The boat came closer to land and the people aboard waded through shallow water to reach the shore, where Crean said some “scattered into the mangroves” but were located and detained.
Crean said 90 men, 22 women and 10 children were held near the beach for processing by U.S. Customs and Border Protection. One man and one child were taken to a nearby medical facility to be treated for dehydration. People on board told police they had been on the sailboat for seven days.
Despite fears of a surge of migrants to Florida from Haiti in response to ongoing violence there, numbers of such incidents are down significantly from past years.
Last year, thousands of migrants from Haiti and Cuba were stopped at sea as they tried to reach Florida.
“The Coast Guard and our Homeland Security Task Force Southeast partners have not observed an increase in unlawful maritime migration compared to historical trends,” Coast Guard spokesman Nicholas Strasburg said.
Strasburg said the Coast Guard interdicted and repatriated 1,800 Haitian migrants and 6,618 Cuban migrants during fiscal 2023.
The numbers for the current fiscal year, which started last October, show a marked decrease, with 294 Haitians and 422 Cuban repatriated thus far.
The migrants who landed in Key West on Wednesday were transferred to U.S. Border Patrol facilities in the Keys and Broward County.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) deployed more than 250 state guard and other law enforcement officers in March to patrol the waters around the Keys “in anticipation of a potential influx of illegal immigrant from Haiti.”
The state also established a $20 million “base camp” in the Keys to house the officers and equipment DeSantis sent to the area last year.
“When a state faces the possibility of invasion, it has the right and duty to defend its territory and people. Under Governor Ron DeSantis, Florida will act,” the governor’s office said in a news release in March announcing more resources for “Operation Vigilant Safety.”
Officers from that group were part of the response to Wednesday’s migrant landing, a spokeswoman for Florida’s Division of Emergency Management said in an email.
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