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The U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Florida is helping oversee Routh’s prosecution in the apparent assassination plot against Trump.
He is also the first Haitian American to serve as U.S. attorney, nominated by Biden before getting confirmed by the Senate in December 2022.
Markenzy Lapointe was raised in both Haiti and the Miami area, serving in the Marine Corps during the Gulf War in Iraq before becoming a lawyer and eventually the first Black attorney to be South Florida’s top federal prosecutor.
In a Monday press conference, Lapointe announced the criminal charges against Routh, who is accused of trying to assassinate Trump one day earlier at his golf club in West Palm Beach. Routh was federally charged with firearm possession by a convicted felon, and possession and receipt of a firearm with an obliterated serial number.
It is notable that Lapointe will prosecute the suspect in what the FBI has called the attempted assassination of Trump, given that the former president and his allies are continuing to repeat racist lies about Haitian immigrants who have settled in the industrial Ohio town of Springfield.
Lapointe was born in Port-au-Prince as the son of a Haitian street vendor and a tailor, moving to the U.S. as a 16-year-old who did not know English and sharing a cramped Liberty City apartment with his mother and four siblings. He was naturalized in 1995.
As a lawyer, Lapointe clerked with Florida Supreme Court Justice Harry Lee Anstead during the contested 2000 election litigation, and as U.S. attorney helped prosecute individuals accused of participating in the July 2021 assassination of Haitian President Jovenel Moise.
The federal prosecutor has maintained a pro bono practice, where he helped reunite a baby girl who was buried in the rubble of the 2010 Haiti earthquake with her family. Jenny, now a teenager, lives with her parents in the U.S., according to NBC Miami.
“One of the things you realize being the first of anything – first Haitian American, first Black U.S. attorney, is there’s a tremendous responsibility that comes with that,” Lapointe told the outlet last year. “Part of that is recognizing it means a whole lot more than you thought it would because there’s an entire community who may have felt outside of the process, outside of the mix.”
