ICE Arrests Haitian Oligarch Accused of Supporting Gangs
A member of Haiti’s elite is facing accusations that he helped support violent gangs that have wreaked havoc in the Caribbean nation.
07/22/25
Pierre Reginald Boulos, a permanent resident of the United States and a citizen of Haiti, was arrested by U.S. immigration agents in Florida last week.
The United States government publicly accused one of the wealthiest and most powerful figures in Haiti of a “campaign of violence and gang support” — for the first time blaming a prominent member of the nation’s elite for rampant violence there.
Pierre Reginald Boulos, 69, a doctor who amassed extreme wealth through a chain of supermarkets and a car dealership, was arrested Thursday by the Homeland Security Investigations arm of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency in Palm Beach County, Fla., where he lives.
“If you are supporting and collaborating with Haitian gang leaders — you can book yourself a ticket home,” the Department of Homeland Security said on a
social media post.
The arrest is an important development in Haiti’s battle against violent gangs. While authorities have launched offensives against gang leaders and put million-dollar bounties on their heads, critics have argued that law enforcement officials in Haiti and the United States haven’t done enough to go after wealthy power brokers who helped finance or even create gangs.
Business leaders have long been known to pay gangs for things like protection and access to the ports. Political parties use gangs to get communities to support particular candidates or start street protests targeting rivals.
Critics say that the support of Haiti’s elite was crucial in the establishment of gangs in the country. But in recent years, the armed groups have grown in numbers, weapons and money to the point that they no longer need the elite, experts said.
Mr. Boulos’s detention “is a game-changing situation,” said Francois Pierre-Louis, a former cabinet minister in Haiti who now teaches at the City University of New York. “It’s going to get other people to line up or be afraid, and they might stop supporting the gangs, although many of them are really no longer in control of them.”
This appears to be the case with Mr. Boulos, he said, because gangs burned down a number of his businesses. If Mr. Boulos had influence over gangs, the businesses would have been protected, he said.
“The gangs have become their own bosses,” Mr. Pierre-Louis said.
Mr. Boulos was being held in ICE detention and could not be reached for comment. His adult children did not respond to requests for comment, and it was unclear if he had hired a lawyer.
An ally of Mr. Boulos’s who spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid getting caught up in a federal investigation said many business leaders in Haiti paid gangs because they were being extorted. Mr. Boulos, the person said, came to the United States in 2021 in fear for his life.
Mr. Boulos, who is of Lebanese and Syrian descent, was a power broker in Haiti and helped provide weapons to the police during periods of security concerns, according to cables released by WikiLeaks.
A former president of the Haitian Chamber of Commerce, Mr. Boulos was a member of a commission run by former President Bill Clinton that distributed aid after a devastating earthquake in Haiti.
In 2019, Mr. Boulos started a new party that was billed as a progressive social justice movement for young adults, the Haitian diaspora, farmers and women. When he floated the idea of running for president, he referred to gang leaders as “community leaders” and funded social activities in neighborhoods they controlled.
“I have never helped gang leaders,” Mr. Boulos said in a 2020
interview with Haitian TV. “I have helped community leaders, even if it means that later some of them have become gang leaders. I am not responsible for that.”
In 2021, he was summoned for questioning in connection to the assassination of President Jovenel Moïse. He adamantly denied any role and was never charged.
“Everybody’s name has been floated,” Mr. Boulos told The New York Times then, “including my own.”
In an unusual twist, Mr. Boulos was picked up by immigration authorities, although he was born in New York.
He renounced his U.S. citizenship before kicking off a bid to run for office in Haiti, because foreign citizenship would have prevented his candidacy. Mr. Boulous returned to the United States on a visa in 2021, and received a green card last year, according to internal government documents reviewed by The Times.
But Secretary of State Marco Rubio decided Mr. Boulos could be deported because his continued presence in the country would “have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States because Boulos has engaged in a campaign of violence, gang support, and trafficking weapons and drugs that has contributed to Haiti’s destabilization,” the documents say.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement said in a statement on Tuesday that, when Mr. Boulous applied for residency, he failed to disclose that he had been involved in forming a political party in Haiti and had been referred for prosecution by the Haitian government for misusing loans. That provided grounds for deporting him based on fraud, the agency said.
The Trump administration declared Haitian gangs “foreign terrorist organizations,” which allows the U.S. government to deport legal residents who known to have supported gangs
