A desperate Haiti turns to Erik Prince, Trump ally, in fight against gangs
Donald Trump
, is working with
Haiti
's government to conduct lethal operations against gangs that are terrorising the nation and threatening to take over its capital.
Prince, the founder of Blackwater Worldwide, signed a contract to take on the criminal groups that have been killing civilians and seizing control of vast areas of territory, according to senior Haitian and US government officials and several other security experts familiar with Prince's work in Haiti.
Haiti's government has hired US contractors, including Prince, in recent months to work on a secret taskforce to deploy drones meant to kill gang members, security experts said. Prince's team has been operating the drones since March, but the authorities have yet to announce the death or capture of a single high-value target.
Security experts said Prince has also been scouting Haitian American military veterans to hire to send to Port-au-Prince and is expected to send up to 150 mercenaries to Haiti over the summer. He recently shipped a large cache of weapons to the country, two experts said.
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The Haitian government is awaiting the arrival of arms shipments and more personnel to step up its fight against the gangs.
Erik Prince during the Conservative Political Action Conference in Maryland, US, in 2023. Photograph: Al Drago/Bloomberg
US officials said they were aware of Prince's work with Haiti's government. But the full terms of the Haitian government's arrangement with Prince, including how much it is paying him, are unknown.
This article is based on interviews with a dozen people who follow Haiti closely. All but one spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorised to discuss sensitive security matters publicly.
The US state department, which has provided millions of dollars in funding to equip and train Haiti's National Police, said it was not paying Prince or his company for any work in Haiti.
Prince declined to comment for this article. Blackwater no longer exists, but Prince owns other private military entities.
The involvement of civilian contractors such as Prince, a Trump donor who has a long and chequered history in the private security industry, marks a pivotal moment in Haiti. Its crisis has deepened since its last president was assassinated in 2021, and the government now appears willing to take desperate measures to secure control.
Armed groups escalated the violence last year by uniting and taking over prisons
, burning down police stations and attacking hospitals. About one million people have been forced to flee their homes and hundreds of thousands are living in shelters.
Gangs have captured so much territory in recent months that United Nations officials have warned that the capital is in danger of falling under complete criminal control.
The situation is dire enough that officials and civilians alike say they are eager for any overseas help, particularly after a $600 million international police mission started by the Biden administration and largely staffed by Kenyan police officers failed to receive adequate international personnel and money.
Members of the Kenya Multinational Security Support Mission Force in Haiti arrive at their base after a patrol in Port-au-Prince last September. Photograph: Adriana Zehbrauskas/The New York Times
With Haiti's undermanned and underequipped police force struggling to contain the gangs, the government is turning to private military contractors equipped with high-powered weapons, helicopters and sophisticated surveillance and attack drones to take on the well-armed gangs. At least one other US security company is working in Haiti, though details of its role are secret.
Since drone attacks targeting gangs started in March, they have killed more than 200 people, according to Pierre Esperance, who runs a leading human rights organisation in Port-au-Prince.
After the US occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq ended, security firms such as those owned by Prince started seeing big streams of revenues dry up. Private military contractors are looking for new opportunities, and they see possibilities in Latin America.
Before presidential elections in Ecuador this year, Prince toured the country with local police and promised to help security forces. The country has faced a wave of violence unleashed by gangs.
Erik Prince arrives at a press conference after an anti-crime operation in Guayaquil, Ecuador, in April 2025. Photograph: Gerardo Menoscal/AFP via Getty Images
Ecuadorean officials denied that they had signed any security deal with Prince.
A person close to Prince said he hopes to expand the scope of his work in Haiti to include help with customs, transport, revenue collection and other government services that need to be restored for the country to stabilise. Rampant government corruption is a key reason Haiti's finances are in a shambles.
The Haitian prime minister's office and a presidential council, which was formed to run the country until presidential elections can be held, did not respond to several requests for comment.
Prince, whose sister Betsy DeVos was secretary of education during Trump's first term, donated more than $250,000 to help elect Trump in 2016, according to campaign finance records. He was often cited as an informal 'adviser' to Trump's first transition to office, a description he denied.
