Coast Guard stops overloaded Haitian migrant boat off Bahamas
3 min readThe U.S. Coastline Guard stopped an overloaded sailboat with practically 180 folks crammed on its deck off the Bahamas Sunday night.
The 179 people were very first sighted by a Coast Guard air crew all over 11 p.m. sailing about 30 miles off Andros Island, the company explained.
Two cutters, the Self confidence and the Harriet Lane, stopped the vessel and took the men and women on board. The Coastline Guard said they have been transferred to the custody of the Royal Bahamian Protection Force on Tuesday.
The federal authorities tracks maritime migration by the fiscal yr, beginning and ending Oct. 1. If the figures of Haitian migrants stopped at sea go on on their current trajectory, fiscal year 2022 will surpass final fiscal year, which observed the most men and women interdicted by the Coast Guard because FY 2019.
Because Oct, the Coast Guard stopped 993 Haitian migrants headed to Florida, in contrast to 1,527 in all of fiscal yr 2021. In fiscal calendar year 2020, the Coast Guard only encountered 418 persons from Haiti at sea.
The Coast Guard is also seeing a surge in Cuban migrants on the Florida Straits, the most given that fiscal year 2017. Specialists level to deteriorating financial and political circumstances inside each nations.
Sunday’s halt also continues a development of Haitians boarding overloaded sailboats as a migration suggests. In January, a team of 176 men and women were being stopped in close proximity to the exclusive gated north Important Largo group of Ocean Reef.
On Christmas Eve, the Border Patrol took 52 men and women from Haiti into custody following their sailboat arrived off a distant two-lane freeway around Ocean Reef termed Card Sound Highway. In November, 63 Haitian migrants also arrived on a sailboat in just about the same spot off Card Sound Highway.
The Coastline Guard Tuesday issued a assertion urging migrants from both Cuba and Haiti not to danger their lives attempting to migrate to the States on such journeys. Not only is it extremely unsafe, migrants are very likely to be returned to their homelands if caught.
“The likelihood of a successful migration voyage is lower, and when these voyages are stopped, people really should anticipate to be returned to their country of origin,” Lt. Vladimir Jimenez, legislation enforcement duty officer with the Seventh Coastline Guard District command middle, reported.
This story was initially posted March 1, 2022 4:56 PM.
David Goodhue addresses the Florida Keys and South Florida for FLKeysNews.com and the Miami Herald. In advance of becoming a member of the Herald, he coated Congress, the Environmental Protection Company and the Division of Electricity in Washington, D.C. He is a graduate of the University of Delaware.
