A month after a spike in gang violence in the neighborhood near U.S. Embassy compounds led to the State Department’s decision to order the departure of some embassy personnel, the sounds of automatic gunfire continue to stir panic and trigger cries for help throughout Haiti’s capital.

While parts of the suburb of Tabarre, where the embassy is located, remain a no-go zone, heavily armed men now control large swaths of the hilltop Carrefour-Feuilles community, raising fears among nearby residents that they are one step closer to completely losing Port-au-Prince to armed gangs.

For months, residents prevented armed groups, which already controlled about 80% of Port-au-Prince, from expanding and tightening their grip, pushing back invasion attempts. In April, after police stopped a group of suspected gang members traveling in a vehicle in the capital, residents lynched and burned them alive.

The act provoked a chain reaction in nearby Debussy, Pacot, Canape Vert, Turgeau and Carrefour-Feuilles as residents promised to uproot gangs.

On Thursday, however, they appeared to be losing the fight. A day after Haiti National Police Director Frantz Elbé hailed police operations in Carrefour-Feuilles, saying “several bandits were killed and many firearms had been recovered,” gangs looted and burned a police substation in Savane Pistache. A poor, working class community, Savane Pistache is located in the second district of Carrefour-Feuilles.

Police’s inability to move against the gangs and maintain control is among the many challenges facing the beleaguered force, and the international community, which still has not decided whether it will support a deployment of foreign forces into Haiti and what such a deployment would look like.

“The Haitian national police continue to lose ground and officers to the gangs who threaten formerly safe areas of the capital. As I feared, gangs are seeking out those identified with the ‘Bwa Kalé’ movement and exacting horrible revenge, in one case executing a father in front of his young son and wife,” said William O’Neill, the U.N. independent expert on the situation of human rights in Haiti.

O’Neill said children continue to be recruited by gangs and sexual violence continues, with the Haitian state offering little to no support to the survivors.

“Prisons overflow, criminal investigations drag on, while impunity and corruption exert their nefarious effects on Haitian institutions and society.” he said. “How long can this go on?”

Despite the worrying security environment, the Biden administration on Thursday sent a deportation flight to Haiti, a day after the State Department told U.S. citizens to leave the country “as soon as possible.”

“This is a travesty for the United States to be sending any deportation flights to Haiti right now; it should be viewed as a human rights violation and a potential crime against humanity,” said Guerline Jozef, co-founder of the Haitian Bridge Alliance, an immigrant advocacy group in the U.S. “We cannot be asking for the evacuation of people and deporting them at the same time.”

Jozef said advocates confirmed the flight was en-route to Port-au-Prince, along with another U.S. government chartered flight, whose mission was unclear.

“We can only assume (the second flight is) going to support the evacuation of people who are of U.S. interest,” Jozef said, calling on the Biden administration to turn around the deportation flight with 66 people aboard.

“They are themselves sending people to what they believe is danger,” she said. “I don’t care who is on the plane at this point, whether its people being deported from the border or elsewhere.“

A State Department spokesperson said that the Department of Homeland Security is monitoring the situation in Haiti and coordinating closely with the State Department and international partners.

“At this time, removals of Haitian nationals encountered at our southern border and repatriation of Haitian nationals encountered at sea continue,” the spokesperson said. “Since January, more than 63,000 Haitians have been vetted and approved for travel and more than 50,000 have arrived. We encourage anyone seeking to migrate to the U.S. to do so via legal, safe pathways. Those interdicted at sea are subject to immediate repatriation, and those encountered in the United States without a legal basis to remain are subject to removal.”

Under a two-year humanitarian parole program launched by President Joe Biden in January, nationals of Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela can legally migrate to the U.S. if they have a financial sponsor and pass background checks. Among those who have left the country, are hundreds of Haiti National Police officers, sources in the country say.

The spokesperson would not comment on the second flight, saying “we do not comment on the specific details of any security or staffing adjustments.”

