The Trump administration’s effort to claw back nearly $5 billion in foreign aid, including millions designated for United Nations peacekeeping missions, is raising questions and confusion among longtime Haiti advocates about the United States’ commitment to help stabilize a country in the grip of violent gangs.

The proposed slashing of foreign aid was announced to Congress last week on the same day that the United States’ U.N. mission in New York began circulating a resolution to support a “Gang Suppression Force” in Haiti. That resolution endorses a February proposal by U.N. Secretary General António Guterres, which called for a beefed up multinational security support mission in Haiti that would be partly funded from contributions to the global body’s peacekeeping budget by the U.S. and other member nations.

A $393 million payment to the peacekeeping budget, previously authorized by Congress, is among “15 rescissions of budget authority, totaling $4.9 billion,” that President Donald Trump is now seeking to unilaterally cut.

The mixed signals on Haiti from the White House are further compounded by ongoing lawsuits over earlier efforts by the president to cancel previously authorized foreign aid and congressional backlash over the administration’s latest “pocket rescission” tactic to do an end-run around lawmakers.

“These cuts to peacekeeping funds not only undermine the administration’s plans to help stabilize Haiti, they jeopardize the global response to conflicts around the world, and they are counter to the law,” Rep. Gregory Meeks, a New York Democrat and ranking member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, told the Miami Herald.” “Ultimately, these short-sighted cuts will be more costly and hurt the United States in the long run.”

The administration, in response to an inquiry from the Miami Herald, pushed back against critics suggesting it was letting up on the effort to end gang violence that has left more than 3,000 dead this year and forced 1.3 million out of their homes.

“The U.S. intends to pay its share of assessed contributions for a U.N. Support Office for Haiti to enable a Gang Suppression Force, as proposed in the resolution we shared with the U.N. Security Council,” a senior U.S. official said. “Any suggestions otherwise seek only to distract from the urgent need for the international community to step up and respond to the largest security crisis in the hemisphere. The Gang Suppression Force will not be a peacekeeping mission and is designed to avoid the mistakes of previous missions.”

Since the first contingents of Kenyan troops began deploying to Haiti in June 2024, the U.S. has provided the lion’s share of the funding. The Trump administration says the U.S. has already allocated over $835 million in financial and in kind-support for the mission, but has publicly stated “America cannot continue shouldering such a significant financial burden.”

Still, even as the administration seeks to get agreement from U.N. Security Council members to among other things, double the size of Haiti’s next international force and make it more aggressive, neither Trump nor Secretary of State Marco Rubio has stated publicly what the U.S. financial commitment to the new mission will be or whether the administration will make specific demands on how the U.N. spends American contributions.

For now, Trump’s legal authority to simply cancel congressionally approved foreign spending also remains unresolved.

In a lawsuit filed by AIDS vaccine and Global Health advocates before Trump’s latest rescission attempt, U.S. District Judge Amir Ali on Wednesday issued a preliminary injunction ordering the release of $11.5 billion in foreign aid that is set to expire at the end of the month. But the decision also doesn’t direct the White House where to spend that money.

“To be clear, no one disputes that Defendants have significant discretion in how to spend the funds at issue, and the Court is not directing Defendants to make payments to any particular recipients,” Ali wrote. “But Defendants do not have any discretion as to whether to spend the funds.”

The administration on Thursday appealed the decision. Since starting his second term, President Trump has canceled billions of dollars in development assistance and humanitarian aid. He’s done so by freezing assistance, rolling back previously approved congressional funding and gutting the U.S. Agency for International Development. In July, at Trump’s request, Congress canceled $9.4 billion in media funding and foreign aid that included allocations to U.N. peacekeeping and other U.N. agencies like its child-protection outfit, UNICEF.

Now, he’s seeking to bypass lawmakers through “pocket rescissions” that would effectively freeze funding until the congressional spending deadline expired.

The maneuver outside the appropriation process has upset both Democrats and Republicans, who view it as an attempt to usurp their Constitutionally granted funding powers to appropriate funds.

Even before last year’s U.S. presidential elections, Haiti watchers worried that the country was being made a pawn in the geopolitical game as Russia and China routinely criticized U.S. policy and threatened vetoes in the U.N. Security Council as the humanitarian situation rapidly deteriorated and killer gangs expanded their takeover — and destruction — of entire neighborhoods.

Now with the U.S. moves to cancel more U.N. aid and even levy hefty tariffs on countries like Canada and Brazil, longtime allies in finding a solution to the Haitian crisis, those concerns have only grown as Washington’s has pressed for other countries to take on more of the expense of supporting the under-equipped and under-resourced security mission in Port-au-Prince.

“The administration making drastic cuts to its U.N. peacekeeping contributions just days after presenting a proposal for a ‘Gang Suppression Force’ in Haiti continues three years of performative international engagement on Haiti,” said Brian Concannon, the executive director of the Boston-based Institute for Justice & Democracy in Haiti. “Proposing the U.N take on the gang suppression force while reducing its resources allows foreign officials to claim they are trying to help Haitians, but [it] has little chance of improving life for Haitians.”

A formal notice published in the federal registry on Monday listed 15 projects that Trump would slash. Haiti is mentioned just once, and as part of the Trump administration’s argument for its rollback of $393 million in aid to U.N. peacekeepers. The rationale, however, has nothing to do with on-going efforts to combat gangs.

The U.N., the notice said, has failed to address allegations of sexual abuse “by punishing the perpetrators of these heinous crimes,” and “U.N. peacekeepers were also the source of the cholera outbreak in Haiti after the 2010 earthquake, costing billions and causing lasting harm.”

Haiti’s cholera outbreak killed nearly 10,000 people and sickened over 820,000 Haitians. Yet, when victims and their families tried to get compensation in the U.S. courts, the State Department joined the U.N. in asking a judge in the South District of New York to grant the U.N. immunity from legal action. The suit was filed by Concannon’s advocacy group.

“Using U.N. failures in Haiti to justify U.S. funding cuts is outrageously hypocritical,” said Beatrice Lindstrom, senior clinical instructor at Harvard Law School, who represented cholera victims in litigation and advocacy alongside IJDH. “It was the U.S. that pressured the U.N. to deny cholera victims justice and compensation for years. Righting this wrong requires more accountable peacekeeping — not less peacekeeping.”

In June, the U.N. announced deep funding cuts due to U.S. funding cuts and Washington’s failure to pay its dues. The Better World Campaign, a nonprofit that seeks to strengthen relations between the U.S. and U.N., warns that the proposed rescissions package “will erode America’s influence, jeopardize critical alliances and create a vacuum that strategic competitors like China are eager to fill.”

The not-profit noted that the administration’s claw back “will dramatically reduce America’s diplomatic leverage at the U.N and bolster the interests of countries who don’t share our values.”

“Reform is necessary — but retreat is not reform,” said Peter Yeo, president of the Better World Campaign. “By withholding more than a billion dollars in peacekeeping and U.N. dues, the U.S. risks giving up its vote, and it will unequivocally result in lost leverage and leadership.”

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