Rescuers said weather conditions had improved, but prospects of survival looked increasingly dire.
KEY WEST, Fla. — The prospects of survival for dozens of migrants lost at sea were looking increasingly bleak on Wednesday as the U.S. Coast Guard continued its search for 38 people whose boat capsized in the Florida Straits over the weekend.
“It is dire,” Capt. Jo-Ann F. Burdian, the commander of the Coast Guard’s Miami district, said at a news conference on Wednesday. “The longer they remain in the water, without food, without water, it’s cold, with the marine environment, the sun, the conditions. Every moment that passes, and it becomes much more dire and unlikely that anyone can survive.”
The search operation began at about 8 a.m. on Tuesday when a commercial mariner reported seeing a 25-foot boat capsized about 40 miles east of Fort Pierce, Fla. A tug and barge pulled a survivor off the hull. He was taken to a hospital to be treated for dehydration and sun exposure.
The man, whose nationality was not released, told the authorities that he had left Bimini, in the Bahamas, on Saturday night with 39 other people. The vessel capsized shortly after leaving in weather that included a severe cold front, up to nine-foot seas and 23 mile-per-hour winds. No one was wearing life jackets.
The Coast Guard spotted at least one dead person in the water, Captain Burdian said.
The voyage appeared to be part of a human-smuggling operation, she said. In the past year, some 700 people have been intercepted at sea off South Florida, she said.
The Bahamas is a popular departure location for Haitians trying to make it to the United States.
Human smuggling across borders at sea has been intensifying in recent years, on both ends of the United States. The Coast Guard at times has intercepted more than 100 Cubans, Dominicans and Haitians crammed into a single boat in choppy Florida waters. And smuggling networks have ferried loads of undocumented immigrants from Yemen, Mexico and Central America, sailing from Mexico to Southern California.
Without shelter from the elements and at the mercy of their handlers, many migrants have died en route.
“Honestly, I think the decision to take to the sea is a complicated one,” Captain Burdian said. “Certainly, as we saw in this, the waters in the Northern Straits can be quite treacherous.”
The Coast Guard has so far searched about 7,500 nautical miles, an area about the size of New Jersey, she said. The search was continuing on Wednesday, but at some point, she said, officials would have to call off the operation as the chances of survival grew more slim.
The authorities in the Bahamas said information about the boat and those aboard it was still being gathered.
“Everything is sketchy right now,” said Keith Bell, minister of immigration in the Bahamas. “We are communicating with our U.S. counterparts, and we are in communication with the Ministry of National Security as well to see what information is available, just to confirm whether or not it did in fact come from Bimini and who were these persons.”
The recent surge in maritime smuggling of migrants to Florida and California has occurred as technology deployed along the land borders has made it increasingly difficult to elude capture.
The number of Cubans making the perilous journey is smaller than the large numbers that arrived before January 2017, when the Obama administration ended the policy that had allowed Cubans to remain legally in the United States once they touched U.S. soil. But the numbers are climbing quickly as economic hardship intensifies on the Caribbean island.
Haitian migrants, who most often embark from the Bahamas, have frequently boarded rickety homemade boats, paying thousands of dollars for a shot at leaving a country engulfed in gang violence, political upheaval and destitution after the assassination of the former president and a deadly earthquake. Migrants from the Dominican Republic have also tried to make the maritime crossing.
Since the beginning of October, Coast Guard crews have intercepted 155 Dominicans and 129 Haitians near Puerto Rico, with hundreds more taken into custody during the 2021 fiscal year. In September, the Coast Guard stopped a boat carrying 104 Haitian migrants, jammed shoulder to shoulder, less than 20 miles from Miami.
In California, apprehensions of migrants and smugglers at sea nearly doubled from fiscal 2019 to 2020, and they continued to rise in fiscal 2021, with 1,460 apprehensions as of July, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection.
Smugglers on the West Coast typically use rudimentary flat-bottomed fishing boats, called pangas, that pick up migrants on the beaches in Baja California, the Mexican state just south of California. But they have also tried to mingle with tourists by employing pleasure boats.
In the span of two weeks in August, the Border Patrol reported halting six separate maritime smuggling attempts. Pangas have managed to make landfall, undetected, in the wee hours of the night up the coast from San Diego to as far as Newport Beach in Orange County, and Long Beach and Malibu near Los Angeles.
On the East Coast, many of the smuggling operations have departed from Bimini, a chain of small islands in the Bahamas populated by fewer than 2,000 people. They are the closest inhabited islands to the United States.
It is predominantly Haitian migrants who have embarked from there, but residents said the operations are furtive and are rarely spotted on the mainland. “You don’t see it in the community, you only hear things. You don’t even see it,” said Robbie Smith, the former Bimini chief councilor. “If they’re doing it, they’re doing it when people are sleeping at night.”
Rachel Knowles-Scott contributed reporting from Nassau.
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