Overview:
French authorities in Guadeloupe and French Guiana are grappling with a sharp rise in asylum claims from Haitians while continuing deportations to Cap-Haïtien. Advocates say the dual pressures have overwhelmed local asylum systems, exposed legal contradictions and deepened uncertainty for Haitian communities long rooted in France’s overseas territories.
PARIS — Authorities in the French overseas regions of Guadeloupe and French Guiana are deporting Haitians even as asylum claims from the Caribbean territories rise sharply, a convergence that immigrant advocates say is overwhelming local asylum systems and leaving long-established Haitian communities in legal limbo. According to La Cimade, a nonprofit that supports migrants, asylum seekers and refugees, officials in several French territories are struggling to manage the caseload of Haitian asylum seekers.
The combination has created administrative bottlenecks and uncertainty for tens of thousands of Haitians long rooted in the Caribbean territories, the advocates say.
“We see people who arrived as children, who built families here, facing expulsion because of a claim that is poorly defined and poorly supervised,” said Pauline Râï, who oversees La Cimade’s work in immigration detention in Guadeloupe and French Guiana.
The expulsions reflect a refusal by French authorities to reckon with the scale of Haiti’s crisis and the protections it requires, advocates say.
“We were honestly taken aback, because it’s not as if there hadn’t been warnings,” said Lucie Curet, La Cimade’s regional director for the Antilles-Guiana region. “There were alerts from many associations, calls from the U.N. refugee agency to stop removals to Haiti and even a mission by the French asylum office.”
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La Cimade has repeatedly called for an end to expulsions to Haiti and for authorities to allow Haitians to pursue asylum claims without being removed before courts have ruled, warning that returns, including via Cap-Haïtien, expose people to serious risk.
According to experts, deportations are not just a local enforcement issue but part of a wider European shift toward tougher immigration policies. Advocates say the result is a system that simultaneously recognizes Haiti’s extreme violence while removing people who have lived, worked and raised families under French jurisdiction for years.
“There is a huge unresolved question about how Haitians who will remain, who can work and access services, will integrate,” Curet said. “Right now, nothing is in place.”
Haitian expulsions ramping up
Advocates say the expulsions, called éloignements in French, restarted just before summer 2025.
“In French Guiana, 38 Haitians have been detained in the CRA since the beginning of 2025,” Râï said in a December 2025 interview.
The center’s capacity dropped to 12 beds after a fire early in 2025, which means the numbers represent only a fraction of what authorities used to detain. Still, she said 100 people have been expelled from French Guiana since summer 2025.
The detention center of Matoury in the French department of Guiana. Google Satellite.
Because French Guiana has no direct flights to Haiti, most detainees are transferred to the CRA in Guadeloupe before departure. Guadeloupe, she said, has expelled 11 Haitians so far in 2025 out of 52 detained there.
Râï emphasized that decisions increasingly turn on the French government’s broad use of menace à l’ordre public, a loosely defined allegation that someone threatens public order. Once authorities apply that label, she said, the chance of avoiding removal drops sharply, even for people with deep family ties in France.
Some Haitians are also expelled directly from assignation à résidence, or house arrest. Because those removals are not publicly reported, advocates often learn about them only through word of mouth.
“We suspect removals are happening, but prefectures do not communicate,” Râï said.
Shift in Europe falls on Caribbean territories’ backs
Marie-Laure Basilien-Gainche, a public law professor who specializes in asylum and migration policies, said the resumption of expulsions follows a subtle but significant shift at the European level. Across the continent, governments have increasingly pushed for tougher interpretations of asylum law and fewer legal constraints on deportations, a trend that has accelerated as far-right parties and hardline coalitions have gained power and reshaped migration policy debates.
For years, the European Court of Human Rights issued interim measures, emergency orders used in exceptional and urgent situations, to block returns to Haiti due to the risk of inhumane or degrading treatment. In May, however, several Council of Europe member states sent a letter urging the court to interpret the protection offered by Article 3 of the Convention more flexibly in migration cases.
“Is there a causal link? A coincidence? We don’t know,” Basilien-Gainche said.
“But since that letter, the court has stopped issuing interim measures preventing returns to Haiti. And the prefectures were delighted.”
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At the same time, she noted, French asylum judges have acknowledged that Haiti presents a level of violence whose intensity is so high that Haitians obtain subsidiary protection. To reconcile those contradictory positions, authorities have leaned on the idea of internal asylum: they started to send back Haitians to Cap-Haïtien, a city not explicitly named in asylum rulings as experiencing violence of the same intensity as Port-au-Prince.
“If we were applying the law honestly, administrations would have to verify whether someone can really travel safely from Cap-Haïtien to another region without their liberty or security being threatened by gangs,” Basilien-Gainche said. “If we’re being realistic, given the situation in Haiti, you don’t return people there.”
