How U.S. Aid Cuts Are Affecting Haiti

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti—At 19, Emmanuel was caring for three siblings when he was forced last year to join Viv Ansanm, a coalition of gangs that controls large swaths of Port-au-Prince. Their father had left Haiti for Brazil to find work, and Emmanuel had been waiting for the promise of a job at a livestock program run by Sakala, a local youth development organization in the capital’s densely populated Cité Soleil neighborhood.

“We lost him because he couldn’t wait any longer,” Daniel Tillias, the co-founder of Sakala, told the New Humanitarian and Foreign Policy, adding that Emmanuel—whose name has been changed for security reasons—has since fled Viv Ansanm and gone into hiding.

Sakala is among many organizations in Haiti that lost U.S. funding last year and are struggling to continue their programs aimed at tackling the impact of rising gang violence through peace and development initiatives.

Before U.S. President Donald Trump came back to office in January 2025, U.S. funding made up more than 65 percent of humanitarian aid in Haiti, where 6 million people—out of a population of nearly 12 million—are currently in need of assistance.

In January 2025, one of Trump’s executive orders suspended new foreign assistance and set in motion the dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). The following month, a separate order gutted the Inter-American Foundation (IAF), and by March, Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced that the administration was cancelling 83 percent of USAID’s programs worldwide. In Haiti, the freeze halted roughly 80 percent of U.S.-funded programs, according to OCHA, the United Nations’ emergency aid coordination body. Many of these were vital for families to get by and for violence-prevention programming in neighborhoods where armed groups recruit.

Armed groups now control 90 percent of Port-au-Prince and continue to expand in neighboring departments such as Artibonite. Nearly 1.5 million people in Haiti have been internally displaced, food insecurity affects more than half of the population, and insecurity disrupts every aspect of daily life. Like Emmanuel, a rising number of children and young people have been left without access to education or job opportunities, and therefore with no other choice than to join gangs for the survival of their families.

According to UNICEF, the number of children recruited into armed groups tripled in 2025 compared with the previous year, and they now make up half of all Haitian gang members.

While cuts did not create Haiti’s gang recruitment crisis, they gutted the programming designed to keep young people out of the armed groups: job training, income support, education, and community mediation.

“USAID helped manage Haiti’s problems,” said Christine Sainvil, the chief growth officer of Papyrus S.A., a Haitian firm that has helped more than 300 local organizations qualify for the agency’s funding. Its dismantling “has created a level of desperation that pushes people to default to an easy solution.”

For Tillias, recruitment is straightforward: Gangs take in the kids who can’t earn money or find support elsewhere. Sakala’s tuition assistance, tutoring, sports, and small agricultural jobs existed to fill those gaps. Now, Tillias said, “without USAID support, all you have left is the rule of the ganglord.”

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Only 7.6 percent of USAID’s Haiti spending since late 2023 reached local organizations directly, but it paid salaries and kept programs running in neighborhoods the state had abandoned—initiatives that children and communities depended on.

Isabelle Clérié, a Haitian anthropologist and transitional justice expert, said these jobs and programming were the only social services available in some places. The loss of them left more ground for armed groups and “aggravated an already complicated situation.” In Cité Soleil, for instance, gangs have foundations providing basic public infrastructure “because they understand that it’s them or nobody,” she added.

According to a report published by Church World Service following Trump’s executive order, the IAF cut some $10 million across 27 grants in Haiti, leading to more than 80,000 Haitians losing access to locally led development programs. USAID canceled a five-year program for conflict, peace, and security, as well as agriculture and livelihood development projects involving both international and local organizations.

Among them was the Haiti Citizen Security Program, a $24 million effort overseen by Tetra Tech that funded local peacebuilding organizations. The entire five-year program cost less than 2.5 percent of the $1 billion the United States says it has already spent supporting security in Haiti in recent years. The freeze also halted $1.4 million to Papyrus S.A.

“All [local organizations] have been impacted in some form or another,” Sainvil said. “A lot of us are in limbo because we … were still owed money, or reimbursement of all of the funds that were disbursed.”

