The Trump administration has designated a coalition of powerful Haitian gangs and an allied force sowing terror in Haiti’s bread basket as terrorists.

The Viv Ansanm coalition, whose membership consists of more than two dozen of Haiti’s best-armed criminal groups, and the Gran Grief gang have been labeled as both Foreign Terrorist Organizations and Specially Designated Global Terrorists by Secretary of State Marco Rubio.

Rubio, who views the gangs and their escalating violence and influence as a direct threat to U.S. national security, made the designation on Friday. The gangs join eight other Latin American crime organizations that were similarly labeled as terror groups by the State Department in February. That list includes Mexican cartels as well as Venezuela’s Tren de Aragua.

“The Trump Administration is sending a clear message with its terrorist designations of Viv Ansanm and Gran Grif,” a senior State Department official told the Miami Herald. “Under the leadership of Secretary Rubio we are holding accountable vicious groups which have undermined Haiti and its people. It’s in America’s national security interest to hold the vicious gangs accountable.”

Rubio sees the terrorist designation as critical in trying to address regional concerns that gangs are also trying to turn Haiti into a narco-trafficking state where illegal guns and drugs pass through freely.

Both designations come with significant implications criminally and financially for anyone deemed as providing “material support” or “resources” for the designated groups. Not only do individuals risk counter-terrorism sanctions and criminal charges, they could also be removed from the U.S. or be banned from entering.

“There is no territorial limitation, so if someone is paying the gangs in France or Australia that still applies,” said Vanda Felbab-Brown, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and an expert on non-state armed groups who closely monitors Haiti. “There is no limitation to just Haiti or the United States.”

Both designations come with clauses, she said, that “define any payment of any kind, any material support of any kind— as little as a cup of tea, a pencil or a cup of coffee, or a toy —as material support and come with very lengthy criminal penalties and very robust financial penalties.”

“It has potentially huge implications whether banks, Western Union, financial systems will be willing to send remittances to Haiti. If they are afraid they will be prosecuted, they might be willing to not take such payments,” Felbab-Brown said. “On the positive aspect, perhaps this will scare off more Haitian politicians and businessmen who hire gangs for their nefarious purposes.”

Felbab-Brown and other experts on Haitian gangs’ stranglehold on the population warn that the designations could have other “chilling effects.” They include having Haitians in the U.S. labeled as “terrorists based on flimsy evidence” as in the case of Venezuela’s Tren de Aragua, and to the denial of foreign assistance and humanitarian aid in Haiti.

The terrorist designation “does provide an opportunity to deny funds,” said Felbab-Brown. “It’s really imperative that any multilateral donor, bilateral donors who still provide some form of aid... engage with the U.S. government and seek guarantees or assurances they will not be prosecuted, since the odds are that some money coming from either private entities or multilateral entities will end up in the hands of the gangs. If they fear that this will lead to the U.S. government going after them, this will have enormous chilling effects on the aid and lethal effects in Haiti where so much of the population is already starving.”

Coalition of 27 gangs

According to the United Nations, the ongoing violence has displaced more than a million Haitians. In addition, more than half of the population — 5.7 million Haitians — faces acute hunger, including two millions reaching levels of famine, according to the World Food Program.

For months, Haiti’s capital has been on the brink of falling to members of the Viv Ansanm coalition, which now controls up to 90% of metropolitan Port-au-Prince. The group was formed in September 2023 through an alliance between factions of the powerful G-9 alliance led by a former police officer, Jimmy “Barbecue” Chérizier, and Vitel’homme Innocent.

Since February 2024 they’ve been launching coordinated assaults on multiple fronts targeting police stations, neighborhoods and hospital’s, overwhelming Haitian security forces and the Kenya-led Multinational Security Support mission financed by the U.S.

The gang coalition consists of 27 different armed groups that have been able to simultaneously coordinate and carrying out attacks on multiple fronts including different geographic regions of the country at once, according to the local National Human Rights Defense Network.

But while the gangs consist of disenfranchised youth from the country’s slums, their memberships also increasingly includes children as young as 8. Some serve as lookouts while others are hired to set fire to buildings or to shoot up neighborhoods before an assault.

Gran Grief, an ally of the Viv Ansanm coalition, is the largest and most powerful gang in Haiti’s Artibonite region located north of the capital. The gang was founded by Prophane Victor, a former member of the country’s Parliament who has been sanctioned by the U.S. and U.N. and is currently in custody in Haiti. The gang is behind several massacres, including a retaliatory attack that killed at least 115 residents in the rural town of Pont-Sonde in October.

Gang members are also responsible for the deaths of several Haitian police officers as well as two members of the Kenyan mission.

Deporting gang members

Until now, Haiti’s security forces and the mission have been no match for the gangs. Both Viv Ansanm and Gran Grif carried out fresh attacks on Monday. While Viv Ansanm launched a deadly assault not far from the presidential palace, Gran Grief invaded several rural communities in the Artibonite, where kidnappings are also ongoing, that forced residents to flee into a river to get away.

More than 5,600 Haitians died in gang-related violence last year, and more than 1, 600 have been killed in the first three months of this year, the U.N. said this week. At the same time, at least 161 cases of kidnappings for ransom were documented, 63% of them in the Artibonite region, the U.N.’s human rights office said. The escalating violence is prompting the formation of self-described defense groups known as brigades whose access to weapons is raising alarms that Haiti is a nation on the brink of anarchy.

A senior U.S. official who first confirmed the terrorist designation plans to the Herald said the administration is also considering deporting people to El Salvador’s maximum security prison. The Trump administration has sent several hundred Venezuelans to the prison after invoking the 1798 Alien Enemies Act.

While the designation is welcome in some parts of Haiti, it also worries some Haitians, who are often forced to pay gangs tolls to travel along the main highways. Business owners are forced to pay thousands of dollars each month or risk having their places of commerce burned to the ground.

Humanitarian aid groups also sometimes pass through “foundations” that gangs have set up in order to deliver aid to those displaced by the violence or living in gang controlled areas.

“Any entity doing business with Haiti needs to do due diligence to guarantee that not a penny of the money it’s sending to Haiti will end up in the hands of the designated terrorist entity,” said Felbab-Brown.

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