On January 22, 2025, ICE agents arrested a Haitian gang member named Wisteguens Jean Quely Charles in Mattapan, Massachusetts. During the arrest, Charles screamed at the cameras: "I'm not going back to Haiti!" and "F* Trump, Biden forever!" The clip went viral overnight.
On September 10, 2026, he boarded a deportation flight out of Louisiana. Destination: Haiti. Turns out he was in fact going back.
Charles had racked up 17 criminal convictions in a two-year span in Massachusetts. Assault and battery on a public employee. Resisting arrest. Drug trafficking. Weapons violations. Trespassing. He was a documented member of the Back Block Money Gang. This wasn't a guy who overstayed a tourist visa and forgot to file paperwork. This was a one-man crime wave operating inside a sanctuary city that did everything it could to shield him from federal enforcement.
Fox News reporter Bill Melugin broke the deportation confirmation: "Remember the Haitian illegal alien gang member who went viral...he has, in fact, gone back to Haiti."
Charles had first been admitted to the United States in 2013 under the Obama administration and had his Temporary Protected Status revoked in 2022. It took way longer than it should have but the illegal alien gangbanger is no longer walking the streets of America or terrorizing its people.
DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin didn't mince the details: "This illegal alien gang member from Haiti had quite the rap sheet, with convictions for assault and battery..." The White House statement was more direct: "This gang member and criminal illegal alien loved Obama, Biden, and open-border Democrats."
Nineteen months is a long time between a deportation order and wheels up. That gap wasn't ICE dragging its feet. That was the legal system absorbing every appeal, every motion, every procedural roadblock that sanctuary-state infrastructure could throw at a straightforward removal case — for a man with 17 convictions. Boston didn't want him gone. The federal government did. The federal government won.
The sanctuary city argument has always rested on the idea that local cooperation with ICE creates a "chilling effect" on immigrant communities. That framing assumes the person being shielded is a scared dishwasher, not a gang-affiliated repeat offender with a weapons rap sheet screaming obscenities at federal agents on camera. Charles wasn't chilled. He was emboldened. The sanctuary framework gave him 17 bites at the apple before the system caught up.
The deportation flight left from Louisiana, not Massachusetts. That detail matters. The state that sheltered him for years didn't participate in sending him home. A state 1,500 miles away ensured he would never terrorize Americans ever again.
