Why not Haitians?
28th September 2021 · 0 Comments
News of thousands of Haitians fleeing political upheaval in a country hit by a presidential assassination, a 7.2 M earthquake, and Tropical Storm Grace camped out under a bridge in Del Rio, Texas, last week went viral.
Most shocking and stunning was the video of Haitian asylum seekers being prevented from stepping on American soil by Custom and Border Patrol agents (CBP) on horseback after the Haitians waded across the Rio Grande from Mexico.
CPB horsemen were wielding the reins like whips and forcing the Haitians to swim or wade back to Mexico.
The border cops looked like 19th century slave catchers. After videos of the incident went viral, the federal agents were put on administrative leave pending an investigation.
The cops violated an international law that states that once asylum seekers reach a foreign shore, they have a right to seek asylum.
The agents’ behavior exemplified the blatant disrespect and disdain that Black Americans know all too well.
Donald Trump set off a wave of anti-immigration sentiment when he left Trump Tower, declaring that Mexico was sending rapists, gangs and criminals to the U.S.
He banned Muslims from immigrating to the U.S. and told naturalized citizens like Somali-born Congresswoman Ilhan Omar to go back to the country of their origins. He called African countries “shithole” countries.
However, Trump’s zero-tolerance and cruel separation policies did nothing to discourage hundreds of thousands of brown migrants from El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala and Mexico from coming to America. More than 432,000 of these families were apprehended at the southern border in 2019, a December 2020 United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and UNICEF survey revealed.
Under pressure from refugee groups and attorneys, Trump’s administration provided shelter, food, clothing and the opportunity to seek asylum. But the holding facilities looked like detention camps or jails rather than migrant camps where asylum claims should be processed. Some adults and teenagers were deported, but unaccompanied minors were allowed to stay with family members already in the U.S.
Although Trump employed cruel policies to stop immigrants from Central America and the Caribbean from seeking asylum in the U.S., it seems the harshest rejections and deportations have always been reserved for Haitians.
Did border cops on horseback run Central American migrants down? Or deport them immediately? No.
Could it be that the darker the skin tone, the more intense the racist reaction is by white law enforcement agents?
Or is it that Haiti being the only Black-run nation in the western hemisphere is the cause for such disdain?
Whatever the reason for the backlash against Haiti, American presidents have been deporting Haitians since they fled the cruel dictatorship of Papa Doc Duvalier, his son and the series of military governments which followed them.
In 1972, President Richard Nixon jailed and expelled the “boat people,” and refused to grant them asylum, choosing to label them as economic migrants.
Presidents Ronald Reagan, George Herbert Walker Bush and William J. Clinton wouldn’t even let them reach American shores. Bush sent them to Guantanamo Bay.
President Carter, however, welcomed both Haitian and Cuban immigrants to America and President Barack Obama allowed Haitians to seek refuge in the U.S. after the devastating 2010 earthquake for humanitarian reasons.
Obama started deporting Haitians without visas in 2016, after determining that conditions had improved in Haiti and after a surge of 5,000 Haitians, many of whom immigrated from Brazil where they went to find work, arrived on the southern border.
Given Haiti’s current political instability, Haitians under the bridge in Del Rio, Texas, seem ready to endure any conditions, short of deportation, rather than remain where corruption, political persecution, crime and violence, and life-threatening conditions exist.
We feel their pain. Louisianans are experiencing the destruction of Hurricane Ida. Lives and property are destroyed, possessions lost, and life as they knew it is gone. Many don’t have adequate food, water or shelter.
Picture Haiti now. Thousands are dead, 53,000 homes are destroyed and many are still missing due to the earthquake and Tropical Storm Grace.
Unfortunately, natural disasters are not grounds for seeking asylum today. And Trump’s 2020 Title 42 law is a convenient excuse for closing the borders and keeping immigrants out under the suspicion that migrants might increase the spread of COVID-19 in the U.S.
Although the Biden administration says it’s committed to a more humanitarian immigration policy, social and racial justice, police accountability, and other lofty civil rights reforms, its actions regarding the Haitian surge are just the opposite.
If anyone should be empathetic to the plight of the Haitians, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas should be. Mayorkas’s family fled Cuba after the Cuban Revolution, resided in Florida, and settled in California. Mayorkas is responsible for border security, but he knows what fleeing political tyranny is about.
So, why is Mayorkas in court defending the use of Trump’s Title 42 to keep the borders closed?
Mayorkas had the hubris to go to the border and admonish Haitians that if they come here “illegally,” they will be deported. He bragged that hundreds have been deported since arriving in Del Rio.
Criticism of Biden’s use of Trump-Era immigration policies reached a fevered pitch last week.
The ACLU renewed its lawsuit against Title 42. Mayorkas was called to testify before Congress. A special U.S. envoy to Haiti resigned because of the “inhumane, counterproductive decision to deport thousands of Haitian refugees.”
“The people of Haiti, mired in poverty, hostage to terror, kidnappings, robberies, and massacres of armed gangs and suffering under a corrupt government with gang alliances, simply cannot support the forced infusion of thousands of returned migrants lacking food, shelter, and money without additional, avoidable human tragedy,” Ambassador Daniel Foote wrote in his resignation letter.
The Associated Press quoted an unnamed official who said the Homeland Security Department has been busing Haitians from Del Rio to El Paso, Laredo, and the Rio Grande Valley along the Texas border and added flights to Tucson, Arizona. They are processed by the Border Patrol at those locations.
Other reports suggest that single adults are being deported, and families with children are being processed for asylum.
If thousands of Haitian migrants camped under the bridge in Texas have been released into the U.S., that may be Biden’s saving grace. Perhaps, this is just a bad cop, good cop situation, with Mayorkas playing both roles.
President Biden should consider putting forth an executive order that includes humanitarian reasons as a qualification for asylum because it’s not ok to deport victims and survivors of natural disasters who have lost all.
This article originally published in the September 27, 2021 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
