No country in the Caribbean region is as heavily dependent on outside assistance as Haiti, where a patchwork of United Nations humanitarian aid agencies provides everything from food for malnourished children to shelters for displaced families, while an armed international force is trying to help put down brutal gangs.

But as the U.N. Security Council finally starts to mull over how to strengthen assistance to the Caribbean nation, those very operations could soon be in jeopardy.

The Trump administration, which already slashed its contributions to the U.N. earlier this year as part of global foreign-aid cuts, is seeking to cancel $9.4 billion in spending previously approved by Congress. The package of cuts, voted on last month by the House but not yet the Senate, includes $2 billion in foreign aid that would jeopardize U.N. programs worldwide, including in Haiti, where the dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development has aid workers struggling to deal with a complex humanitarian crisis.

Armed groups, now in control of most of the capital and spreading terror to other regions, are fueling hunger and internal displacement. Among the country’s nearly 12 million residents, almost half, 5.7 million, are facing acute hunger while nearly 1.3 million are internally displaced in makeshift camps.

Included in the Trump administration’s cuts package are total eliminations of U.S. voluntary contributions to international organizations and programs like the United Nations Children’s Fund, the United Nations Development Program and the United Nations Population Fund. The proposal also suggests completely eliminating the money for the U.N. peacekeeping budget — which would leave millions of people at risk all over the world. More than 25% of that budget comes from the U.S.

The cutback request is raising alarms among international observers, who believe the cuts undermine U.S. foreign policy and endanger the lives of Haitians at a moment they face a worsening humanitarian crisis and the Trump administration seeks to terminate deportation protections for their compatriots in the U.S.

“We’re very much seeing the U.S. go through, in some ways, a bipolar approach to how it’s dealing with these global crises,” said Daniel Forti, a senior U.N. analyst with the International Crisis Group. “You have sort of two sides of the U.S. government taking different approaches to this, and we’re not sure which one’s going to prevail.”

On one hand are foreign service diplomats like John Kelley — the acting U.S. Representative to the U.N. who spoke about “the increasing levels of violence, recruitment of children in armed gangs, and food insecurity” during a Security Council meeting on Wednesday — supporting stability and conflict resolution. On the other are members of Congress and the White House who are pushing to cut the funding that makes a potentially stable Haiti possible.

While all Democrats in the House opposed the cut request, all but four House Republicans voted in favor.

Experts say the drastic cuts to the U.N., along with the scrapping of USAID programs, undermine a fundamental stated goal of current U.S. policy: stopping migration. The longer the violence, hunger and human-rights violations continue in Haiti, the greater the push for people to leave.

And cuts to vital programs in health care make it more likely that infectious diseases will spread to the U.S. because viruses don’t respect international borders.

“Holding up our pledged funding ... is short-sighted and will undercut the administration’s goals of reducing instability and migration,” said Victoria Holt, director of Dartmouth College’s John Sloan Dickey Center for International Understanding.

The U.N.’s financial crisis

On Wednesday, Miroslav Jenca, assistant secretary-general for Europe, Central Asia and the Americas, told the Security Council that Port-au-Prince “was for all intents and purposes paralyzed by gangs and isolated as a result of the ongoing suspension of international commercial flights” into the country’s main airport. Gangs’ brutality was is affecting every aspect of life, he added, and “plunging the country into even deeper suffering and trauma.”

He called for international action to help pay for the Kenya-led Multinational Security Support mission in Haiti and to endorse Secretary-General António Guterres’ recommendation on Feb. 24 to establish a U.N. support office to provide logistic and operational support for the mission.

Even before Trump proposed funding cuts, the U.N. was facing a liquidity problem because of aid cuts and late payments by the United States and others. The crisis has prompted the agency to look at laying off nearly 7,000 staffers and cutting its budget by 20% ahead of Jan. 1, the start of its new budget year. The U.N.’s current political office in Haiti is not immune. Jenča acknowledged that the office, established in 2019, was not designed to operate in the hostile environment the U.N. is facing today.

A return to peacekeepers?

Canada’s ambassador to the U.N., Robert Rae, who serves as president of the U.N.’s Economic and Social Council, has called for stronger support for the U.N. Integrated Office in Haiti by equipping the office with staffing and resources. Ahead of Wednesday’s meeting, he also urged the Security Council to heed Haitians’ calls for robust security help.

“The situation in Haiti is deteriorating at an alarming rate with significant impacts on the Haitian population and on the region. The Haitian population is being exploited, raped, kidnapped, and recruited by armed gangs. They are malnourished and facing famine conditions. They are fleeing their homes in record numbers due to violence,” he said. “We must act.”

In the short. term, “significant support” should be given to the Kenyan security mission, Rae said. In the longer term, “a U.N. stabilization mission should be seriously considered,” he urged. Haiti’s Transitional Presidential Council also asked, at the end of last year, for a formal U.N. peacekeeping operation — a request that has been ignored.

With the U.S. already reducing its funding and in arrears on its assessed UN contributions, the effects are already showing up in existing missions that are scrambling to save cash due to the budget constraints.

Congress has until July 18 to act on Trump’s request to pull back $9.4 billion in U.N. funding.

“Places like Haiti, Afghanistan, Somalia, they’re going to be the ones hit hardest by this because they’re so integrated into the global aid infrastructure and have worked very closely with the U.N. for decades, and there are few natural allies to pick up the slack,” Forti said. “That’s just going to lead to more challenging humanitarian outcomes — and more instability.”

©2025 Miami Herald. Visit at miamiherald.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.