More than 100 Haitian migrants landed in southern Florida Tuesday on board a sailing boat, the latest in a wave of migration to the southern US state, local media said.
The boat had left northwest Haiti on Friday, said one of the passengers quoted by the Miami Herald.
The US Border Patrol confirmed on Twitter that “a sailing vessel involving a large number of migrants made landfall” in Key Largo, about 70 miles (110 kilometers) south of Miami, without specifying their nationality.
The Miami Herald reported there were more than a hundred people on board, while NBC Miami put the number at around 200.
The Florida Keys, an archipelago off the southern tip of the state, have received hundreds of migrants in recent days, mostly Cubans.
Since Saturday, at least 460 Cubans have disembarked on the Keys, according to a statement from the sheriff’s office, which described the current situation as a “mass migration crisis.”
The arrival of about 300 of them at the Dry Tortugas National Park in the Keys led the authorities to close the nature reserve until further notice starting Monday.
Haiti, the poorest country in the Americas, has been mired in an economic, political, and security crisis for years, aggravated by the assassination of President Jovenel Moise in 2021 and the growing influence of criminal gangs.
Cuba, for its part, is experiencing its worst economic crisis since the 1990s. The shortage of food and medicine, as well as a lack of hope about the future, have caused hundreds of thousands of people to leave for the United States in the last year, seen as the largest exodus in the island’s history.