She added that French Guiana, like Mayotte, another French overseas department, operates under an exception to a legal regime that expands police powers and reduces procedural safeguards for migrants, making expulsions easier to carry out than in mainland France.
The sharp rise in asylum applications from Haitians does not mean more people are arriving from Haiti, Curet stressed. The surge began after a December 2023 ruling from France’s National Court of Asylum that granted automatic subsidiary protection to Haitians from three regions experiencing extreme violence: Port-au-Prince, Artibonite and the Ouest department.
Once the word spread, many Haitians already living in Guadeloupe and French Guiana reapplied for asylum, especially those who were previously denied.
“It’s normal. These are people who were already here,” Curet said. “But it was not anticipated at all by national authorities.”
Haitians in French territories, a primer
Sociologist Jean Eddy Saint Paul, founding director of the CUNY Haitian Studies Institute, says the current situation cannot be understood without looking at the longer history of Haitian migration to France’s overseas territories.
“Before the 1970s and 1980s, there were very few Haitians living in the French overseas departments,” Saint Paul said, citing the Duvalier dictatorship as one of the first major factors that drew Haitians to those territories.
Geographic proximity and cultural ties, such as a shared Creole language, made Guadeloupe, Martinique and French Guiana accessible alternatives to the U.S. As U.S. immigration policy hardened under Ronald Reagan’s presidency in the early 1980s, those French territories became more of an alternative.
Guadeloupe is about 700 miles from Haiti, while French Guiana is a short flight away, making those territories among the closest European jurisdictions to Haitian shores.
“At the beginning, many of the migrants had completed secondary education in Haiti and could use French,” Saint Paul said. “They believed integration would be easier in a francophone territory.”
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During the 1980s, Haitian konpa musicians and Antillean zouk bands such as Kassav’ performed across the region, fostering what Saint Paul described as “cultural globalization” that created a sense of shared Caribbean culture.
“These territories were then seen as less foreign,” he said. “And they were calmer, more stable politically and socially.”
Other waves of immigration followed political upheavals in Haiti: the 1991 coup that ousted President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the violence that followed, and later the 2010 earthquake and its aftermath.
“During those moments, the priority was not the destination,” Saint Paul said. “It was leaving.”
Over time, Haitians who settled in French overseas departments built social networks and helped relatives join them. Haitians in the French overseas territories live under a wide range of legal statuses. Although the same citizenship and residency laws apply as in mainland France, access to permanent status is slow and conditional, leaving many families, including those with children born locally, in long legal uncertainty.
Backlogged asylum systems leave local Haitian community in limbo
In French Guiana, asylum applications jumped from 5,000 in 2023 to 8,000 in 2024. Requests in Guadeloupe rose from roughly 700 to 1,850. As of October 2025, French Guiana had already recorded 7,500 applications. Overall, advocates are saying the trend has stabilized but not slowed.
Because French authorities failed to anticipate the surge, both territories now face unprecedented delays, Curet said. Under French law, asylum seekers must be registered within three days, extendable to 10 during periods of high demand. In French Guiana, however, registration now takes between 12 and 18 months. In Guadeloupe, the wait is closer to three months.
“It’s incomparable to anything seen in mainland France,” Curet said. “French Guiana has always been under-resourced, and now it is the department with the highest increase in Haitian protection needs.”
Source: La Cimade
Although asylum seekers are legally entitled to housing and social support, Haitians consistently receive less of both. Curet said Haitians are the most represented nationality among asylum applicants but benefit the least from accommodation and social assistance.
Stereotypes portraying Haitians as naturally resourceful or accustomed to hardship often shape decisions by local authorities, she said. In exchanges with prefectures and service providers, Curet said advocates repeatedly hear the assumption that Haitians can “manage on their own” or rely on community support.
For Haitians who arrived years ago, that often means continuing to live in the same precarious conditions they faced before seeking asylum. For more recent arrivals, informal community networks may provide some help, but Curet said those networks are limited and cannot always meet people’s needs.
Source: La Cimade
Beyond the immediate strain on the asylum system, Curet said a deeper crisis is emerging: the integration of Haitians who are now receiving protection at high rates.
In French Guiana, between 70% and 80% of applicants are granted protection, roughly double the national rate in mainland France. Most Haitians do eventually receive subsidiary protection, a stable legal status that includes the right to work and access social benefits. Yet the territory has no long-term housing centers for people who receive protection and offers only six months of social support, far less than what is available in mainland France, according to La Cimade.
“Suddenly, there’s this time bomb, this huge challenge to address this issue of how these Haitians who are destined to remain in these territories will then integrate them,” said Curet.
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