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Haiti paid France a costly ransom for independence. Some say it must be paid back
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Days before Trump took office in 2017, the United Arab Emirates organised a meeting between Prince and a Russian close to President Vladimir Putin of Russia as part of an effort to set up a back-channel line of communication between Moscow and the incoming US president, a meeting that later came under scrutiny.
The House of Representatives intelligence committee made a criminal referral to the justice department about Prince, saying he had lied about the circumstances of the meeting, but no charges were ever filed.
Prince has a decades-long history of military interventions overseas, some of which ended badly. Blackwater faced legal problems over its work for the US military in places such as Iraq, including an episode in 2007 in which its employees killed 17 civilians in Baghdad. (Trump pardoned four Blackwater guards in 2020.)
In 2011, Prince helped recruit and train an army of Colombian mercenaries for the United Arab Emirates to use in conflicts around the Middle East. In 2017, he proposed a plan to use contractors to take over Afghanistan. In 2020, the New York Times revealed that he had recruited former spies to help conservative activists infiltrate liberal groups in the United States.
A year later, the United Nations accused him of violating an arms embargo in
Libya
, which he denied.
'My name has become clickbait for people who like to weave conspiracy theories together,' Prince said in a 2021 interview with the New York Times. 'And if they throw my name in, it always attracts attention. And it's pretty damn sickening.'
Haiti's experience with private military contractors goes back decades. When US forces returned former president Jean-Bertrand Aristide to power in 1994 after he was ousted in a bloody military coup, he was accompanied by a private security team from the San Francisco-based Steele Foundation.
In recent years, military contractors in Haiti have had a more tainted record. Colombian mercenaries hired by a US security firm were accused of taking part in the 2021 assassination of the last elected president, Jovenel Moïse.
Rod Joseph, a Haitian-American US Army veteran who owns a Florida-based security officer training company, said he had been in talks with Prince to help supply personnel for his contract since late last year.
People at Lycée Marie Jeanne, a school in the Lavaud neighborhood of Port-au-Prince, Haiti, that was turned into a camp for people escaping violence, last September. Photograph: Adriana Zehbrauskas/The New York Times
Joseph, who trained Haitian police on the use of surveillance drones, said Prince gave him the impression that his plans were under the auspices of the US government but then shifted to be directly under the purview of the Haitian government.
He said Prince told him that he planned to send private soldiers from El Salvador to Haiti along with three helicopters to engage in attacks against the gangs.
Joseph said he was uncomfortable with the idea of contractors working directly with the Haitian government, without any American oversight.
'We should be very worried, because if he's from the US government, at least he can have the semblance of having to answer to Congress,' he said. 'If it's him, his contract, he doesn't owe anybody an explanation.'
'It's just another pay-day,' he added.
Prince had texted him a few days earlier, Joseph said, seeking a list of Haitian-American veterans to send to Haiti, but he declined to provide names unless Prince could provide more precise details of their mission and would allow Joseph to lead them.
US military contractors doing defence work overseas are required to obtain a license from the state department, but those licenses are not public record.
Prince has been trying to expand his portfolio and has travelled overseas in search of new business, said Sean McFate, a professor at the National Defense University and author of The Modern Mercenary: Private Armies and What They Mean for World Order.
Prince is viewed sceptically by other members of the private military industry, McFate said, because of his showy nature and the negative publicity he generates for a security industry that prides itself on a 'sense of professionalism'.
'It's always worth noting where Prince is going, because it's sort of a barometer of where he thinks Trump world might end up, and he wants to make a buck from it,' McFate said.
But experts stress that Haitians are desperate for solutions – regardless of where they come from.
'The doors are open. All possibilities must be on the table,' Haiti's minister of economy and finance, Alfred Métellus, told Le Nouvelliste, a Haitian newspaper, last month. 'We are looking for all Haitians, all foreigners who have expertise in this field and who want to support us, want to support the police and the army to unblock the situation.'
Joseph said he worried that outsourcing the work of fighting gangs to private military contractors would not do anything to improve the skills of the Haitian police and military.
'When you do it this way, it's trouble,' he said. 'Every time you parachute knowledge in and parachute out, the locals will always be in need of that knowledge. If you don't have knowledge of security, you will just have a bunch of dead people.' − This article originally appeared in
The New York Times
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