American missionaries trapped in Haiti pleaded for rescue on Tuesday, reporting constant gunfire around their hideaway and corpses rotting in the streets. The group’s leader said the only assistance they have received from the Biden administration was advice to “be safe.”
“Okay, well, that’s not really helpful,” Jill Dolan of the group Love A Neighbor said of the response she received from the U.S. Embassy when she asked for help getting her family out of Haiti.
“My fear is that we will be caught in the middle of something really dangerous. We’re already on the front lines of it; we’re in a bad area. It’s kind of depressing. The gunfire never stops,” Dolan told the New York Post on Tuesday.
Men on motorcycles drive past burning tires during a demonstration following the resignation of Prime Minister Ariel Henry in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, on March 12, 2024. (CLARENS SIFFROY/AFP via Getty Images)
Dolan and her family are holed up in a “makeshift motel” in the capital city of Port-au-Prince, where the worst battles of Haiti’s immense gang war have been fought. She and her family founded Love a Neighbor — a nonprofit missionary charity, based in Washington State — to help manage a small orphanage for children abandoned or sold by their impoverished parents.
Dolan said she was on her way out of Haiti to attend a wedding in Florida with her husband and adopted teenage children when gangs attacked the airport, causing all commercial flights to be canceled.
“We’ve contacted agencies to extract us out. They have just said, ‘It’s way too dangerous where you are; you have to stay put,’” she told CBS News on Wednesday.
An armed member of the G9 and Family gang patrols a roadblock in the Delmas 6 neighborhood of Port-au-Prince, Haiti, on March 11, 2024. (Odelyn Joseph/AP)
The Post spoke to other American missionaries and charity volunteers who said they have been trapped in various parts of Haiti — few of them as completely overrun with violent anarchy as Port-au-Prince, but nowhere in Haiti seems entirely safe.
The other missionaries also spoke of being abandoned by the Biden administration, which seemed able to do little beyond evacuating staffers from the U.S. Embassy in Port-au-Prince.
“Nobody’s reached out to us or anything. And then, of course, when we saw the non-essential workers get picked up, we were thinking, ‘Well, maybe they’re going to come back and start evacuating Port-au-Prince and then have a plane for everyone else,’” said Miriam Cinotti, who came to Haiti on a mission to rescue young women from gang violence.
“We’re worried because we’re in a country where we don’t know what’s going to happen. It’s unpredictable what’s going on; we don’t know,” said a missionary who used only her first name, Lynn.
Gang leader Jimmy “Barbecue” Cherizier with G9 federation gang members in the Delmas 3 area on February 22, 2024, in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. (Giles Clarke/Getty Images)
Lynn added that her husband is diabetic and unable to obtain medication due to the security crisis in Haiti.
A woman, named Kim Patterson, has been trying to rescue her father, 75-year-old Marine veteran Boyce Young, who arrived in Haiti on February 16 to help with humanitarian assistance. He has been making such trips to Haiti for almost a decade and thought this would be his last opportunity to pitch in and help.
“He wants to live a life with purpose, and that’s how he viewed Haiti and going to help, and I’m sure, with the Marines, it was the same thing. He wanted to live a life of purpose,” his daughter said.
Patterson said Young is currently sheltering in a relatively safe village in southwestern Haiti, but she can not find a way to get him out of the country.
Patterson, like the others, said the U.S. Embassy “was not a lot of help” in her rescue effort.
“I’m crying every day. I never in my life felt as helpless as I feel right now because I’m a woman from southeast Georgia just trying to get my dad out of a third-world country that’s in the midst of a civil war,” she said.
Then-Vice President Joe Biden eats ice cream during a visit to Little Man Ice Cream in Denver, Colorado, on July 21, 2015. (AP Photo/Brennan Linsley)
Stars and Stripes said on Tuesday that the State Department did not respond to a request for comment on Young’s plight.
Congressional Republicans are increasingly critical of Biden’s paralysis in the face of the Haitian disaster, especially since people outside of the multi-trillion-dollar administration are, once more, stepping up to arrange rescue missions, as they did following Biden’s disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan.
Rep. Mike Waltz (R-FL) said on Tuesday:
We’ve had multiple members of Congress rescuing U.S. citizens that were trapped in the West Bank and elsewhere in Israel, that were trapped in or are still trapped in Afghanistan. We have a breakdown here between the State Department and DOD [Department of Defense] in terms of having assets and resources available to go get Americans.
Another Florida Republican, Rep. Cory Mills, was able to evacuate ten Americans from an orphanage in Port-au-Prince on Monday night. Mills also organized rescue missions for Americans trapped in Afghanistan and stranded in Israel in 2021 and 2023, respectively.
“This mission reiterates a disturbing reality under President Biden’s leadership: American lives are continually jeopardized. I have led missions to rescue Americans multiple times when Joe Biden has deserted them,” Mills told Fox News on Tuesday.
“There’s a clear pattern of abandonment. Yet again, this group was left behind by Biden and his State Department after requesting their help in country,” Mills said of the people he rescued from Haiti.
Rep. Cory Mills (R-FL) (Bill Clark/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images)
“Those stranded in war-torn Haiti were left hopeless and without options. The State Department’s answer was to sign up for a notification system and wait for alerts: They offered no real assistance, no opportunities to be rescued, and no plan whatsoever,” added Rep. Lisa McClain (R-MI), who counted some of the people whom Mills recovered among her constituents.
One of those Michiganders was Detroit Free Press columnist Mitch Albom, who was able to get word to McClain on Saturday, prompting her to ask Mills for help.
“Since I was the one who asked these wonderful eight other volunteers to come help at our orphanage, I felt it my obligation to get them out safely,” said Albom, who organized the humanitarian mission, along with his wife.
“But my wife’s and my heart aches for the kids still there. Saying goodbye to them this time was horribly difficult. We pray for help in making their country safe for them again, and we will be back with them the moment it is possible,” he said.
Members of the General Security Unit of the National Palace set up a security perimeter around one of the three downtown stations after police fought off a gang attack the day before in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, on March 9, 2024. (AP Photo/Odelyn Joseph)
“Our deepest thanks to everyone who sent messages and prayers for us. We were luckier than a lot of others. Please don’t forget about them,” Albom urged.
McClain said she was thankful to Mills for his help and “infuriated that the State Department has so carelessly left so many Americans to die in Haiti.”
“We worked around the clock to do the work the Biden administration was unwilling to do, and I am eternally grateful for the heroic actions my friend Cory Mills took in traveling to Haiti and physically rescuing Michiganders that were left behind,” she said.
