Daily Times

Miami: Florida authorities had 356 Haitian migrants in custody Monday after the group arrived in a wooden boat that ran aground near a private club the day before, US border officials said.

The boat, which was packed with people, became stranded around 1:00 pm local time (1800 GMT) Sunday in front of the upscale Ocean Reef Club in North Key Largo, on the southern tip of the US state.

“One hundred fifty-eight of the migrants ended up swimming to the shore,” US Customs and Border Protection spokesman Alan Regalado said via telephone. “The ones that swam to the shore are taken to custody by US Border Patrol.”

The other 198 people stayed on board the boat, he said.

“Those who remained on the vessel were safely transferred over to a US Coast Guard cutter and they were let into their custody,” Regalado said.

Authorities are currently processing the migrants’ fingerprints and other information, he said. All of them are “in good health.”

US Customs and Border Protection had on Sunday called the incident a “maritime smuggling event. Chief Patrol Agent Walter N. Slosar of the US Border Patrol had shared a photo on Twitter Sunday of the vessel crowded with people and listing sharply to one side.

Another picture showed some 20 people wrapped in striped towels clustered on the shore, with piles of what appear to be wet clothes nearby. The arrival was the third time US authorities had detained Haitian migrants trying to reach the United States in a week.

On Friday, the Coast Guard intercepted 123 people on board a small vessel off Anguilla Cay, in the western Bahamas, and last Sunday, it detained more than 140 people off the coast of Andros, the largest island in the Bahamas.

Human smugglers are known to use the Bahamas — a group of islands near the Florida coast — as a jumping-off point for getting people, many from other Caribbean countries such as Haiti, into the United States, in what can often be a treacherous journey.