Walls full of bullet holes and police in “full armor” were among the sights that greeted a group of U.S. House lawmakers who recently traveled to Port-au-Prince, Haiti, a city that has been ravaged by gang rule since the July 2021 assassination of its former president.
“The gangs will essentially block the streets with rubble, with debris, they’ll dig giant ditches in the road, and so these military and police units can’t traverse,” House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Brian Mast, R-Fla., told Fox News Digital. “Some of these areas are like Afghanistan, and it is probably the poorest place I’ve ever been through in my life.”
Mast led a group of bipartisan members of Congress on a trip to Venezuela and Haiti recently, which he said was the first congressional delegation in either country in a decade.
In Haiti, they were hosted by the country’s prime minister, whose palace “a year ago, would have been a war zone,” Mast said. “They have been actively working to take back land across the breadth of Port-au-Prince.”
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But while he saw signs of slow improvement thanks to an international coalition of forces as well as a U.S. paramilitary group run by Erik Prince, Mast said the realities of gang violence were ever-present.
A video he was shown, for example, depicted Haitian gang torture of a heavy machinery operator helping police clear gang-made blockages in the city streets.
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“They took this guy who was this equipment operator, and for working with the police, they kidnapped his family. And then they told him they’ll trade his family for him. He turned himself over,” Mast said.
“They brutally killed him. I mean it’s all on video. They cut off his ears, fed him his own ears… Then they hacked at him for probably at least five minutes with machetes. His limbs looked like a Christmas tree afterwards, with just bone and skin and other things coming off of him, until ultimately they killed him. That is who these gangs are.”
And it’s not just adult allies of the local police forces suffering from gang violence, according to the Florida Republican. Another chilling incident Mast said he became aware of while in Haiti was the kidnapping of a 6-year-old U.S. citizen by a local gang who he said may have committed sexual crimes against her.
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“There was a 6-year-old American citizen girl. I don’t want to say that she was raped, but there were health issues that led to believe that she was also raped, as a 6-year-old girl, by these gangs,” Mast said. “It appears as though we were able to secure the release yesterday.”
He said there was ultimately an “agreement” on the ransom money the girl’s family would pay after she had been held hostage for at least 46 days.
“It appears as though we were able to get an exchange finally made yesterday. But again, it’s just another example of who these gangs are and the forces that are being brought to bear, to bring them to heel,” Mast said.
A State Department spokesperson told Fox News Digital that the administration has no higher priority than the safety and security of Americans, and that it was aware of reports of an American child kidnapped for ransom in Haiti but would not provide further details out of respect for the family’s privacy.
Beyond the current level of assistance, however, Mast said he doubted there was more the U.S. could do to help the country as a whole.
“This started with political people starting gangs there for their own benefit. And most of the politicians there are beyond guilty of pillaging their own country instead of doing something good for their country. That’s how Haiti is in the state that it’s in,” he said.
It comes as thousands of Haitians in the U.S. are facing a potential return to their home country after the Trump administration ended their temporary protected status (TPS) that was first granted after an earthquake in 2010.
Mast argued, however, that the return of those Haitians who did not get permanent residency in those 16 years could potentially help bolster security there.
“One of the big things would be to take the able-bodied males and put them into the police and military, which are actively recruiting, which were so decimated by the TPS taking place in the first place,” he said. “All of these people took the chance to say ‘Okay, I’m leaving,’ and it left their forces that are supposed to protect the country essentially with no forces, which is one of the other parts of how the gangs came to be.”
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