Betania Dominique and Ener Montimar left Haiti nearly a year ago for a better life, a journey that eventually led them to a migrant camp next to the Rio Grande in Texas to await US immigration processing.
On Sunday, Montimar, 42, was summoned by US border officials to board a bus leaving the site, his wife said.
She has not heard from him since.
Photo: AFP
Dominique, 43, now fears that her husband of 10 years has been sent back to their crisis-stricken homeland.
The camp under the border bridge in Del Rio, Texas, became a gathering point for as many as 14,000 migrants in the past few days, mostly from Haiti.
Many — like Dominique and her husband — came from as far as Chile.
US authorities have since Sunday taken 4,000 migrants from the Del Rio camp to detention for processing and sent at least several hundred back to Haiti on flights.
“When he left, a relative called me and said to go back to Mexico... They’re deporting everyone under the bridge,” Dominique said, after wading back through the Rio Grande to join a fast-growing camp on the Mexican side.
Haitian authorities said that Montimar was not on the list of passengers flown back to Haiti on Sunday or Monday.
Reuters could not immediately confirm if Montimar was set to leave on one of the four flights to Haiti scheduled for Tuesday or if he had been taken to a detention center.
Dominique’s last few calls to Montimar went unanswered.
A WhatsApp message asking in Haitian Creole: “Love, how are you?” received no reply.
Her eyes welled with tears as she showed a photograph of Montimar in an orange sweatshirt, smiling confidently.
The two set off about a year ago from Jacmel, a coastal colonial town in southern Haiti that has struggled to recover from a 2010 earthquake, making jobs scarce.
They sent their son to live with Dominique’s brother in the neighboring Dominican Republic while a daughter in Haiti studied pediatrics until money ran out, Dominique said.
The couple lived in Chile for a few months, but said that they had struggled to find work and pay rent.
They sold some land in Haiti to finance the trip on foot and by bus to the US, Dominique said.
The trip took them across 11 countries and the treacherous jungle of the Darien Gap — one of Latin America’s last wildernesses — on the Isthmus of Panama, the gateway to Central America.
The last time Dominique saw her husband, they talked about their children.
They did not want to return to Haiti, she said.
“Almost every day there’s a storm; there’s an earthquake. We don’t have a president; we don’t have a real government,” Dominique said. “What are we going to do with our kids?”
Dominique said she plans to seek work in Mexico until she and her husband can reunite, perhaps somewhere else in Latin America.
“We have nothing in Haiti,” Dominique said.
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