On Thursday, the United Nations Integrated Office in Haiti released its latest report on the security situation in Haiti. Though its reporting is between January and June, the figures provide a snapshot of the vicious cycle of violence that this weekend led to the killing of several church members when a violent gang opened fire on them as they marched into its community on the outskirts of Port-au-Prince.

The U.N. said more than 1,800 people were victims of gang-related violence in Haiti during the first six months of this year, with the number of individuals killed, injured or kidnapped rising by 14% between January and March compared to the same three months last year.

The highest number of violent incidents took place between April and May, when, after the killing of a gang leader, Carlo “Ti Makak” Petithomme, by one of his associates in the wealthy Petion-Ville enclave of Laboule, a fed-up Haitian population decided to take matters into their own hands.

Armed with machetes, gasoline and sticks, residents in Port-au-Prince neighborhoods set out with police to hunt down gang members while others formed “self-defense” groups to protect their neighborhoods. Dubbed “Bwa Kalé,” the violent movement, which soon spread across Haiti, led to “an unprecedented spike in mob lynchings,” the U.N. said.

“Lynchings ... resulted in the death of at least 238 individuals allegedly linked to gangs,” between April 24 and June 30, the U.N. reported..

Also killed during this period in gang-related violence were 13 police officers and at least 467 gang members, the majority of whom were lynched by the population. Seven people were killed in extrajudicial executions by government-appointed prosecutors in the southern cities of Les Cayes and Miragoâne.

Jean Ersnt Muscadin, the public prosecutor in Miragoâne, has declared that the Nippes, the regional department where he’s located, “is the cemetery for bandits.” He publicly engages in summary executions of presumed or suspected gang members who have been arrested, a practice both Haiti human rights advocates and the U.N. have strongly denounced.

The U.N. report, which also documents 298 nationwide kidnappings during the period, said that the west region, which includes metropolitan Port-au-Prince, accounts for most of the gang-related crimes, followed by the Artibonite Valley just to the north.

The violence, which includes gangs using rape as a way to terrorize residents, has continued despite ongoing police operations, a gang truce in July and the deaths of hundreds of gang members.

After seeing a drop in gang-related killings and kidnappings, which human rights groups credited to the brutal justice of the Bwa Kalé, Haitians are seeing an escalation in attacks.

The fresh round of attacks in Carrefour Feuilles and Tabarre has displaced thousands of Haitians who are now sleeping in public squares and at least 24 schools, according to the Ministry of Education.

“The gangs now control almost every access road in and out of the capital; they extort huge amounts of money, imposing ‘taxes and tolls’ on goods and people going through gang checkpoints which adds to the already high cost of basic necessities,” said O’Neill, adding that the situation has gotten worse since he visited Haiti in June.

During that visit, he said, Haitians told him “they live with a level of fear and terror that I cannot fathom.

“Gangs control huge sections of Haiti’s breadbasket, the Artibonite Valley which has exacerbated food insecurity. Hunger is real for many Haitian families,” he added. “People in the south shared with me their fears that the gangs will soon spread to the Grand’Anse, where basic services like medical care are already scarce. One doctor described how patients had to pay several times to reach their life-saving dialysis treatments.”

The U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said that as of last month there were nearly 200,000 Haitians who were displaced, including thousands of children.

“This violence comes as Haiti faces unprecedented humanitarian needs, with almost 5 million people, half of the population, unable to find enough to eat,” the U.N. agency said. “Prolonged drought, followed by flooding in June, have limited spring harvests, resulting in yields below the five-year average.”

The office noted too that gang activity at the Varreux oil terminal, which gangs seized for six weeks last year, and on the main roads near the port is once again risking the availability of fuel in the country.

“The oil products trade association has alerted the Minister for the Economy, pointing out that gangs’ high charges for entering and leaving the terminal are resulting in prohibitive transport costs that distributors are having to pass on to gas station prices, despite the prices set by the government, at the risk of having their stations closed. On average, the oil industry is losing two trucks a day.”

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