Isaacson, a migration analyst at the Washington Office on Latin America, says “enterprising” travel agencies have fueled the surge of migrants taking charter planes. Travel agencies rented – and sometimes owned – the charter planes, then sold tickets to migrants for thousands of dollars.
The journey carried risks for migrants as the Biden administration made it more difficult to seek asylum at the border.
“But if you come from the other side of the planet, these travel agencies can still promise you that you will enter the United States and you can stay there because the United States does not have the capacity to do that . deport you,” Isaacson says of the messages aimed at people wanting to reach the United States.
Travel agencies are “really on a blurry line between travel agency and smuggling operation,” he says.
American reaction
U.S. officials have watched with concern the growing number of charter flights to Nicaragua. As the Biden administration attempts to stem the unprecedented flow of migrants reaching the U.S. border, charter flights pose a huge problem, largely because there was no obvious solution to cracking down on flights outside of American airspace.
Additionally, because migrants were legally allowed to enter Nicaragua, there was nothing the Biden administration could do to stop them from purchasing plane tickets to that country.
Instead, the Biden administration has sought workarounds. At the end of 2023, she convinced Haiti to impose a total ban on charter flights to Nicaragua.
The administration also revoked the visas of many charter company executives, but declined to say how many visas it revoked or provide the names of the executives.
These measures nevertheless seem to have had an impact since the number of charter flights to Nicaragua has decreased in recent months.
“In this space you can never declare victory, so we certainly don’t. But we are cautiously optimistic that what we are doing has worked and will continue to work,” says Nuñez-Neto, Biden’s senior adviser on migration.
For Pierre, the Haitian father, charter flights were a lifeline.
He was reunited with his children in July, at his New Jersey home, after nearly a decade apart. He estimates they spent up to $30,000 on their trip to the United States.
His children’s lives were more important than money, he said, adding that even if he had to spend more to bring them to the United States, he would have done so.
