Former NFL star Jack Brewer and Benghazi contractor Mark Geist are joining forces to help evacuate Americans trapped in Haiti.
Speaking with the Washington Examiner, Brewer and Geist laid out their plans to evacuate the remaining Americans from the country as quickly as possible, combining their resources and expertise.
“He was the perfect partner for us,” Brewer said of Geist. “We really had a gap in our ability to bring people from our safe zones and in the north of Haiti to Miami, and so Mark came in with some solutions for us to get some larger planes in so we can get our shuttles and our helicopters in with a number of people.”
“We’re really looking forward to that because I think we’ll be able to move more Americans each day into the U.S.,” he added.
The goal was to evacuate 30 Americans per day, but with Geist’s help, Brewer believes the number could increase to 60. Previously, the best they could do was 24 evacuations per day, with an average of about 12-14.
“Working with Mark should be able to double that, if not more,” Brewer said.
After the collapse of Haiti’s government due to gang violence, well over 1,000 Americans were trapped in the country. Brewer’s organization, The Brewer Group, has operated in the country for over 15 years, primarily providing and supporting medical care, orphanages, and disaster relief. The latest crisis has shifted the focus of the group to evacuating the trapped Americans, which Brewer estimates is now around 500-600 people.
Brewer estimates that his group has evacuated about 126 Americans in total. To evacuate more, he is joining forces with Geist, a former CIA contractor who was severely wounded in the 2012 battle of Benghazi. He is credited with helping to save the lives of over 25 Americans from Islamic militants at the CIA annex during the attack.
Geist explained how using their assets to evacuate Americans is more efficient than the State Department, which has cooperated with TBG in dealing with the evacuations.
“The reason we can do it so much easier, so much better, is it doesn’t cost us the amount of money it would the U.S. government because if the U.S. government’s going to do something, an operation that would cost us … half a million dollars, well it would cost the U.S. government probably $25 million,” he said.
Geist has plenty of previous experience in evacuating people from warzones, aside from his role in the Benghazi attack. He helped evacuate Americans from Afghanistan during the government’s collapse in 2021, evacuated Christians from Bethlehem in the West Bank after the beginning of the Israel-Hamas war, and played a limited role in evacuating Americans from Sudan upon the beginning of the civil war in 2023.
The gangs aren’t deliberately seeking to harm Americans, according to Geist, likely wanting to avoid the wrath of the U.S. government. However, many of the Americans trapped in Haiti are of Haitian or Caribbean descent, meaning they are even more likely to be caught in the crossfire, “and that’s why it’s so important to get them out of Port-au-Prince.”
Most rescues don’t involve sending armed security groups into gang-occupied territory. Instead, Geist explained, contacts direct trapped citizens to meet with Brewer and Geist’s organization at a designated spot, at which point they are taken to the Cap-Haïtien International Airport in the north. The airport itself has been largely secured, with gang violence being centered in the capital.
Brewer himself visited Haiti for two weeks before heading back to the United States last week. He described a dire situation.
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“The trauma in … the people is probably the worst thing that you can see,” he said. “You know, those kids that are completely traumatized, living in, literally laying on floors all day because there’s … machine gun fire and military-grade weapons being used right outside your house, in your neighborhood.”
“It’s a rough situation,” Brewer continued. “Because it’s not like you have a government that they can call, refer to, lean on — there’s no government. It doesn’t even exist.”