After gang members burned down a relative’s home in 2018, Jerry, 33, fled the danger of his native Haiti and has been trying to reach a stable life in the United States ever since.
He lived in Chile until he left this summer, riding buses with his wife, Admoline, 25, and their 2-year-old daughter, Amandjie, along the well-worn roads that wind through Bolivia and Peru. They hiked the Darién Gap, a remote strip of jungle and treacherous streams that connects Colombia and Panama.
On foot or by bus they continued northward through Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Honduras, Guatemala, and Mexico — all the way to the edge of Texas, where, after they turned themselves in to US immigration agents, they waited and slept alongside other migrants, without blankets or shelter, under an old bridge spanning the border.
“It was difficult, traumatic,” Jerry said of the saga that eventually led him and his family to a friend’s home in Mattapan. He asked that only their first names be used for fear of US immigration authorities.
And yet, their journey isn’t over.
They are among 600 Haitian families who have arrived in Massachusetts since March as political, economic, and social conditions in Haiti have continued to deteriorate. The humanitarian crisis has been acutely felt in the state, home to roughly 46,000 Haitians and Haitian Americans, many concentrated in the Boston area — the third-largest Haitian diaspora population in the country behind Brooklyn, N.Y., and Miami.
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