At least 17 Haitian migrants were killed when their boat to Miami, Florida, capsized Sunday off the coast of the Bahamas, authorities revealed.
The 30-foot, twin-engine speedboat was carrying as many as 60 people when it went under, though only 25 have been rescued, leaving upward of 15 still missing. The dangerous voyage was part of “a suspected human smuggling operation,” Bahamian Prime Minister Philip Davis said at a press conference Saturday afternoon.
The U.S. Coast Guard is assisting with the search for those still unaccounted for.
CUBAN AND HAITIAN MIGRANTS SETTING SAIL TO FLORIDA BORDER AT ALARMING RATES
Bahamian Police Commissioner Clayton Fernander said the dead include 15 women, one man, and an infant. Those rescued alive were taken for medical observation by health workers.
Rescuers found the sunken boat about 7 miles from New Providence at about 1 a.m. Sunday but weren’t able to conduct a rescue mission for about seven hours. They heard knocking at the time from underneath the hull, which turned out to be a female passenger who was still alive and trapped in an air pocket.
“At daylight, we were able to recover the boat,” Fernander said. “The hull of the boat was the same color blue of the sea, so it was difficult at nighttime to identify the vessel in the water. It was submerged in the water.”
Two men were taken into custody, the police commissioner said. The suspects were known to police for other criminal matters and could face manslaughter charges.
The Biden administration’s undoing of former President Donald Trump’s border policies prompted a flood of Central American and Mexican migrants to reach the southern border. Central Americans looking for refuge from the Northern Triangle countries — Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras — have often been manipulated by human smuggling operations, which publicized those policy moves to push a narrative that the border was open.
A thousand miles from the U.S.-Mexico border, though, federal law enforcement and military that patrol the waters surrounding Florida and Puerto Rico are seeing the emergence of a new border crisis.
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As record numbers of Cubans and Haitians attempt to cross the southern land border illegally, others are increasingly taking to the sea. Department of Homeland Security authorities with the Coast Guard told the Washington Examiner their personnel are interdicting more migrants at sea than ever before.
A Coast Guard spokesperson pointed to socioeconomic problems in both countries as a reason migrants choose to flee but added that the agency has warned against the risks involved in traversing the seas in unsafe vessels without life jackets. It is also a violation of federal law.
The Coast Guard encounters migrants packed into shoddy vessels in such places as the Florida Keys, South Beach in Miami, and off the Puerto Rico coast daily. Others who made landfall or swam ashore are taken into custody by Border Patrol.
