17398: (Hermantin) Miami Herald- We the Haitian people (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: leonie hermantin <lhermantin@hotmail.com>

Posted on Sun, Nov. 23, 2003

We the Haitian people
By ANDRES VIGLUCCI
aviglucci@herald.com



For one day short of two months, U.S. immigration authorities kept Lormise
Guillaume and her 2-year-old son, Jordan, locked away in a small motel room.
Armed guards were at their door at all times. Lormise and Jordan were not
allowed outdoors. They could not open a window. Jordan could not have toys
or crayons.

Often there were no diapers for Jordan. All he had to wear was an adult
T-shirt.

Jordan would not eat the food provided him. He cried much of the time.
Sometimes, Lormise had to restrain him when he woke up screaming or banged
his head against the wall.

Their offense: coming to the United States clandestinely on a boat from
Haiti to seek political asylum. Lormise said they came to escape the gang of
political enforcers whose death threats had chased her husband, Dany, out of
Haiti a year earlier.

But to the government, Lormise and Jordan's presence on U.S. soil
represented a security threat. So much so that on the day they were taken to
a hearing at immigration court, Dany -- with a work permit and a home
awaiting his family in Fort Lauderdale -- was not permitted to hug his son.

For the past 12 months, immigration authorities -- using anti-terrorist
powers granted them after Sept. 11 by the USA Patriot Act -- have been in
blanket fashion placing Haitian asylum-seekers in indefinite custody, a
policy that is applied to no other nationality. High officials have said the
policy is necessary to avert a mass emigration from perennially troubled
Haiti.

To dozens of families like the Guillaumes, the official stance has meant
weeks and months of anguish as unaccompanied children are detained, husbands
separated from wives, and mothers with bewildered children confined to rooms
leased by the government at a Comfort Inn Suites motel -- in some cases even
after immigration judges have granted them release. U.S. Attorney General
John Ashcroft asserted authority to set aside judges' decisions to protect
national security.

The U.S. policy has also meant, according to immigrant-rights advocates,
that scores of Haitians with potentially legitimate claims of persecution
have been deported under speeded-up procedures they contend don't allow time
to prepare complex legal cases. In several instances, young people forcibly
returned to Haiti, including one 14-year-old orphan, have disappeared.

The photographs in this magazine are a storehouse of images from a critical
passage in the Haitian diaspora. They encompass the despairing gestures of
those who linger in custody, the unflagging faith in America's promise
evident in the faces of those who have won release, and the efforts of South
Florida's Haitian community -- through protests and demonstrations, prayers
and special Masses -- to rally support from the rest of the country, where
their cause remains largely unpublicized and unheard.

Etched in each of these portraits is an alloy of faith and determination --
nothing less than Haitian newcomers' stubborn insistence on making a place
for themselves in an unfamiliar new land, no matter how grudging the
welcome.

In many respects, the Guillaumes have been luckier than others.

On the warm May morning when they posed for photographer Bruce Weber,
Lormise and Jordan -- yes, after Michael Jordan -- were barely a month out
of detention. In the photograph, Lormise Guillaume's face radiates gladness
as she tries, squeezing Jordan's cheeks, to make the boy smile.

Like many of those who came before them, Dany and Lormise are eager to build
a new life in the face of some very long odds.

''I love this country,'' Dany said. ``I am happy that I came. We were having
trouble in Haiti, and God put us on solid ground here.''

Yet in his own close-up portrait on another page, Dany seems wary. He said
he still can't understand why his new country found it necessary to lock up
his wife and child.

At the motel, Jordan grew increasingly listless, so severely dehydrated he
finally had to be rushed to the emergency room. Only then did authorities
release Lormise and Jordan to Dany's custody while their asylum case is
decided.

In other instances, the consequences of U.S. policy have been more dire.
Franquelyn Thermitus, 25, pictured in these pages while jailed at the Krome
Avenue immigration detention center, disappeared in Haiti after his
deportation in August. He left behind a 16-year-old sister, Rose, who has
been detained more than a year. She is being held by immigration authorities
at Boystown, a children's shelter in Miami, even though an adult cousin in
New York has offered to take her in.

Every Sunday, Rose is allowed to speak on the phone with her cousin, Ulna
Thermitus.

''I tried everything so she could come with me, but nothing worked,'' Ulna
said earlier this month. ``She's depressed. She stay in there too long. The
other day she was crying about Franquelyn. She miss him.''

Their story illustrates the harrowing circumstances that drive many Haitians
to seek safe haven in South Florida: Rose and Franquelyn boarded a boat to
Miami after political gangsters torched their home. Their parents, who
disappeared, are presumed dead. During a recent trip home, Ulna searched
fruitlessly for Franquelyn. She prays he's OK.

It was Rose and Franquelyn's arrival on Miami's shores, along with 200
others seeking asylum from growing turmoil in Haiti, that triggered the
shift in U.S. policy.

Their boat ran aground off Virginia Key at midday on Oct. 29, 2002,
disgorging scores of people into the shallow water and onto busy
Rickenbacker Causeway: men, women and children, some carrying babies,
scrambling for shore as TV helicopters broadcast the pathetic scene to the
nation.

Their prompt detention signaled an end to the practice in force for years
previously. Until then, Haitian asylum seekers in South Florida who could
demonstrate a credible asylum claim had been routinely released to await
final determination of their cases.

Rose and Franquelyn were not the only orphans on the boat to be separated.
Ophelio Joseph, 14, was among 19 passengers who never reached shore and were
immediately repatriated. He, too, has not been heard from since.

His older brother, Ernesto Joseph, has been detained in Miami for most of a
year while the government contests his family's assertion, backed up with
documents from Haiti, that he is only 16, and thus a minor eligible for
release.

Ernesto's is a tangled case: He was briefly released to an uncle in Miami
after a psychologist concluded he was suffering from extreme depression and
post-traumatic stress syndrome. He was awarded asylum by an immigration
judge. But then he was rearrested last month and taken to the Comfort Suites
after an immigration appeals court overturned the asylum grant. He now may
be deported at any time.

If he is, Ernesto would share the fate of more than half the boat's
passengers. According to the Florida Immigrant Advocacy Center in Miami,
which has represented many of the passengers, about 110 had been deported by
the end of October. Nine remain in custody. About 80 have been released,
either after winning asylum or on temporary humanitarian grounds, like the
Guillaumes.

This new chapter in Haitians' long struggle for libete, egalite, fraternite
has by chance coincided with Haiti's 200th year of independence, a milestone
observed as fervently in Little Haiti as in Port-au-Prince, where those
lofty goals seem today as far removed as ever. Their pleas for fair
treatment have thus been imbued with Haitians' enormous pride in their
heritage.

Last May, on Haitian Flag Day, hundreds gathered under the old oak trees
behind Notre Dame D'Haiti Catholic Church in Little Haiti: musicians,
worshipers, 15 priests -- nearly every one of them holding a flag, or a
banner, or wearing the red and blue of the Haitian flag. Even the oaks.

They listened patiently, intently, while speaker after speaker displayed a
keen sense of America's tradition as a welcoming beacon in spite of the
obstacles that Haitians, among the most tired, the poorest and hungriest of
all, must surmount to reach it.

''We the Haitian people, we come to this country to work, to look for a
better life,'' the Rev. Robes Charles said in his homily. ``Our only crime
is coming on a boat, and they put us in jail. What kind of justice is this?

``God is with us in this fight . . . We are a good people. We aren't home
yet. But you know what? We are not giving up.''


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