Jamaica Prime Minister Andrew Holness said Wednesday that the escalating gang crisis in Haiti has reached a point that demands a rapid increase in the number of cops and equipment for the Haiti National Police to battle gangs that are on the verge of taking over the capital.

Ultimately, the Haiti National Police “has to take on the gangs,” he said. “The present holding situation that we have is not necessarily moving the situation forward as we would all like.”

Holness’ comments came amid new protests and growing anxiety in Haiti about a possible takeover of the capital by armed gangs amid conflicts within the country’s political transition government and its police hierarchy. He made the comment after a high-level meeting with Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who arrived in Kingston on Wednesday.

As part of his first official visit to the English-speaking Caribbean, Rubio is seeking feedback from leaders of the 15-member regional bloc known as CARICOM on the volatile situation in Haiti, which Holness described as a threat to regional security.

How much weight Holness and other Caribbean leaders’ views on Haiti carry with the Trump administration remains to be seen. But Rubio, recognizing that the current multinational security mission led by Kenya is not large enough to take on heavily armed gangs, is trying to drum up support in the region for funding that would allow the mission to expand.

In a separate discussion about Haiti on Wednesday sponsored by the World Bank, former Jamaica Prime Minister Bruce Golding said the head of the mission recently also told him and two other former Caribbean prime ministers that he needs an additional 1,500 officers to be effective against gangs. Golding said he believes that number, which would put the force at 2,500, is still too low. He acknowledged that funding remains a challenge to put in place “an effective force, an overwhelming force” needed to defeat the gangs.

Golding said a former member of the Haiti’s ruling nine-member Transitional Presidential Council, which the Caribbean Community had helped create last year, had complained that CARICOM’s involvement bordered on interference.

Golding’s revelations underscore the challenges that an association of Caribbean elder statesmen known as the Eminent Persons Group, formed to help Haiti, has been facing.

On Wednesday morning four Democratic members of Congress sent a letter to Rubio urging him to prioritize the ongoing humanitarian and security crisis in Haiti during his visit to the Caribbean, which also includes stops Thursday in Guyana and Suriname.

“With violent gangs causing unimaginable human suffering in Haiti, and spillover impacts for regional stability and on Haitian-American communities, the United States simply cannot afford to pass up the opportunity to advance region-wide support for a Haitian-led solution to the current crisis,” the letter said. It’s signed by Reps. Gregory Meeks of New York and Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick of Florida, and Sens. Jeanne Shaheen of Missouri and Cory Booker of New Jersey.

The four lawmakers specifically mentioned the recent cuts to U.S. funding, including the dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development. They called the aid cuts “a gift to the violent gangs who have exploited the country’s political instability since the assassination of President Jovenel Moïse in 2021.

“We urge you to use this trip to the Caribbean to outline how the United States, and the State Department you lead, will galvanize the international community to allocate the necessary resources to stop the gangs and their elite enablers, and to help alleviate the human suffering in Haiti,” the lawmakers wrote. “The United States cannot sit on the sidelines of a crisis of this magnitude in our own region. Failure to act risks furthering the humanitarian crisis to the point where gangs control the entire capital, and the United States, along with its partners in the region, are responding to a mass migration event.”

The U.S. has been the main benefactor of the Kenya-led security mission. The Biden administration provided more than $600 million. Though the State Department has provided more than $40 million in waivers amid ongoing U.S. foreign aid freezes, it is unclear whether the Trump administration will continue funding the lion’s share when the mission comes up for renewal in October.

No Haiti policy

The Trump administration doesn’t have a clear foreign policy on Haiti, even as it ends immigration protections as of April 24 for more than 200,000 Haitians who were paroled into the U.S. under humanitarian benefits during the Biden administration.

Last month, United Nations Secretary General António Guterres ruled out transitioning the struggling Kenyan mission into an official U.N. peacekeeping mission and instead called for beefing up the current mission and using some of the U.N.’s budget to support salaries. The U.S. has yet to publicly weigh in on the proposal.

In a preview of the visit, Maurcio Claver-Carone, the administration’s envoy for Latin America and the Caribbean, told journalists on Tuesday that the administration is working on a new security strategy for Haiti but did not go into details.

Rubio’s trip, he said, was geared partly toward hearing the views “of our neighbors and our allies in the Caribbean in order to see what they believe is possible and how they can chip in and how they could work with us.”

After his meeting with Holness, Rubio also met with prime ministers Stuart Young of Trinidad and Tobago, and Mia Mottley of Barbados. Mottley also represented the 15-member Caribbean Community known as CARICOM. His last meeting was with the head of Haiti’s Presidential Council Fritz Alphonse Jean and on Thursday he travels to Guyana and Suriname.

Haiti, Rubio, acknowledged, has been a challenge. “It’s a multifaceted challenge,” he said. This was underscored Wednesday when armed gangs were shooting near the U.S. embassy and Kenyan officials still had not retrieved the body of their dead officer, a day after armed gangs in the Artibonite region burned three armored vehicles in an ambush.

Ongoing gang attacks

Though Jamaica was among the first countries to volunteer security personnel for the mission in Haiti, it has yet to deploy its officers. Of the 1,000 foreign officers on the ground, only 31 are from the Caribbean region.

How best to address Haiti’s unraveling crisis remains a central question of the security response. Those opposed to international intervention have long argued that the money is better spent on the Haiti National Police while others point out that while the police needs to be built up, the current crisis demands foreign assistance.

Haiti’s police are less than 10,000 for a country of 12 million, and those involved in actual anti-gang operations are only a handful. At the same time, the force has been under-resourced and outgunned.

Last year the academy, which itself has come under gang attack, only graduated 700. It is not only too small to meet the needs, but dozens of police stations have also been destroyed by gangs. There are also not enough trainers and then there is vetting. Today with more one in 10 Haitians displaced due to the violence, vetting is not only difficult but almost impossible in some instances, officers argue, because they cannot safely access neighborhoods due to the violence.

On Wednesday, Guterres’ spokesman Stéphane Dujarric told journalists at the U.N. in New York that humanitarian aid workers have warned that escalating attacks on populated areas have forced repeated and record-level displacements in the Port-au-Prince metropolitan area.

“The scale and pace of displacement is rapidly outpacing the capacity of humanitarian actors to respond,” Dujarric said. “Nearly 23,000 people were displaced in just a week in mid-March, that’s what the International Organization for Migration is telling us, with families seeking shelter in already severely overcrowded sites, with minimal essential services such as water, sanitation, health care and protection were among those displaced.”

The U.N. Dujarric said, assesses the situation on a daily basis and takes decisions every day on how to respond to the crisis with its aid workers.

“It’s really a flexible footprint,” he said, “and people are shifted to the best places where they can deliver aid and deliver aid safely.”

He also defended the efforts of the multinational support mission. The force is doing the best possible job they can given, Dujarric said, given “the deficit in support they are getting from the international community.”

“Whether it’s the Kenyans and other nationals who’ve sent people there, to put their lives at risk,” he added, “They need more equipment, and Haitian political leaders need to also recommit to a political track.”

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