30272: Hermantin(News)100 migrants make desperate landing (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: leonie hermantin <lhermantin@hotmail.com>

Posted on Wed, Mar. 28, 2007

100 migrants make desperate landing

BY KATHLEEN McGRORY AND TRENTON DANIEL

More than 100 famished Haitian migrants slogged through waves and staggered 
ashore Wednesday after their flimsy wooden sailboat ran aground on Hallandale 
Beach.

One man didn't make it, washing up dead on the sand. A second, naked and 
shivering in the fetal position as he clung to a shipboard rope, had to be 
pried loose by paramedics, who carried him to the beach on a stretcher. One 
10-year-old boy was aboard.

''You could tell that a lot of them didn't know how to swim. They were 
terrified. You could see it in their eyes,'' said Danny Nassi, who lives in a 
condo on the beach.

The Haitians told authorities they had spent 22 days aboard a 40-foot smuggling 
vessel. They told one witness that they ran out of food after 10 days -- then 
resorted to eating toothpaste and drinking salt water.

The boat left the northern coast of Haiti -- either from Port-de-Paix or the 
island of La Tortue, some of the migrants told people who assisted them on 
arrival.

It landed near Hallandale Beach Boulevard, behind a row of high-rise condos and 
hotels, including the recently rebuilt Westin Diplomat, which dominates the 
shoreline. A crowd of hotel guests and condo dwellers quickly gathered. 
Residents with binoculars stared down from their balconies.

And several news choppers hovered overhead, broadcasting the scene into an 
untold number of living rooms.

Haitian community activists, meanwhile, renewed demands that the Bush 
administration grant undocumented Haitian migrants temporary immigration status 
so they can avoid deportation.

Several activists planned a news conference in Miami's Little Haiti 
neighborhood later Wednesday to press their demand for an immigration benefit 
for undocumented migrants known as temporary protected status.

''Nicaraguans, Hondurans, Salvadorans and others have received TPS based on 
environmental or political factors,'' read a statement from Haitian Women of 
Miami. ``Haiti fully qualifies but has never received it.''

TPS temporarily suspends deportations and enables recipients to get work 
permits.

Rep. Kendrick B. Meek, D-Fla., immediately wrote letters to Julie Myers, the 
head of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and to Michael Rozos, the 
agency's field office director in Florida, asking that the Haitian migrants not 
be sent to detention centers outside South Florida.

The migrants were traveling aboard an old-fashioned sailing ship. The sail was 
tattered and the blue and white paint chipped.

''The vessel was obviously unseaworthy and grossly overloaded,'' said Coast 
Guard Petty Officer Jennifer Johnson. ``Nobody should have embarked on a voyage 
of that length on a vessel like that.''

Many of the passengers were bruised and scraped from riding in the crowded 
conditions.

Before the sailboat reached the shore, a few of the passengers jumped into the 
water and swam several hundred yards to shore. A local lifeguard waded in to 
help.

The passengers who remained onboard crowded the ship's deck and watched -- 
until the sailboat ran aground about a half-hour later. That unleashed a mad 
scramble through waist-deep water.

One teenage passenger flailed his arms in the water until an older passenger 
who had made it to shore came back to assist him, witnesses said.

At that point, local police, fire rescue and Coast Guard personnel arrived. 
Ambulances rushed to the beach to provide emergency medical care.

''It was intense,'' said Hugo Paez, who ran down to the beach with his camera. 
``You could tell they really wanted to come to this country.''

All told, Hallandale Beach Fire Rescue ushered 103 migrants to a firehouse on 
Hallandale Beach Boulevard and State Road A1A. The migrants were given food and 
water, said Andrew Casper, a department spokesman. Dozens of migrants, many 
draped in white blankets, a few in camouflage, crowded into the firetruck bay.

''Some of them needed medication,'' recalled Kenol Obnis, a waiter from the 
Diplomat who rushed to the station house after he saw the boat from a 
forth-floor window. ``Some of them looked very, very bad.''

Obnis said some of the migrants had bruises on their backs from the voyage.

Also helping at the firehouse was North Miami Councilwoman Marie Erlande 
Steril. The Haiti native saw the dramatic landing from her bedroom TV set. So 
she dashed to help out.

'They were afraid, trembling and crying, `Are they going to send me back?' '' 
said Steril, who said she helped interview in the firehouse. ``They were 
complaining about how much they risked their lives.''

While there, Steril helped Jean Monestime, whose older half-brother was a 
delivery brother in Hallandale Beach. Steril let Monestime use her cellphone to 
dial his half-brother, who he hadn't seen since a 2001 trip to Port-de-Paix.

''He told me, he's here, he didn't die,'' Ricardo Francois, 43, said outside 
the firehouse. ``I don't know what they're going to do to him.''

Eleven were taken to the hospital -- seven men and four women. Three were 
listed in serious condition. Others were dehydrated and weak from hunger, 
police said.

The remaining 90 were being interviewed by Border Patrol officials. They were 
taken to the Border Patrol facility in Pembroke Pines.

Every year, Haitians risk their lives -- and disappear -- by boarding leaky 
boats in a desperate attempt to reach the Bahamas or South Florida for jobs and 
opportunities.

Sometimes they reach their destination, undetected by U.S. coastal patrols.

In 2002, television networks captured the live landing of 220 Haitians 
scrambling onto Miami's Rickenbacker Causeway. The next year, almost two dozen 
Haitians came ashore in Palm Beach County.

That Haitians usually get sent back to Haiti is a constant bone of contention 
among Haitian leaders. A U.S. policy informally known as ''Wet Foot Dry Foot'' 
allows Cuban migrants to stay if they reach U.S. soil. Haitian migrants are 
sent back home.

Gov. Charlie Crist, who was briefed on the migrants' arrival Wednesday morning, 
called their landing a ``difficult situation.''

''As the grandson of an immigrant, I appreciate people's yearning for freedom 
and a better opportunity for themselves and their family,'' Crist said. ``But 
we have a federal policy that's a little bit different than that.''

Miami Herald staff writer Mary Ellen Klas contributed to this report.





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