The worsening crisis in Haiti has leaders in South Florida’s large Haitian American community alarmed and searching for solutions that never seem to come.
“Every day in Haiti people are being murdered, are being raped, killed. Houses, properties are being set ablaze in total impunity. This is what Haiti is living today,” Frandley Julien said Monday. “This is the most severe crisis Haiti has seen in more than 100 years.”
It’s so bad, Julien said, that every morning when he wakes up he immediately checks WhatsApp “to make sure that everybody is still alive.” His father lives in Haiti.
Julien, who regularly appears on Haitian radio and television, is a former prosecutor who practices law in North Miami Beach, which has a large Haitian American community.
“When the phone rings from Haiti, we hesitate before we pick up,” Julien said Monday in a video news conference, explaining that was not unique to him, but the “experience of everybody in the Haitian community.”
State Rep. Marie Woodson, D-Hollywood, who was born in Haiti and has relatives there, said people are going hungry because the gang-fueled violence is so pervasive they can’t leave their homes to get food.
Others have been thrown out of their homes by gangs, and forced to live on the street, she said.
“The situation in Haiti really weighs on my heart. It’s also deeply frustrating,” she said. “I feel helpless.” The U.S. and the rest of the international community, she added, “cannot afford to turn a blind eye to Haiti anymore.”
Julien and Woodson appeared with former U.S. Rep. Debbie Mucarsel-Powell, a Democrat running against U.S. Sen. Rick Scott, R-Fla.
It’s an issue that hits close to home for many in Florida where, Woodson estimated, the Haitian community numbers about 500,000, most of whom she said are first-generation Americans who, like her children, were born in the U.S.
Besides his family ties to Haiti, Julien sees the results in his practice as an immigration attorney. One client recently told him that “it’s better to be undocumented (in the United States) than dead (in Haiti),” Julien said.
Woodson called for compassion to people who flee Haiti and make it to Florida.
“These are human beings. Those are mothers, those are fathers. They are not fleeing Haiti just because you want to leave Haiti,” she said. “If it was your family or anybody else who were in this situation, you would use compassion, you would reach out and see how you can help instead of just standing by to send them back to what they are leaving.”
*Story originally appeared in the South Florida Sun Sentinel.
