The New Dark Age

1 April, 2010 — HLLN

Recommended HLLN Link:
Contact info at
www.margueritelaurent.com/campaigns/campaigntwo/TPS_08.html#sampleTPSletter

Please mail letters demanding that the Obama Administration release the earthquake victims from US prisons, provide them with trauma and other medical help, re-unite families, grant humanitarian parole as necessary and stop all deportations to Haiti. CC: erzilidanto@yahoo.com

In this post

– Rushed From Haiti, Then Jailed for Lacking Visas
By NINA BERNSTEIN, March 31, 2010 | nyti.ms/dwQeJb

– Haiti: Addressing Atrocities Following the Quake
by Suzan Song, March 31, 2010, Huffington Post
www.huffingtonpost.com/suzan-song/haiti-addressing-atrociti_b_520353.html

March 31, 2010
Rushed From Haiti, Then Jailed for Lacking Visas
By NINA BERNSTEIN | nyti.ms/dwQeJb

More than two months after the earthquake that devastated Haiti, at least 30 survivors who were waved onto planes by Marines in the chaotic aftermath are prisoners of the United States immigration system, locked up since their arrival in detention centers in Florida.

In Haiti, some were pulled from the rubble, their legal advocates say. Some lost parents, siblings or children. Many were seeking food, safety or medical care at the Port-au-Prince airport when terrifying aftershocks prompted hasty evacuations by military transports, with no time for immigration processing. None have criminal histories.

But when they landed in the United States without visas, they were taken into custody by immigration authorities and held for deportation, even though deportations to Haiti have been suspended indefinitely since the earthquake. Legal advocates who stumbled on the survivors in February at the Broward County Transitional Center, a privately operated immigration jail in Pompano Beach, Fla., have tried for weeks to persuade government officials to release them to citizen relatives who are eager to take them in, letters and affidavits show.

Meanwhile, the detainees have received little or no mental health care for the trauma they suffered, lawyers at the Florida Immigrant Advocacy Center said, despite an offer of free treatment at the jail by a local Creole-speaking psychotherapist.

Their plight is a result of the scramble to cope quickly with the immigration consequences of the quakes destruction and death toll. Some Haitians who arrived without papers were handed tourist visas, only to find that status barred them from working; the more fortunate received humanitarian parole, an open-ended status that permits employment. Those already in the country illegally were allowed to apply for temporary protected status, which shields recipients from deportation for at least 18 months and lets them work.

Almost at random, it seems, immigration jail was the ad hoc solution for these 30 survivors and for others still hidden in pockets of the nations sprawling detention network. Some of the 30 have already been transferred to more remote immigration jails without explanation.

On Wednesday, after inquiries by The New York Times, a spokesman for Immigration and Customs Enforcement said the 30 Florida detainees were being processed for release, and that 35 others who had arrived since the Jan. 12 earthquake, some by boat, were also being held in detention centers around the country.

In order to mitigate the probability that Haitians may attempt to make a potentially deadly journey to the U.S., we clearly articulated that those who traveled to the U.S. illegally after Jan. 12 may be arrested, detained and placed in removal proceedings, the spokesman, Brian P. Hale, said in a statement. He added that Nina Dozoretz, acting director of the agencys Division of Immigration Health Services, had just approved counseling by the volunteer psychotherapist.

Advocates for the detainees said they had been told for weeks that deportation officers in Florida were waiting for senior officials in Washington to set a policy for the group. Most were ordered deported in February, but are eligible for release under an order of supervision until deportations resume.

Their prolonged and unnecessary detention is only exacerbating their trauma, the advocates wrote to the agency on March 19, after receiving no response to detailed, individual requests for release by two dozen of the detainees. There is no reason to spend taxpayer dollars detaining traumatized earthquake survivors who cannot be deported and who have demonstrated that they are neither a flight risk nor a danger to the community.

