According to United States authorities, there is a group of over one hundred migrants stranded by human smugglers on an island known as Mona Island located near Puerto Rico, who need rescuing. Although the nationality of these migrants has yet to be discerned, U.S. officials believe the majority of them are Haitian. This group of migrants includes women, children, and men. The Secretary of Puerto Rico’s Natural Resources Department, Anaís Rodríguez, noted that the group of migrants includes sixty women (three of whom are pregnant), thirty-eight men, and five children, ranging in ages from five to thirteen.
Human traffickers have long used Mona Island as a staging area for their boat trips promising to transport migrants from the Dominican Republic and Haiti to the U.S. territory. Mona Island is situated in the perilous waterways between Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic. In recent months, many people have lost their lives while attempting to leave their nations because of an increase in poverty and violence. Authorities saved 68 Haitian migrants who had been abandoned in the seas around Mona Island in late July— at least five of them had perished in the duration. Despite the fact the environment in Mona is inhumane and cannot sustain human life, smugglers do not care about the security of the people they are transporting. In a boat, they essentially just pile them up, and smuggle them from region to region. Once the migrants are located by officials, they are normally taken to Puerto Rico for processing where some of them request asylum giving everything they have been through and the conditions of where they are from.
