Haiti’s gang crisis is no longer confined to a handful of neighborhoods in Port-au-Prince, but many of us remain unaware of how bad the problem on the island truly is.
The gang consortia control major roads, commercial passages and entire communities, while expanding deeper into rural areas and other parts of the country. They have attacked police stations, prisons, hospitals and pillaged neighborhoods as well as carried out kidnappings, massacres, cattle theft and burned homes, all while using military-style weapons to seize territory.
The humanitarian toll has been colossal.
More than 5,600 people were reported killed amid violence in Haiti in 2024, according to Amnesty International, which also reports that as much as half of the country’s population faced acute hunger, while children continued to be recruited and exploited by armed groups.
By 2025, nearly 6,000 people had died in gang violence, while approximately 1.4 million people had been displaced from their homes and the island’s criminal groups were operating in five of Haiti’s 10 departments, according to Human Rights Watch researcher Nathalye Cotrino.
“The violence is definitely spreading,” Cotrino noted.
Despite the gang activity spilling into rural areas, Port-au-Prince is still being terrorized by the gangs.
The U.N.’s report found that gang violence in just two Port-au-Prince neighborhoods killed at least 613 people and injured another 375 over a four-and-a-half-month period ending July 31. More than one-third of those killed or wounded were not affiliated with gangs, including 111 women and 77 children, while more than 176 women and girls were raped by gang members, often as punishment against residents of areas controlled by rival groups. In contrast, more than 18,000 people were forced from their homes.
Gangs once operated largely as fragmented neighborhood groups. However, over the past decade, they have formed more extensive criminal coalitions which are capable of coordinating attacks and controlling territory, posing a major challenge to Haiti’s already enfeebled government.
Armed groups have controlled an estimated 80% to 90% of Port-au-Prince, while increasing their presence in the Artibonite and Central departments as well as controlling critical routes connecting the capital with northern and southern Haiti and roads leading toward the Dominican Republic— these routes are extremely valuable.
Gangs extort trucks, buses, businesses and maritime traffic moving through the areas they control, meaning they can easily regulate who enters or leaves certain communities, extort commercial vehicles, and use the same transportation networks to move weapons and other contraband.
“There’s been a big increase of gangs fighting for control of key roads and junctions,” William O’Neill, the United Nations expert on human rights in Haiti, said. “Why? Because they’re money-making.” O’Neill also described the routes as “hugely remunerative and strategically important.”
The violence tied to that territorial expansion has been brutal.
In March, armed members of the Gran Grif gang attacked Jean-Denis in Haiti’s Artibonite region. At least 70 civilians were killed, according to reporting based on videos, photographs, satellite imagery and witness testimony.
Speaking to The Guardian, Merçide Daniel shared that five members of her family were killed.
“I had never seen anything like this before,” said Daniel. “It was a massacre.”
Pierre Espérance, executive director of Haiti’s National Human Rights Defence Network, said armed groups have terrorized communities outside the capital as their reach has grown.
“They are kidnapping people. They are burning churches and schools, they are burning houses with people inside them,” Espérance said via Amnesty International. “They are massacring, killing, raping.”
For civilians, escape has become increasingly difficult as major roads are dangerous due to their neighborhoods becoming battlefields for the lawless. Hospitals and clinics have been attacked or forced to close. Medical workers have been killed and kidnapped and families fleeing armed groups have packed into displacement sites that lack sufficient food, water, sanitation and medical care.
Amnesty International reported that 1 million people had already been displaced by early 2025, half of them children. About 5.4 million people were living with acute hunger.
“There is no life in Haiti,” Espérance explained. “The people have been abandoned.”
Haiti does not manufacture firearms on an industrial scale, yet gangs have somehow managed to acquired assault rifles, high-caliber weapons and ammunition capable of overpowering police units. Since 2021, the United Nations has documented an increase in military-style and high-caliber weapons entering Haiti—weapons used by gangs include AK-47s, AR-15-style rifles and, increasingly, .50-caliber rifles.
Many of the illegal firearms entering Haiti are believed to originate in the U.S.—the very country sending the island’s refugees home. The weapons have been used in sniper attacks, kidnappings, prison assaults, mass lootings and coordinated operations to capture new territory.
The flow of weapons may also be hard to stop as Haiti has long land and maritime borders, numerous ports, irregular roads and several clandestine airstrips. Police and customs agencies are already struggling with limited staffing and resources and cannot adequately monitor every shipment or route.
Drugs also move through the country.
Haiti is primarily considered a transit point for cocaine and cannabis moving toward North American and European markets. Cocaine shipments can arrive through remote airstrips or by sea before being moved through other Caribbean routes. While there is not yet judicially established evidence directly connecting Haitian gangs to cocaine trafficking through arrests or seizures involving gang members. However, some gang leaders and affiliates have publicly claimed to profit from the drug trade.
Haiti’s Central Financial Intelligence Unit has also identified “smurfing,” the practice of breaking large amounts of illicit money into smaller transactions to reduce the likelihood of detection. The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime has been working with Haitian authorities to strengthen border security, intelligence operations and anti-corruption investigations.
One of Haiti’s most notorious gang leaders is Jimmy “Barbecue” Chérizier, a key figure in the powerful Viv Ansanm coalition whose Delmas 6 stronghold has repeatedly been targeted by Haitian security forces.
In January 2026, security forces destroyed at least two homes belonging to Chérizier during an operation that included an explosive drone strike, according to a Haitian government source cited by the Miami Herald. Video from the area showed a large building erupting in an explosion as smoke rose over the neighborhood. Police, members of Haiti’s armed forces and private military contractors have intensified operations against gangs in the capital, forcing some Viv Ansanm members and leaders to retreat from territory near downtown Port-au-Prince.
Authorities said the more expansive operations led to the seizure of at least 33 firearms, including automatic rifles, along with more than 12,200 rounds of ammunition. Chérizier’s whereabouts were unknown following the strike. In August 2025, the U.S. indicted Barbecue for conspiracy to violate U.S. sanctions.
“Cherizier and a U.S. associate sought to raise funds in the United States to bankroll Cherizier’s violent criminal enterprise, which is driving a security crisis in Haiti,” said Assistant Attorney General for National Security John A. Eisenberg. “The National Security Division does not tolerate criminal gang fundraising in the United States, and will continue to pursue those who enable Haiti’s violence and instability.”
That reality has also heightened questions about the treatment of Haitians seeking protection in the United States.
The U.S. government warns its own citizens against traveling to Haiti because of the kidnappings, the violent crime as well as the country’s political instability and severely limited emergency services. Still, the U.S. has deported Haitians back to the country and ended immigration protections that have allowed hundreds of thousands of Haitians to remain in the U.S. under Temporary Protected Status (TPS). These protections are especially important for Haitians because the designation allowed eligible immigrants to safely remain in the country. However, in July, the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services officially terminated TPS for Haiti.
The United Nations refugee agency urged governments not to forcibly return people to Haiti and has warned that people sent back could face serious threats to their lives and safety and the agency has also called for Haitians seeking protection to receive access to fair asylum procedures.
Under Trump’s “regime”, that is unlikely to happen.
How can Haitian immigrants be forced back to a country where gangs control major roads, neighborhoods and commercial routes, where more than a million people have been displaced, where families are being massacred and where the United States itself warns Americans not to travel?
The question becomes even more pressing because many of the firearms fueling Haiti’s gang crisis originate outside the country, including from the U.S.
