Trump Says Bahamian Hurricane Refugees Could Be Gang Members Or Drug Dealers #HurricaneDorian #Bahamas
Hurricane Dorian may not have hit the U.S. East Coast as hard as many feared, but it decimated The Bahamas, leaving tens of thousands homeless. On Sunday, over 100 of the displaced were instructed to disembark a rescue ferry bound for Florida because they didn’t possess U.S. visas. Customs and Border Protection has been unable to offer an adequate explanation for why this happened, as visas are not required for Bahamians traveling to the U.S.
President Donald J. Trump defended on Monday the policy requiring Bahamian evacuees to have U.S. visas by claiming without evidence that “gang members” and “drug dealers” were trying to get into the country with the evacuees.
When asked about the debarking incident, Trump said the U.S. needs to be careful about allowing Bahamians into the country following Hurricane Dorian. “I don’t want to allow people that weren’t supposed to be [in the Bahamas],” he said, adding that among the refugees could be “very bad people and some very bad gang members and some very very bad drug dealers.”
It’s unclear what role the Trump administration played in the refugees’ removal from the ferry.
According to Brian Entin of Miami’s WSVN News, who was on the ferry Sunday and documented the chaos following the announcement, passengers were initially told they would be allowed to enter the United States, and only needed to possess a Bahamian passport and clean police record, per CBP policy. A day earlier, a cruise ship arriving at the Port of West Palm Beach carried nearly 1,500 refugees, all of whom were processed. But this was not the case on Sunday.
CBP officials in Florida blamed the ferry company, Balearia. “If they worked with us, we would have been there to facilitate that process,” an official told Entin. “We would have made sure that everyone was properly documented. … Why they said that, I don’t know. It’s really heartbreaking for them to say that to these people who have suffered beyond comprehension.”
But members of the ferry’s crew told Entin that CBP told Balearia that passengers without visas would not be admitted to the United States. Balearia did not immediately return a request for comment. An official statement from CBP did not offer specifics about what the agency communicated to Balearia, stating vaguely that “CBP was notified of a vessel preparing to embark an unknown number of passengers in Freeport and requested that the operator of the vessel coordinate with U.S. and Bahamian government officials.”
Former congressman and 2020 presidential candidate Beto O’Rourke responded to the news that displaced Bahamians had been removed from the ferry by criticizing the Trump administration. “This is the height of cruelty — denying help to those who need it most,” wrote O’Rourke. “This administration has said the words on the Statue of Liberty should be rewritten, and in their actions, they are already changing who we are as a country. It’s on us to prove we’re better than this.”
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