The governments actions have been especially bewildering for the survivors relatives, like Virgile Ulysse, 69, an American citizen who keeps an Obama poster on his kitchen wall in Norwalk, Conn. Mr. Ulysse said he could not explain to his nephews, Jackson, 20, and Reagan, 25, why they were brought to the United States on a military plane only to be jailed at the Broward center when they arrived in Orlando on Jan. 19.

Every time I called immigration, they told me they will release them in two or three weeks, and now its almost three months, said Mr. Ulysse, a retired carpenter and architectural designer who said he had always warned his relatives in Haiti not to come illegally on boats, but to wait for a green light from the United States.

On March 11, Reagan was abruptly transferred, and for days his younger brother did not know where he was. It turned out he had been taken to the Baker County jail, in Macclenny, Fla., six hours away. On Tuesday evening, a paralegal found him there in shackles, about to be transferred again; guards, following government protocol, would not say where.

His brother is far away hes waiting, waiting, Mr. Ulysse said of Jackson. He started to cry on the phone. Its very terrible.

Jackson, who was trapped in the collapse of his familys apartment building in the quake, and pulled from under cinderblock by a cousin, lost many relatives in the destruction. His formal request for release, dated March 12, describes how even the sound of someone on the jail stairs makes him fear another earthquake and worry that because he is locked up, he will be unable to escape.

The jailed survivors requests for release, prepared with help from law students volunteering on spring break, detail a variety of circumstances that led them to board the airplanes.

One man who was in a taxi when the earthquake hit was later placed on a military plane to Miami by a doctor from Texas who had treated him for severe back and leg injuries. He left the plane in a wheelchair.

Mike Kenson Delva, 21, asked a Marine for a job and was assigned to help board a young boy whose leg had been amputated, along with the boys wheelchair-bound mother. Suddenly, the plane took off.

Thats my little nephew, my brothers son, said his uncle, Reymond Joseph, 46, an American citizen and a supervisor with the New Jersey Department of Motor Vehicles, who is ready to take care of him.

Another jailed survivor is Lunva Charles, 25, who hopes to be reunited with her 3-year-old son and his father, Paul Herver Sanon, legal permanent residents living with his parents in Irvington, N.J.

I want to marry her, she wants to marry me, Mr. Sanon, who works in a nursing home, said in French on Tuesday. Shes sad, shes so sad, she wants to see her child.

The youngest detainee, Eventz Jean-Baptiste, 18, has no parents. He is now responsible for his two younger brothers, who are homeless and living in a tent city in Port-au-Prince, Charu Newhouse al-Sahli, the statewide director of the advocacy center, wrote in urging his release to his aunt and uncle in Coral Springs, Fla.

Mr. Jean-Baptiste describes putting his little brother and a cousins baby on top of a collapsed concrete wall during the quake, as they all prayed and cried. Afterward, we had nothing to eat or drink, he said. I thought if I stayed in Haiti any longer I would not survive, and my family would not survive, so I decided to try to board a plane. No one asked him for papers until he reached Orlando, he said.

Haiti: Addressing Atrocities Following the Quake
by Suzan Song, March 31, 2010, Huffington Post

www.huffingtonpost.com/suzan-song/haiti-addressing-atrociti_b_520353.html

By now, people are aware of the earthquake’s toll in Haiti. Two months later, the smell of dead bodies trapped under the rubble still lingers in the air, and food, water, and security barely exist. On top of this devastation is a second natural disaster that followed: girls and women, from 2 to 72 years old, are being raped in their make-shift shelters.

Just as we assisted in the aftermath of the earthquake, we now need to assist in the aftermath of this new devastation. We do this by invigorating a policy already in place, called humanitarian parole, an immigration status that allows the most vulnerable to enter the U.S. for a temporary period of time, for an urgent, compelling reason such as life-threatening medical need, or to promote a significant public benefit.

