Puerto Rico’s labor movement is demanding answers after word spread about the horrific murders of four Haitian women recently deported from the island.
The women, aged 27 to 31, were found slain near the Haiti-Dominican Republic border. The Associated Press reported on February 2 that Dominican police discovered their bodies in the Elías Piña area and were investigating the murder of at least one of the women, which they believed could be tied to a single person.
Dominican police think all the murders were committed by gangs in Haiti who kidnap returned deportees and demand ransom from their families. The AP said, “[I]nvestigators believe the women were killed and then thrown into a river that swept the bodies away and deposited them where they were later found.”
Members of the SPT (Sindicato Puertorriqueño de Trabajadores), a Puerto Rican union connected to the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), say they are disgusted by the case and are calling for changes to Puerto Rico’s immigration policy. In a public statement, the SPT said, “The governor and any other official cooperating with ICE must be held accountable for actions that may have contributed to this devastating tragedy.
“Our people take pride in their solidarity and welcoming culture. Our neighbors, our Dominican, Haitian, Latin American, and other sisters and brothers from around the world who live, work, and build Puerto Rico every day, are not foreigners. These four women were integral to our communities and society, and today we deeply feel their loss. Our duty was to protect them and ensure their safety, not to send them into danger.”
News of the murders came after an increase in immigration enforcement actions in Puerto Rico. On January 26, 2025, ICE agents conducted raids there after Gov. Jenniffer González-Colón’s administration gave the agency the names and addresses of 6,000 people who had received driver’s licenses under a 2013 law that was meant to help undocumented residents.
Israel Marrero Calderín, president of the SPT and an international vice president of the SEIU, told the AmNews that the government’s actions were a betrayal of Puerto Rico’s core values.
“We don’t really know these women personally, but it hit close to home as soon as we heard about it,” Marrero said regarding the victims. “Obviously, this is outrageous, it’s outrageous, and for us, it really represents a moral wound for Puerto Rico and for all Puerto Ricans, because we cannot accept that government decisions are disconnected from human consequences.
“That’s why it’s outrageous,” he continued. “The deaths of these girls, these women, are not just numbers; they are lives that are lost, and an ethical response, not a political one, is our demand. And we, as Puerto Ricans, as U.S. citizens, who have been discriminated against in the United States itself because of our race, because we are Latino, understand perfectly what is happening to all these people who are being deported …, and even more so with these Haitian women, when we see that the U.S. government itself is asking its citizens not to travel to Cuba because of crime and terrorism, the unrest there, yet here, in a crude, crude way and following government instructions, they are doing something tragic to these women.”
Marrero emphasized that the Puerto Rican state is being used to conduct these deportations. “We cannot confirm that the police are helping, but the state has been helping,” he noted. “For example, here the Department of Transportation and Public Works regulates the entire driver’s license process. At one point, immigrants without U.S. citizenship were authorized to obtain a driver’s license. It was a special license to operate motor vehicles, and the government took that list and gave it to ICE. ICE began visiting people’s homes to report them, so there is undoubtedly cooperation between the government and ICE. Even though we see the police conducting the raids, we know for sure that they are collaborating.”
Sanctuary and solidarity
Fritznel D. Octave, the Haitian Times’ Haiti editor, explained that violence in Haiti remains severe and chaos in Port-au-Prince has made on-the-ground reporting about such cases difficult. He said it was challenging trying to find information about the four women’s murders in the local media.
Octave pointed to the work of groups like Group for Refugees and Repatriated People (GARR) and the International Organization for Migration (IOM), who try to assist the hundreds of people arriving in Haiti on deportation flights. “It’s always been challenging, even though you have those organizations down there in Haiti … they lack things to really help, especially when the deportation becomes as massive as it is: over 100, 200, 300 at a time,” he explained.
For the SPT, the urgency to confront politicians who would participate in these deportations is both a political and a humanitarian must. Marrero argued that the Haitian community is now a vital part of Puerto Rico’s economy, often taking on jobs in sectors like construction that are hard to fill.
“SPT will continue to guide and support as many immigrants as we can,” Marrero vowed. “We are going to continue to participate in activities that denounce and put an end to this discrimination and these insensitive deportations. We will continue to collaborate with our international organization on these processes and will continue to guide people to participate in protest and denunciation activities to stop this deportation and prevent the government from continuing to collaborate with ICE. This is a critical message, and we are also educating people about the importance of politics and the right to vote. We cannot go back to being blind; we have to become politically active to support candidates who are against all these policies and who, on the contrary, guarantee a better coexistence for all these people. It is also an educational process we are undergoing, and it serves as an option for those who vote blindly or refuse to vote.”
The SPT supports calls for Puerto Rico to be recognized as a sanctuary state; it wants an end to the González-Colón administration’s backing of the Trump administration’s federal immigration enforcement policies.
“What we are saying,” Marrero said, “is that Latin Americans from all other parts of the world are not foreigners; they are a living part of the social fabric, this vibrant Puerto Rico.”