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      Haitian Migrant in Massachusetts Is Charged With Raping a Teenager

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      The suspect and the 15-year-old were both living in a hotel that currently serves as a migrants shelter. The charge comes amid heightened scrutiny over America’s immigration policy. A Haitian migrant has been charged with raping a 15-year-old girl at a hotel serving as a migrant shelter in Massachusetts, authorities said Thursday.Cory B. Alvarez, 26, was arrested on Thursday and pleaded not guilty at his arraignment that day in Hingham District Court on one count of aggravated rape of a child. He entered the United States lawfully in June 2023 through New York, according to James Covington, a spokesman for the Enforcement and Removal Operations unit of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Boston. But it was unclear through which specific immigration program Mr. Alvarez entered the country. The charge comes as Boston and other cities grapple with questions over migrant housing and amid intense debate across the country over America’s immigration policy. The killing of a 22-year-old woman at the University of Georgia campus in February became a political flashpoint when a Venezuelan migrant was charged with the crime, with Republicans including former President Donald J. Trump blaming the death on President Biden’s policies. Such statements have struck many liberals as inflammatory rhetoric.National data has suggested that there is not a causal connection between immigration and crime in the country, and that growth in illegal immigration does not lead to higher local crime rates. Many studies have found that immigrants are less likely than people born in the United States to commit crimes.In the Massachusetts case, both Mr. Alvarez and the teenager, who is disabled, were living at the Comfort Inn in Rockland, a Boston suburb, according to the Rockland Police. It was not clear whether the girl was also a migrant.The Comfort Inn is part of a state and federal program to house migrant families, the Plymouth County District Attorney’s Office said in a statement. There are about 7,500 families enrolled in the emergency shelter system across Massachusetts, with just under 3,900 of them in hotels or motels, according to government figures from Friday. In December, the state reported that just over 3,500 families receiving emergency assistance housing were migrants, refugees or asylum seekers. We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      America Owes a Historical Debt to Haiti

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      Despite the violence and political turmoil in Haiti, New York Times Opinion columnist Lydia Polgreen argues that this might be the tipping point that finally brings peace to that island nation. U.S. interference in Haiti has long been criticized, and in this audio essay, she says we finally have a chance to repair the damage we’ve done and help set the country back on a course toward dignity and democracy: “Just because there is this long history of failure doesn’t mean that success is not possible.”(A full transcript of this audio essay will be available within 24 hours of publication in the audio player above.)Illustration by Akshita Chandra/The New York Times; Photograph by EA/Getty ImagesThis episode of “The Opinions” was produced by Vishakha Darbha. It was edited by Kaari Pitkin. Mixing by Sonia Herrero. Original music by Sonia Herrero, Carole Sabouraud, Pat McCusker. Fact-checking by Mary Marge Locker. Special thanks to Shannon Busta.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow the New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, WhatsApp, X and Threads. More

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      A Chance for Hope in Haiti’s Latest Crisis

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      Dead bodies are rotting on the streets of Haiti’s capital, Port-au-Prince. Clean drinking water is scarce, and a cholera outbreak threatens. Hunger looms. The outgunned police force has all but disappeared.Armed groups have seized control of ports and major roads in the capital and freed inmates from jails. They shut down the airport, preventing the country’s deeply unpopular prime minister, Ariel Henry, from returning from a trip abroad, and have threatened to overrun the presidential palace. Under intense pressure from the United States and other regional powers to speed the transition to a new government, Henry agreed to resign late Monday.And now comes the hardest part: determining who will govern Haiti. Will a transitional government manage to lead that fragile nation back to stability and democracy? Or will the armed men who roam the streets and murder, kidnap and rape with impunity, along with the political and business leaders aligned with them, seize control and set off a fresh cycle of violence and criminality?I want to be hopeful and see this as a rare moment of possibility for self-determination for the Haitian people, whose country has long been a plaything of foreign powers and avaricious local elites. Much of my hope comes from having closely followed the work a collection of political, civic, business and religious groups that for the past two years have been frantically trying to forge a path for Haiti out of its disaster, demanding that Henry step aside and hand power to a transitional government that could, with help from abroad, stabilize the country and lead it back to democracy through new elections.“This is too much of a good crisis to waste,” Fritz Alphonse Jean, a former central banker who has played a pivotal role in that effort and would serve in the proposed transitional government, told me.But I am equally fearful, having seen armed groups, some of them aligned with political and business power brokers in Haiti, gathering strength as Henry clung to power with the tacit support of the United States and other regional powers. These brutal gangs have succeeded where civilians have failed: They physically blocked Henry from returning and forced his resignation. Now they threaten to seize momentum from the leaders who seek the restoration of Haitian democracy.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Haiti to Receive Another $130 Million From U.S. to Restore Order