Consider Solange, a 16-year-old straight-A student whose dream was to become a nurse. In forty seconds, her life collapsed as her parents and siblings lay under the crumbled blocks of her home. She wandered the streets alone until an elderly man offered to help. He brought two men to rape her.

Solange received no protection, and cannot find food or water. The cement wall that took her family also injured her back, but she cannot receive the urgent surgery in Haiti that is required to fix it.

The earthquake demolished safety networks of family and community. Women are fearful of going to get distributed goods protected by men who demand sex-for-aide. They have lost their husbands in the earthquake, and are forced to become financially independent without the skills or educational background. With children and orphans dependent on them, they are not free to relocate for work.

Sexual predation after societal devastation is not particular to Haiti. We tend not to think of ourselves as forces of nature, but we are. As agents of nature, when people experience acute trauma, some may multiply disaster by forcing their power onto others, out of psychological strain on the moral poise of being idle, angry at losing control, or frustrated with a lack of basic needs and uncertainty about the future. Indonesia had rape and abuse that threatened the physical and psychological safety of women and children in temporary camps after the tsunami. New Orleans endured rapes and sexual violence in the aftermath of Katrina.

Humanitarian parole has been used in the past, for Hungarians escaping communism, Cubans fleeing their country, Indochinese migrants who fled at the end of the Vietnam War, and others from China, Iraq, El Salvador, India, Iran, and Lebanon to name a few. No one disagrees that Haiti is a dire humanitarian crisis right now. As responsible neighbors, we need to act quickly to offer relief to these women and their children who are the future of Haiti.

Secretary Napolitano allowed humanitarian parole for Haitian orphans in the process of adoption, but parole should be extended to Haitians in need of emergency treatments, especially when treatment is only a short few hours away.

Haitian-Americans are weaving into the fabric of American politics and culture. Massachusetts and Florida both have Haitian-American officers in the state legislature. There are eight Haitian-Americans in elected office in South Florida and there is talk about sending a Haitian-American to Congress. New York and New Jersey also have Haitians that are running for state and local offices.

Americans are weathering difficult economic conditions ourselves. Many worry about immigrants (undocumented or otherwise) using publicly funded health-care, taking unskilled jobs away, using public resources like schools, and resisting assimilation.

But countries are becoming more dependent on each other, so it may be useful to build communities with our neighbors. Humanitarian parole would allow Solange admission to the U.S., to contribute economically to our country by finding meaningful work, to obtain health care for her life-threatening medical concerns, and to learn skills to provide a life for herself and help re-build her country.

We can help parole Solange out of the prison of human squalor that she’s wrongly been subjected to, surrounded by death, destruction, and rape. We can offer her humanitarian treatment for her potentially life-threatening medical and psychological suffering.

An Urgent HLLN Action Appeal:
Ask Obama to release the earthquake victims from US prisons, grant them
humanitarian parole

Folks, we need you to restart sending letters out to Homeland Security chief, Janet Napolitano; Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and President Barack Obama urging that the earthquake victims currently warehoused in US jails be immediately released, granted humanitarian parole and/or Temporary Protected Status (TPS) be granted to not just Haitians who were in the US before January 12th but also the earthquake victims needing immediate medical treatment or, who like “the 30 survivors who were waved onto planes by Marines in the chaotic aftermath are prisoners of the United States immigration system, locked up since their arrival in detention centers in Florida.” (See, New York Times – Rushed From Haiti, Then Jailed for Lacking Visas, By NINA BERNSTEIN, March 31, 2010 | nyti.ms/dwQeJb)

According to the New York Times article: “The detainees have received little or no mental health care for the trauma they suffered, lawyers at the Florida Immigrant Advocacy Center said, despite an offer of free treatment at the jail by a local Creole-speaking psychotherapist.”

