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As the FBI investigates three incidents of U.S. commercial airliners being fired upon departing Haiti and the FAA orders a 30-day ground stop, nonprofit leaders are up in arms about the Biden administration’s overall response.
Jack Brewer, a retired New York Giants safety who runs the Jack Brewer Foundation, said in a Thursday interview the halt to civil aviation is a drop in the bucket compared to what President Joe Biden can and should do against "terrorists" attacking U.S. citizens.
Brewer’s foundation has helped build churches, help in the medical realm and minister to underserved populations in Haiti and East Africa. In the states, the Jack Brewer Foundation’s major focus is on the fatherlessness epidemic he said particularly glaring in the Black community.
Brewer said he and his foundation are a consistent presence in Haiti, arriving regularly at Toussaint Louverture International Airport in Port-au-Prince where the jets have been targeted.
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"We’ve also had some tragedy -- we've had some unfortunate deaths," he said, describing how the head of one of his schools was murdered and parents and children either kidnapped, attacked or burned alive by the gangs that have taken over their half of the island shared with the Dominican Republic since Haitian President Jovenel Moise was assassinated.
"They give FAA ground-stops for verbal threats… you don’t do FAA ground-stops when your planes are getting shot in the sky – you do military action," he said, adding the FAA shouldn’t be the main agency for such a high-level threat.
A JetBlue flight bound for JFK, an American Airlines plane bound for Miami and, most recently, last Monday, a Spirit Airlines flight that attempted to land in Port-au-Prince but rerouted to Santo Domingo, were all found to have been hit by gunfire.
Brewer said the Biden administration is content to fight proxy wars in Ukraine and elsewhere, but not against a nation-state 90 minutes away from its shores where Americans are being maimed.
"If we really want to say we stand for democracy… then what are we doing in Haiti?"
He also criticized the Congressional Black Caucus for what he saw as relative silence against attacks on Americans, and in a global sense, an extremely dangerous environment for Black people.
"They’ll talk about Black Lives Matter and cops and all these other scenarios, but when you have this the first independent Black nation in the world that's in utter chaos. And we're going to sit back here and do nothing about it. It's a slap in the face as a Black man," he said.
"And it should be a sign to all of the American people just how these Democrats on the left and their woke politics is nothing about except for themselves. If they can't raise money for it, where it doesn't benefit them politically, they stay out of it."
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In recent public actions, the CBC’s subset House Haitian Caucus held a news conference in September condemning hate against Haiti.
CBC members Reps. Ayanna Pressley, D-Mass., Yvette Clarke, D-N.Y., and Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick, D-Fla., in May, spoke on Capitol Hill to call for federal action against the Haiti crisis.
Cherfilus-McCormick, considered the first Haitian-American in Congress, said Haiti is a "facing a political crisis of epidemic proportions with its people calling out for refuge."
"The increasing violent gang activity and attacks on commercial airlines in Haiti have further destabilized the island, putting the Haitian people at greater risk and underscored the need for a comprehensive humanitarian response from the United States," Clarke, Pressley and Cherfilus-McCormick said in separate statement Friday.
"[W]e renew our call for the Biden-Harris administration to immediately halt all deportations, further combat illicit arms trafficking, and deliver the humanitarian assistance needed in Haiti."
The three congresswomen are co-chairs of the House Haiti Caucus.
Brewer, however, said Biden had eight years to better address Haiti, including after Moise was killed in 2021 and the ensuing migrant surge.
Brewer said he believes Trump is the right man to properly address the situation and that he should immediately sanction the country and appoint a "Frederick Douglass"-like ambassador instead of career civil servants to hold public officials there accountable.
"I would give them 24 hours. I tell all those gang members, whether it's ‘Barbecue’ or whomever, all the gang members: just know you've got 24 hours to throw your guns in [or have] the U.S. military in there and smoke them all out."
JP Decker, head of Mercury One – a charity that does similar work in Haiti – told Fox News Digital the group is trying to help an American family get their adopted daughter out of Haiti amid the chaos.
"This [FAA] decision has left many families in a state of uncertainty and has delayed the opportunity for many children to start their new lives with their adoptive families," he said, calling on the feds to work with international partners to reopen the airspace and quell the threat.
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Victor Marx, who leads the Haitian orphanage organization All Things Possible, said the feds had not acted to "stabilize the situation and protect innocent lives before it reached this critical point."
"Whatever support or assistance the United States might offer at this point must come with accountability," he said. "Trust me, no one trusts that government. I would urge the U.S. to work through private organizations to bypass the government and bring stability to the region."
A representative for the FAA said it is responsible for the safety of civil aviation operations, and that it indeed issued a "NOTAM" prohibiting flight within 10,000 feet above Haitian airspace for 30 days. The representative further directed Fox News Digital to the Pentagon.
Fox News Digital reached out to the White House and Pentagon. The CBC declined comment.
