Bahamas repatriates 62 Haitians as Immigration warns of removals

The Bahamas Department of Immigration carried out coordinated repatriation operations yesterday, sending 62 Haitian nationals back to their home country alongside separate removal exercises for undocumented Dominican and Chinese citizens, though authorities have not publicly disclosed the exact number of Dominican and Chinese individuals processed in the latest round.
The recently repatriated Haitian cohort comprises 51 adult men and 11 adult women, and the operation marks the latest entry in a sustained series of targeted removal actions targeting people residing in the Bahamas without valid legal status throughout 2025. Chedville “Chad” Adams, Acting Assistant Director of Immigration with oversight for operational divisions, delivered a stern public advisory to all undocumented persons remaining within the country’s borders, outlining severe consequences for anyone who fails to regularize their immigration status voluntarily. “Any individual without formal legal residency or valid immigration status in the Commonwealth of The Bahamas faces full enforcement action including arrest, formal prosecution, mandatory deportation, and a permanent or extended bar on re-entering the national territory at any point in the future,” Adams emphasized during a public briefing on the operations.
This year’s removal track record stretches back to the immediate aftermath of the May 12 general election, when immigration authorities chartered a Bahamasair flight on May 15 to repatriate 107 Haitian nationals to Cap-Haïtien, a group that included 22 women and five underage minors. Officials confirmed that the vast majority of that cohort had either overstayed their original permitted visitor or resident window, while the remainder had been apprehended after making unauthorized, unapproved landings on Bahamian soil. Subsequent monthly operations have ramped up in scale: 114 Haitian citizens were repatriated in June, followed by a flight on August 27 that carried 116 Haitian nationals (79 men, 33 women and four minors) to the northern Haitian hub. In September, a two-phase operation moved 184 Haitian detainees home, with a Bahamasair flight departing New Providence with 29 detainees before collecting an additional 71 people from the Inagua detention facility to carry 100 passengers on the first leg of the journey.
The shift to routing all deportation flights to Cap-Haïtien instead of Haiti’s capital Port-au-Prince comes against the backdrop of a catastrophic security collapse in Haiti, where armed criminal gangs now control an estimated 70% of the capital’s metropolitan area. Port-au-Prince’s main international airport has been deemed far too high-risk for regular commercial and state-chartered deportation flights, forcing regional governments to redirect all repatriation traffic to the more stable northern coastal city. The Bahamas is not the only regional state accelerating these enforcement actions: the United States has also dramatically scaled up its own deportation flows to Haiti, after terminating Temporary Protected Status protections that had shielded roughly 350,000 Haitian migrants residing in the U.S. from removal. Washington launched its first post-termination deportation flight on August 20 carrying more than 160 Haitian nationals, and within a matter of weeks shifted from a previously monthly flight schedule to weekly repatriation runs to process undocumented Haitian residents.
Official statistics submitted to the Bahamian Parliament show that the country repatriated a total of 2,910 foreign nationals across 2024, 2,196 of whom were Haitian citizens. For the 11-month period leading up to June 2025, total operating costs for the national repatriation program have already exceeded $1.5 million, as immigration authorities continue to prioritize enforcement of domestic immigration rules amid sustained cross-border irregular migration pressures.