For Lakou Lapè, one of the organizations that was supported by the Haiti Citizen Security Program, the shift has been debilitating. It was running five programs—one funded at $1.2 million annually—when the stop-work order came. It gave up its offices.

Before the cuts, Jean-Gilles Bernard Camille, an independent peace facilitator who had to flee his neighborhood at the start of 2026 due to gang violence, conducted trauma trainings and organized psychosocial support and peace committees at Lakou Lapè. He sat down with everyone from private-sector figures to armed group leaders. In neighborhoods hit by armed violence and drone strikes, he said that some residents who might otherwise have joined armed groups out of revenge decided not to because they remembered the trainings.

Camille, among other peace facilitators, used to manage upward of 10 sessions a month; he hasn’t led a single dialogue session since the end of 2025. The Haiti-based Institute for Research and Action for Peace (IRAP) hoped to hire the facilitators full-time, but the cuts mean they can now only offer them occasional session work at $120 a day.

Louis-Henri Mars, a board member and special advisor at IRAP, summed up the importance of USAID funding by saying it allowed organizations such as IRAP to bring people from all sectors of Haitian society into dialogue with each other. “When that stops, then we have to go back to square one and start again,” he said.

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Initially, he would bring bullets to one of the coalition’s leaders, Jeff Larose (better known as Kanaran), and walk the streets with other gang members, stopping cars to ask for money. He also watched over kidnapped civilians. In exchange, he was fed twice a day. But then, he was given a new assignment.

“One day, they brought in a young man who had stolen a gun from a gang member. … They told me it was my job to kill him; I had no choice, so I killed him with my handgun,” Jean said. “I killed four people,” he added. “When I did it, I felt like my heart was being ripped out.”

Whether recruited willingly or by force, teenagers usually remain at the bases to do odd jobs, undergo initiation, and be used as cannon fodder in shootouts with the police. While they are being fully indoctrinated into the mindset of the armed groups, they are guarded by their elders and cannot escape. Eventually, they are used as informants or to throw Molotov cocktails at police vehicles.

Some time later, while Viv Ansanm held a large party, Jean managed to slip out and hid in the streets until he came across a police officer who took him to a transit center run by the state agency responsible for reintegrating children from armed groups, the Institut du Bien-Être Social et de Recherches (IBESR).

The procedure followed a protocol signed in October 2023 by the Haitian government and the U.N. to require that children encountered in armed groups during security operations be treated primarily as victims and handed over to child protection authorities.

In the future, Jean hopes to earn money laying tiles. “To stop young people from joining gangs, you have to talk to them and warn them,” he said.

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Yvenel Louis is the president of the management committee of a displacement site set up at Club International, a former nightclub that now holds 455 families. He and his neighbors from Pernier, a violence-ridden suburb on the outskirts of Port-au-Prince, have been displaced three times in two years. The last time was on the night of July 11, 2025, when armed groups overran their camp, and he guided residents out by megaphone at 11 p.m., including children and people with disabilities.

As president of the camp, Louis, who is 29, has overseen several mediation and humanitarian programs. He said their loss will be felt for years. Children see armed men commanding respect, he explained, “and they 1787148999 won’t find anyone to tell them that’s not the right path.”

Gamania Ceide, a facilitator who works alongside Camille, also believes that peacebuilding programs make a real difference.

She recalled a case involving a young man from the Tokyo neighborhood who had been through their conflict-management trainings at Lakou Lapè. When Tokyo burned for the second time, his house went down with his mother inside; armed groups offered him weapons for revenge, but he refused. “He always says if it weren’t for the training he received, he doesn’t know what would have happened after his mother’s death,” Ceide said.

Preventive programs, including education and vocational training that give displaced adolescents something to do, have been the most affected by the cuts, according to Geetanjali Narayan, UNICEF’s representative in Haiti. Those USAID-funded courses taught skills such as bicycle repair and hairstyling and offered “a little bit of normalcy,” she said.

UNICEF has patched some of the gaps left by USAID with other donors, but 79 percent of its roughly $257 million humanitarian appeal for Haiti remained unfunded, as of June 30. Without such alternatives, a young person concludes, “Let me go join the armed groups. Why not? I have nothing else here,” Narayan added.