The US must stop automatically criminalizing the poor quake victims and support an international response to the tragic Haiti earthquake that values all Haitian life, liberty, family and is sensitive to the human agony of family lost and separated in Haiti. This may be done through extending humanitarian parole to the earthquake victims imprisoned by the US and by extending the Temporary Protective Status (TPS) cutoff date from January 12, 2010 to December 31, 2010, allowing patients from the quake flown into the US or in need to be flown into the US for specialized medical treatment to be afforded humanitarian parole and those who are accompanying their US children post January 12 to enjoy said benefit.

TPS was established to provide protection to people who are temporarily unable to return to their homelands. Humanitarian parole is afforded for a temporary period of time, for an urgent, compelling reason such as life-threatening medical need, or to promote a significant public benefit.

In all these Obama/UN grandiose talk about relief and rebuilding Haiti, it is simply barbaric to put surviving earthquake victims from Haiti in jail in Florida or elsewhere in the US with the intention of deporting them back to the rubble and the smell of dead bodies trapped under the rubble that still lingers in the air everywhere, except in the places where the foreign “charity” workers, NGOs, Haitian elites and International communities reside in Haiti. A new social order and justice is urgent. It may begin with the US providing humanitarian parole and equal application of TPS to Haitian Nationals and the earthquake victims.

The 2010 earthquake and its more than 50 aftershocks caused horrific damages with over 300,000 dead and 1.3 Haitian nationals rendered homeless.

In 2002 TPS and a stop to deportations with work permits was renewed for Nicaraguan and Honduran immigrants because of continuing difficulties caused by Hurricane Mitch in 1998. At this point, Haiti is in much worse shape than Central Americans were at the time because of the unimaginable damage of the worst natural disaster in modern times. Haitians in the United States should receive equal treatment and protection. Haiti’s earthquake victims already in the US should be granted TPS disaster relief and/or humanitarian parole.

It’s simply inhumane to imprison and/or deport Haiti earthquake victims back to Haiti under these devastating conditions where they will find no home, no employment, no food, no personal safety and security.

The worst natural disaster in modern times is compelling enough reason for the US to provide humanitarian parole or TPS to Haitians with life-threatening medical need, or who have otherwise survived the earthquake and landed in the US on a US military plane, like “the 30 survivors who were waved onto planes by Marines in the chaotic aftermath are prisoners of the United States immigration system, locked up since their arrival in detention centers in Florida.”

This is unconscionable. The greatest superpower on earth, whose former president (Clinton) recently acknowledged his policies impoverished Haiti, added to the overcrowding in the capital, ought to stop imprisoning traumatized earthquake victims and help the people in Haiti by permitting their friends and relatives in the United States to remain here legally and given work permits to help themselves and to continue to send support to a nation in severe crisis. Please affirm the United States tradition of caring for and protecting persons in vulnerable situations by extending TPS and/or humanitarian parole or permanently stopping all deportations through Deferred Enforced Departure (DED) or any equivalent administrative or executive ruling, with a specification to stop ALL deportations and provide work permits to Haitian nationals.

Ezili Danto
Haitian Lawyers Leadership Network

*
Contact info at
www.margueritelaurent.com/campaigns/campaigntwo/TPS_08.html#sampleTPSletter

Mail letters to demanding that the Obama Administration release the earthquake
victims from US prisons, provide them with trauma and other medical help, grant
humanitarian parole, stop all deportations to Haiti. Write to:

The Honorable Barack Obama
President of the United States
The White House
Washington, DC 20500
Phone: 202 456-1111 or 1-800-906-5989
Fax: 202-456-2461 | www.whitehouse.gov/contact/

The Honorable Janet Napolitano
Secretary, Department of Homeland Security
2001 Independence Ave, SW
Washington, DC 20528
Phone: 202-282-8000
Fax: 202-282-8401
Homeland Security Comment Line: 202 282 8495

The Honorable Hillary Rodham Clinton
U.S. Secretary of State, U.S. Department of State
2201 C Street NW
Washington, DC 20520
Phone: 202-647-4000

Forwarded by Ezili’s Haitian Lawyers Leadership Network