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      The U.S. secretary of state announced more aid for the multinational security mission planned to deploy to Haiti, as well as more humanitarian aid.Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken announced Monday that the United States would provide an additional $100 million in aid toward a United Nations-backed multinational security mission planned to deploy to Haiti, which has been overrun by gang violence.He also pledged an additional $33 million in humanitarian aid, bringing the U.S. commitments to $333 million.“We can help. We can help restore a foundation of security,” Mr. Blinken said during a meeting of regional leaders held in Kingston, Jamaica. “Only the Haitian people can, and only the Haitian people should determine their own future, not anyone else.”The pledge of further U.S. aid was the highlight of a meeting that seemed to achieve little progress in reaching a political resolution as unrest in Haiti’s capital has surged in the last two weeks.Prime Minister Ariel Henry of Haiti departed for Kenya in early March to finalize an agreement for the multinational force, led by the east African nation, to deploy and take on the gangs. Since then, Mr. Henry has been stranded outside his country while gang members wreak havoc and demand his resignation.So far, the prime minister has refused to step down even as pressure grows both in his country and abroad for him to resign. Mr. Henry, who has been staying in Puerto Rico, did not attend Monday’s meeting and it was unclear if he had taken part remotely in the discussion. We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      A Humanitarian Crisis Is Rapidly Unfolding in Haiti

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      As gangs have united in concerted attacks against the state, the prime minister is stranded in Puerto Rico, and food, water, fuel and medical care are in short supply.Dr. Ronald V. LaRoche has not been able to cross into dangerous territory to inspect the hospital he runs in Haiti’s Delmas 18 neighborhood since it was ransacked by gangs last week, but a TikTok video he saw offered clues to its current condition: It was on fire.He learned from neighbors and others who dared venture into gang territory that Jude-Anne Hospital had been looted and cleared of anything of value. It was the second hospital he has had to close.“They took everything — the operating rooms, the X-rays, everything from the labs and the pharmacies,” Dr. LaRoche said. “Imagine! They are taking windows from hospitals! Doors!”Haiti is in the throes of an uprising not seen in decades. As politicians around the region scramble to hash out a diplomatic solution to a political crisis that has the prime minister, Ariel Henry, stranded in Puerto Rico and gangs attacking police stations, a humanitarian disaster is quickly escalating. The food supply is threatened, and access to water and health care has been severely curtailed.André Michel, an adviser to the prime minister, said Mr. Henry has refused to resign, and has demanded that the international community take all necessary measures to ensure his return to Haiti.The United States and Caribbean leaders have been trying to convince Mr. Henry that to continue in power is “untenable.” An international security mission led by Kenya has been stalled. The United States has offered to finance the mission, but showed little interest in sending troops of its own.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      The Wife of Haiti’s Assassinated President Is Accused in His Killing

