wtfisgoingonews:

Bahamas evacuation confusion explained:

Over the weekend, US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) said that they would be accepting refugees REGARDLESS of whether or not they had travel documentations. 

To be clear - the devastation in the Bahamas is staggering. This will be the most damaging and expensive storm in Bahamas history. Winds were over 200 MPH, the storms brought 25 feet of water (homes and buildings were literally submerged and swept away), the Grand Bahama Airport was completely underwater. At least 70,000 people are now homeless with 50 reported dead so far and newspapers in the Bahamas are reporting that this number will likely reach the thousands:

Reports from survivors also point to a much higher death toll.

“I’ve seen dead bodies. I’ve seen bodies of people crushed by debris, hanging out [of] windows. It’s not good,” Brian Symonette, who lived on Abaco, told Time magazine. “I’ve seen seven dead bodies under a [shipping] container.…"

Kristoff Strachan, a resident of Grand Bahama, told MSNBC, “We’re hearing stories of buses being filled with bodies and body bags. It’s a lot.”

In the poor towns of Mudd and Pigeon Peas in Marsh Harbour, home to Haitian laborers, the New York Times counted six bodies in 45 minutes on Sunday. The corpses were pinned under debris. Several men accompanying the Times reporter said they had not seen government teams in the area recovering bodies.

“This area here?” Johnly Pierre said. “Plenty dead.”

Evacuations are also crucial at this time due to the storm flooding contaminating the clean water supply and shelters being overwhelmed with those who evacuated from the Abaco and Grand Bahama islands. 

Yesterday (Sept. 9th) acting CBP Commissioner Mark Morgan said this in to clear up confusion that occured over the weekend where evacuees, including children and babies, were turned away:

“We will accept anyone on humanitarian reasons that needs to come here. If your life is in jeopardy and you’re in the Bahamas and you want to get to the United States, you’re going to be allowed to come to the United States, whether you have travel documents or not.”

Also in general CBP guidelines show that Bahamian citizens traveling from the Bahamas do not usually require a US visa but Trump quickly pushed back against Commissioner Morgan’s statement and is prohibiting those without “proper” identification:

“We have to be very careful. Everybody needs totally proper documentation because, look, the Bahamas had some tremendous problems with people going to the Bahamas that weren’t supposed to be there. I don’t want to allow people that weren’t supposed to be in the Bahamas to come into the United States, including some very bad people and some very bad gang members, and some very, very bad drug dealers.”

Trump then claimed that “large sections” of the Bahamas were not hit by the hurricane and that evacuees should go there which is totally untrue. And acting Port Director of CPB, Stephen Silvestri, said the people didn’t even need to be removed because it’s already existing U.S. policy to pre-screen those coming in from the Bahamas without a visa:

“We would have processed them, we would have done vetting and, you know, we would have done everything we needed to do within the US laws and regulations to determine their admissibility and process them accordingly.”

However, the blame is now coming down on the ferry operator as CPB is claiming that the order did not come from a US government entity. The ferry operator says otherwise saying that they were told evacuees would need more authorization before they were able to travel:

“We boarded these passengers with the understanding that they could travel to the United States without visas, only to later having been advised that in order to travel to Ft. Lauderdale they required prior in-person authorization from the immigration authorities in Nassau [Bahamas].”

So the ferry operator is saying that he was told that the refugees without visas had to apply for authorization while still in the Bahamas. This differs from normal procedure which allows them to travel into Florida where they get the in-person authorization from immigration authorities there.