Who Was on Thursday's Plane: 50 People Who Had Been Living on TPS, a Green Card Holder, and a 3-Year-Old American

A charter plane left Alexandria, Louisiana on Thursday morning and landed at Cap-Haïtien at 7:05 p.m., seven hours late, in heavy rain, after Haiti’s government offices had closed for the day. We have written about that flight twice on this site — about the passenger list that grew by more than two dozen names while the plane sat in Florida, and about the envelope of 10,000 gourdes each person was handed at the migration office inside the airport grounds. What we did not have until this morning was the answer to the question a reader in Springfield or Brooklyn or Miami actually wants answered: who was on it.

HaitiLibre published that answer on Saturday morning, citing Haitian officials. According to its reporting, the group included 50 people who had been living in the United States under Temporary Protected Status, 15 who came in through the humanitarian parole program created under the Biden administration, an unspecified number of asylum seekers, one green card holder, and two small boys — one aged 6, born in Brazil, and one aged 3, a United States citizen.

That is not who most people picture when they hear the word “deportation.” It is a plane substantially full of people who had done the paperwork.

What is verified, and what is one outlet’s reporting

This site tries hard to keep those two categories apart, because a frightened family acts on what it reads here.

Verified, from multiple sources: the flight existed, it was Global X flight 6122, it left Alexandria, Louisiana, it was due into Cap-Haïtien at 12:22 p.m., it finally left Opa-locka at 5:10 p.m. and landed at 7:05 p.m. Haiti’s National Migration Office had been told to prepare for 71 people and learned at the airport that the number would be higher. The people aboard were bused to the migration office, fed, given back their own documents, belongings and medicines, and handed an envelope of 10,000 gourdes — about 76 U.S. dollars at this week’s rate.

One outlet’s reporting, printed here as such: the breakdown above. No U.S. agency has published a list of who was on that plane, and HaitiLibre is the only outlet carrying these numbers. We are printing them because they come from a named source, they are consistent with everything else verified about the flight, and they matter enormously to our readers — but they are HaitiLibre’s reporting, not the record.

Numbers that do not agree, and must not be added up: Haiti’s migration office was told to prepare for 71. It was then told to expect 98. Rezo Nòdwès, which had a reporter at the airport, counted 82 — 71 men, nine women and two children. Three different figures, three different sources, one flight. Nobody official has published a final count, and until someone does, this page will keep printing all three with the name of whoever counted them attached.

”More than half a day, hands and feet bound”

On Friday, GARR — the Support Group for Repatriates and Refugees, a Haitian organization that works with people sent back to the country — issued a statement calling the conditions of the removal inhumane. The people on the plane, it said, went through “hell,” spending more than half a day with their hands and feet bound. The Miami Herald put the time in restraints at more than thirteen hours, not counting the flight itself.

The arrival was equally improvised. Jean Négot Bonheur Delva, who runs Haiti’s migration office, said his staff did not leave the airport until after 2 a.m. — the office’s normal working day ends at 4 p.m. He also said something that deserves attention from any family here with someone in detention: the office had planned to raise the payment handed to each arriving person from about $80 to $200, and could not do it, because dozens of names were added to this flight at the last minute and the budget did not stretch.

Read that alongside the envelope of about $76 that Rezo Nòdwès watched being handed out, and one conclusion is unavoidable: the money at the other end of that flight is not a plan. It is bus fare from Cap-Haïtien to wherever a person actually lives, on a good day, and this was not a good day.

Ohio: hundreds of clergy, one letter, and no change

On Friday, hundreds of clergy members delivered a letter to Gov. Mike DeWine’s office in Columbus. They gathered at Trinity Episcopal Church, walked across the street to the Statehouse, and carried the letter to the governor’s office in the Riffe Center. It asks him to use his influence to end the ankle monitor program, to get ICE to stop operating in Springfield, to seek the release of detainees including Pastor Joubert Adrien, and to press Ohio’s members of Congress to work toward restoring TPS.

One detail from that press conference belongs in front of every reader wearing a monitor. The Rev. Julia Joyce-Miesse of Granville, who accompanied two Haitian neighbors to their ICE check-ins, said one of them later sent her photographs of the blisters and open wounds his ankle monitor left after he wore work boots over it.

And here is the part this site is obliged to say plainly, because saying anything else would be a kindness that costs people money and time: a letter is a request, not a change. Hundreds of signatures do not move your check-in date. An Ohio congressman asked DHS to stop the monitors on Sept. 3; the monitors are still on. Nothing about anyone’s status is different today because this letter was delivered. The report of it carries no response from the governor’s office.

What has not changed

• TPS for Haiti and Syria is terminated, effective July 27, 2026. USCIS’s own page, stamped 09/09/2026, still says so. The work permits that came with it expired the same day.
• Losing TPS is not a deportation order. It is not an instruction to leave, and it is not a finding that you have no case. People in exactly this position win relief through other routes every week.
• No new TPS notice has published for any country since Sept. 1. We check the Federal Register’s documents and public-inspection feeds every single run. The only TPS item in there right now is a routine renewal of the paperwork for Form I-821 — it changes no country’s designation, nobody’s eligibility, and no deadline.
• Your rights at the door and in the car are unchanged. You do not have to open the door without a judicial warrant. You do not have to answer questions about where you were born or how you entered. You can say you want a lawyer and then stop talking.

Two things to finish this week

1. If you have a child who is a U.S. citizen, settle the question now — with a lawyer, and in writing. A citizen child cannot be deported. But a parent who is being removed can be asked to decide, in a few minutes at a counter, whether that child goes too. That is not a decision to make standing up, at speed, in a building where nobody is on your side. Decide it at your own kitchen table, name the person who takes the child, and write it down. Our family plan walks through it, and it takes about fifteen minutes.

2. Write down the A-number, the lawyer’s number and the pickup plan, and give a copy to somebody outside your household. Every flight story on this page has the same hole in the middle of it: the people at the far end did not know who was coming, and the families here did not know their person had gone. The emergency kit and find someone detained pages exist for exactly that gap.

If an ankle monitor is cutting or blistering your skin, photograph it the same day, tell your lawyer, and raise it at your next check-in. If you have a letter telling you to report, keep the appointment and read this first — and talk to a lawyer before the date on it. If you need a lawyer and do not have one, start at help.