Sports Spectrum, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons ; GPA Photo Archive, CC BY 2.0 DEED, via Flickr, Cropped by Resist the Mainstream

Football legend Tim Tebow and his foundation teamed up the Sentinel Foundation, a nonprofit team of veteran commandos, to successfully evacuate dozens of orphans with disabilities from Haiti as the island nation suffers with record levels of gang violence, and thousands more remain trapped.

Less than a month after the release of thousands of prisoners, and the sudden resignation of the prime minister, individuals in Haiti suffer extreme violence and famine. Tebow, long renowned for his charity work in troubled nations, worked with the Sentinel Foundation, which helped evacuate Americans from Afghanistan in 2021, to get the kids to safety in Jamaica.

“Today we are so deeply grateful,” an official of the Tim Tebow Foundation, who gave only the name Steve, said of the operation. “We want to express our deep gratitude to the Jamaican Ministries of Health and Jamaican National Security and Foreign Affairs for accepting 59 children from Haiti who are severely disabled and are now relocated from danger into a safe, secure new community.”

The Tebow Foundation also credited the state of Florida and Rep. Cory Mills, (R-FL) who led a previous mission to rescue a group of Americans trapped in the nation. 

The foundations worked together to provide operational support and funding, with additional guidance from Mills. 

“I'm always happy to offer my support and resources to groups like this; they're not just allies, they're brothers,” Mills said of his cooperation with the foundations. “Their mission to bring vulnerable people home is one I wholeheartedly endorse.”

“The largest obstacle in our mission was probably the rapidly changing and tightening restrictions from the U.S. and host nations like the Dominican Republic,” Austin Holmes, operations officer at Sentinel, said of the operation. 

“We understand they are seeking to protect, but when you effectively cut out the private sector, who is significantly quicker and often more entrepreneurial in their response and capabilities, you limit the level of care and reduce the number of people served,” Holmes added. “This remains a major obstacle in the humanitarian crisis facing Haiti.”

This means that they would be required to green-light missions from the non-existent Haitian government to satisfy U.S. diplomatic requirements. 

“Even though there isn't a Haitian government, there's still paperwork associated with Haiti that the American government requires us to have,” he said

Several civilian or ex-military groups have worked to fill the gap left by the Biden Administration, who repeatedly delayed rescue missions into and out of the nation. The Biden Administration chartered one flight out of the nation, but scheduled that flight to take off from Cap-Haitien, Hundreds of miles from the national capital of Port-au-Prince. 

That mission led to the evacuation of at least 30 Americans earlier this week. However, the Biden Administration required Americans who would be flying from the area to “sign a promissory note agreeing to reimburse the U.S. government for the cost of the flight,” garnering harsh criticism.

Over the span of the week, the U.S. government has aided in the evacuation of over 230 U.S. citizens. 

“We will continue to monitor demand from U.S. citizens for assistance in departing Haiti on a real-time basis,” the State Department said in a statement, reiterating that Americans should not travel to Haiti. 

However, there are non-Americans who are trapped in the nation, including thousands of children. 

“There's 30,000 children in Haiti that belong to nonprofit organizations that are run by American citizens,” said one Sentinel operator known as TJ. “Most of them have no leadership there right now because everyone's had to leave.”

“We were able to successfully evacuate 59 of those 30,000 kids. Of those 30,000, not all those kids have somewhere to go, and not all those kids have special needs, or are high risk,” he said. “We picked the most high-risk children that we could, that had the most likely chance of success and went with it, because I'd rather rescue some than none.”