The IBESR, which runs one transit center in Port-au-Prince and has a larger one planned for Les Cayes to accommodate 600 to 1,000 children, is likely to be directly affected by UNICEF’s shrinking budget, as it depends on the agency and community organizations for access to gang-controlled neighborhoods.

The impact of the cuts also extends to work upstream of the violence that seeks to fight food insecurity.

Hunger and desperation are powerful drivers of gang recruitment. People in displacement centers often face starvation—conditions that fuel vulnerability to armed groups. The majority of children in gangs don’t have parents who earn enough to care for them. “Some are joining to find enough to eat,” Camille said.

Gael Pressoir, an agronomist who founded the Haitian research institute Chibas, was midway through several USAID-funded projects when the agency was dismantled, including an innovation lab run with U.S. universities that was willing to back long-term agricultural research. No country, he argued, has built wealth without first modernizing its agriculture, and Haiti imports more calories than it produces. “If we want to do peacebuilding in Haiti, we better be investing in our agriculture sector,” he said.

Mercy Corps, a global humanitarian aid nonprofit, saw its peacebuilding most affected, along with livelihood initiatives that stabilized family incomes through agricultural work. Globally, the organization shut down 43 of its 60 U.S.-funded programs.

Some organizations have turned to the EU to try to fill the funding gap, but it is also granting less money, said Melodie Cerin, the grants director for the Ayiti Community Trust and grants manager for the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime.

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It is not the first international attempt to solve Haiti’s security crisis by force: U.N. troops arrested and imprisoned gang members after the 2004 coup d’état to oust President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, but the root problems went unresolved, and armed groups now have more recruits than ever.

Compounding the issue is the state’s own limited peacebuilding infrastructure, said Clérié, the Haitian anthropologist. Following the first coup against Aristide in 1991, a government truth commission was formed but failed due to lack of political will and funding.

A government truth commission reestablished in 2024 “was stillborn,” Clérié said, while a national commission for disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration was created but given no funding. Under pressure to deliver, the commission put out banners in March urging armed groups to lay down their weapons, with no steps to follow and a phone number that didn’t work.

“Nobody trusts the government,” Clérié said. “Nobody believes justice is possible.”

For anthropologist Jessica Hsu—the lead analyst for the Center for Operational Analysis and Research and head of research, advocacy, and learning for Roots of Development—lasting solutions must come from pursuing transitional justice to address the roots of the country’s protracted conflict. Transitional justice is a set of processes that seeks to address both past and ongoing violence, repair harm to victims, strengthen accountability, and reform the institutions and conditions that let abuse recur.

“This is about building a hyper-local civil society and replicating that in every single community,” she said. “This is the horizontal accountability that nobody ever talks about, because it’s always vertical up until the donor.”

But according to Clérié, the government’s prevailing narrative is to just kill all the gang members. This is the logic behind the security force the United States is funding, and it is what the peacebuilding and livelihood programs are working against, she explained.

“It’s the dehumanization of not just the gang members, but the communities and everything they’ve suffered through,” Clérié said. “They don’t feel human. … The gang members themselves say, ‘We are devils.’ They’re like, ‘We’re here to die—so who cares?’”

Clérié leads community dialogues on transitional justice. In one session with 100 displaced women, Clérié asked the group to operationalize the demand to “kill them all.” With whose guns? Whose bullets? Who digs a hole big enough for the bodies of Haiti’s estimated 10,000 gang members? Then she asked who was in the 10,000: Half are children, boys the women had watched grow up. Soon, the room was debating how the boys might be reintegrated. “In 20 minutes, we dismantled ‘kill them all,’” she said.

Without that work, she said, “we’re going to just keep repeating the cycle, because we’re not actually going to dismantle the thing that is at the root of all of this.”

This article is a co-publication with the New Humanitarian, a newsroom that puts quality and independent journalism at the service of the millions of people affected by humanitarian crises around the world. Find out more at www.thenewhumanitarian.org.