U.S. lawmakers want mandatory sanctions, reporting on Haiti as gang violence worsens

Miami Herald

22-05-2025

A bipartisan group of U.S. Senators wants to mandate sanctions against supporters of Haiti's criminal gangs and is pushing the State Department to provide a list of the country's most prominent gangs and their leaders — along with a report on the connections between the gangs and the Caribbean nation's political and economic elites.
The Haiti Criminal Collusion Transparency Act of 2025 was filed in the Senate on Thursday amid growing concerns about Haiti's escalating security crisis, which is fueling horrific crimes, including rape, murders and kidnapping. The violence has led to 5.7 million people — more than half the country's population — struggling to find food to eat and more than 1 million people being internally displaced.
The bill was introduced in the Senate by New Hampshire Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and co-signed by Sens. Rick Scott, R-Florida, Tim Kaine, D-Virginia, John Curtis, R-Utah, and Chris Coons, D-Connecticut. A House version of the bill was introduced and passed out of the House Foreign Affairs Committee last month. It was led by ranking Democrat Gregory Meeks of New York.
Last week, Shaheen wrote to Secretary of State Marco Rubio, calling on him to address the humanitarian and democratic governance crises in Haiti. The letter laid out recommendations for U.S.-Haiti policy, including strengthening support for the Multinational Security Support mission, using strategic sanctions against Haitian armed criminal actors and their political and economic enablers, and making efforts to target illicit arms-trafficking networks.
While testifying before both Senate and House committees this week, Rubio said an inter-agency review is currently taking place to come up with options for addressing Haiti's crisis. He suggested that the anti-gang effort, currently being led by Kenya after the United Nations-authorized a multinational security, should be replaced by the Organization of American States, or OAS.
The proposed legislation reflects the current limitations of U.S. efforts to tackle the gang crisis, supporters say. For instance, while the Biden administration issued several sanctions against former Haitian politicians and former parliamentarians, they were mostly cancellations of visas, which under U.S. law are kept private.
Also, the sanctions are not mandatory and members of Congress say they have a blind spot on who major gang leaders are, and their enablers.
Under the legislation, the State Department's sanction authorities would now be mandatory rather than discretionary. The bill also requires that the interagency prioritize resources to sanction such individuals.
The State Department, in coordination with other federal agencies and the intelligence community, would also be required to provide Congress with an explicit list of all known gang leaders and political and economic elites who have direct and significant ties to gang networks. If the legislation passes, the State Department would also be required to provide an assessment of threats to U.S. national interests and democratic governance in the country.
The bill does not include specific funding for implementation, but it's expected that the State would dedicate additional resources.
Resources, however, remain a huge challenge. U.S. intelligence capabilities on the ground in Haiti have been significantly reduced, with the State Department issuing several evacuation orders for staff and the Drug Enforcement Administration targeting its office in Port-au-Prince for closure.
Organization of American States
On Thursday, experts at a discussion on Haiti at the OAS headquarters were told that in addition to gangs' control of up to 90% of the Haitian capital and significant parts of its Artibonite region and some municipalities in the Central Plateau region, the Haitian territory was serving multiple functions in the global drug trade.
'Haiti has increasingly become a preferred transit route for cocaine moving from South America to North America and Europe,' Gaston Schulmeister, director of the Department against Transnational Organized Crime of the Secretariat for Multidimensional Security, said. 'But equally concerning is Haiti's immersions as a transit route for precursor chemicals used also for drug production. Haiti has also become both a source and a transit country for human trafficking victims.'
The country's security and governance challenges were further laid out by its officials including Haiti Transitional Presidential Counselor member Smith Augustin and the defense and justice ministers who flew to Washington for the discussion, 'Finding Urgent Solutions for the Haiti Crisis.'
'We must be clear, the challenges facing Haiti will not be resolved through symbolic gestures. They demand effective cooperation. They demand new additional financial resources, new additional human resources, new additional material resources,' outgoing OAS Secretary General Luis Almagro said. 'They need a strategic investment and a shared vision rooted in democratic values and human rights.'
The country needed the help of its partners, Haiti's Justice Minister Patrick Pélissier said. He detailed how gangs had destroyed dozens of police stations and all of the country's jails in the metropolitan Port-au-Prince area, forcing them to house some of the 8,000 inmates in a rehabilitation facility that also included children.
'What is the consequence to the legal branch? Since 2018 we haven't seen any trials for those crimes in the' West region because the court is in the territory occupied by the gangs, he said, later telling the room that its words need to be transformed into actions.
The crisis, Defense Minister Jean Michel Moïse said, is not just a Haitian one. 'Haiti's stability threatens the entire region, because arm and drug trafficking know no borders,' he said. 'Like the firearms, the drugs are not originating from Haiti, nor are they consumed by Haitians.'
Haiti, he warned, is on the brink of being fully controlled by gangs.
'It is so frustrating that the gangs are so well armed and they have easy access to militarized weapons and ammunition, and the legal entities in Haiti, the army, the police, face challenges in acquiring weapons,' Moïse said.
Moïse noted that the country has restrictions such as the U.S.'s Leahy Law, which restricts access to weapons by Haiti's armed forces. 'We would like to see our good friend, the United States, lift this restriction,' he said, noting that the army only has about 1,000 individuals, who are ill-equipped and ill-trained to carry out urban warfare.
After a preliminary panel, diplomats from several member and observer countries offered up comments about the deteriorating crisis. None, however, addressed Rubio's suggestion that the crisis should be led by the OAS given its role as a hemispheric body. Instead, there were calls for more support for the mission, with a representative for Kenya appealing for more forces that can fight and forward operating bases in order to expand the mission beyond its current 1,000 personnel.
During the conference, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Barbara Feinstein addressed recent efforts by the Trump administration to designate Haiti's major gangs as foreign and global terrorists. But she also called for the need for more accountability from Haiti's transitional government, which has been dogged by corruption scandals and faces possibly a third transition with elections increasingly looking out of reach this year.
'We intend to use these new authorities within our country to decisively take action against those that are providing material support and we believe that this is a critical part,' Feinstein said.
But that alone will be insufficient, she noted, stressing that the U.S. needs a stronger security response including financial assistance from foreign partners and efforts by Haitian leaders to combat endemic corruption.
'Corruption erodes trust and the effectiveness of any security or governance strategy, including efforts to restore democratic order through through free and fair elections,' she said. 'The United States condemns the actions of those who commit abuses of office, including illicit public enrichment work with terrorist organizations and those who participate in arms and ammunition trafficking. This permissiveness only continues to fuel gang violence and complicates the resolution of this dangerous situation.'