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      Martine Moïse, the widow of President Jovenel Moïse, was charged by a Haitian judge with conspiring in his assassination. She was seriously injured in the attack.A Haitian judge has indicted 51 people for their roles in the 2021 assassination of President Jovenel Moïse, including his wife, Martine Moïse, who is accused of being an accomplice, despite being seriously wounded in the attack.A 122-page copy of the indictment by Judge Walther Voltaire that was provided to The New York Times does not accuse her of planning the killing nor does it offer any direct evidence of her involvement.Instead, it says that she and other accomplices gave statements that were contradicted by other witnesses, suggesting that they were complicit in the killing. The indictment also cites one of the main defendants in the case in custody in Haiti, who claimed that Mrs. Moïse was plotting with others to take over the presidency.The accusations echo those contained in a criminal complaint filed by a Haitian prosecutor and submitted to Mr. Voltaire. The official charge against Mrs. Moïse is conspiracy to murder.A lawyer for Mrs. Moïse, Paul Turner, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.But Mr. Turner, who is based in South Florida, had earlier denied the accusations in the criminal complaint.“She was a victim, just like her children that were there, and her husband,” he told The Times. Mr. Turner said his client is in hiding and her current location is unknown to all but a few people.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Overlooked No More: Pierre Toussaint, Philanthropist and Candidate for Sainthood

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      This article is part of Overlooked, a series of obituaries about remarkable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, went unreported in The Times.In 1849, Mary Ann Schuyler, a wealthy New Yorker, was reminded fondly of her longtime hairdresser, Pierre Toussaint, while visiting a Roman Catholic chapel in Europe. “Send my love to him,” she wrote to her sister, Hannah Farnham Sawyer Lee. “Tell him I think of him very often and never go to one of the churches of his faith without remembering my own St. Pierre.”By then, Toussaint, 68, had built a reputation as “the Vidal Sassoon of his day,” as Daniel W. Bristol Jr. wrote in “Knights of the Razor: Black Barbers in Slavery and Freedom” (2015): He had mastered the in-vogue hairstyles of the French — powdered hair, or false hair added on — as well as the newly-fashionable chignons and face-framing curls favored by the Americans.A portrait of Mary Ann Schuyler, who was one of Toussaint’s hairdressing clients. She wrote that she enjoyed their conversations as a “daily recreation.”Throughout his life, he was dedicated to the church and to others — donating to charities, helping to finance the original St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Manhattan and risking his life during epidemics to tend to the ill.In 1997, more than a hundred years after his death, Pope John Paul II proclaimed Toussaint “venerable,” the first step on the road to sainthood. Some disagreed with the move, however, because they felt Toussaint did not resist his enslavement either in Haiti or New York and was therefore a poor candidate for sainthood.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      After Help From Kenyan Police Is Blocked, Haitians Ask: What Now?

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      As Haiti sank into gang-dominated chaos, Kenya promised to send officers to pacify the streets. Now a court has rejected that plan, and there does not seem to be another.Gangs have taken over entire neighborhoods in Haiti’s capital, and killings have more than doubled in the past year, but for the organizers of the Port-au-Prince Jazz Festival, the show simply had to go on.So while judges an ocean away deliberated whether to send a contingent of officers to pacify Haiti’s violence-riddled streets, festival organizers made do by shortening the length of the event to four days from eight, moving the acts from a public stage to a restricted hotel venue and replacing the handful of artists who canceled.As 11.5 million Haitians struggle to feed their families and ride the bus or go to work because they fear becoming the victims of gunmen or kidnappers, they also are pushing forward, struggling to reclaim a safe sense of routine — whether or not that comes with the assistance of international soldiers.“We need something normal,” said Miléna Sandler, the executive director of the Haiti Jazz Foundation, whose festival is taking place this weekend in Port-au-Prince, the capital. “We need elections.”A Kenyan court on Friday blocked a plan to deploy 1,000 Kenyan police officers to Haiti, the key element of a multinational force meant to help stabilize a nation besieged by murders, kidnappings and gang violence.Haiti, the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, has sunk deeper into turmoil in the nearly three years since the president was assassinated. The terms of all mayors in the country ended almost four years ago, and the prime minister is deeply unpopular largely because he was appointed, not elected, and has been unable to restore order.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More