[News] Stop the Deportations - Stand with Haiti

Tue May 17 12:54:53 EDT 2022

*Stop the Deportations – Stand with Haiti*
**
/Jan. 29, 2022 panel presentation 
<https://haitisolidarity.net/in-the-news/stop-the-deportations/> by 
Leslie Mullin at Haiti Action Committee webinar:
/
/Haiti At The Crossroads: Rebuilding Popular Democracy in Haiti 
<https://haitisolidarity.net/video-haiti-at-the-crossroads/>/

Last September, scenes from the Del Rio refugee camp in Texas horrified 
the world as we witnessed mounted US border police terrorizing Haitian 
refugees, whipping people with their reins to turn them back from the US 
border. Evoking the brutality of racial slavery, the images unmasked the 
US government’s racist disregard and contempt for black Haitian lives.

Del Rio has faded from the headlines, and the Biden Administration has 
only doubled-down on sending Haitian refugees back 
<https://msmagazine.com/2022/02/03/biden-immigration-asylum-women/?fbclid=IwAR3aP8y-6St4K8J15lErE3ZowkAJUZyWMeNyK5Ypc6uBBX3HCHMWBAmEfGA>to 
a country that its own State Department has designated the highest 
travel risk. Even before last July’s assassination of the Haitian 
president, US authorities acknowledged that Haiti was undergoing a 
“deteriorating political crisis, violence and staggering increase in 
human rights abuses.”

Last February, at the start of Black History Month, ICE began using 
what’s known as Title 42 to drastically escalate removals and expulsion 
of Haitian refugees, resulting in untold human rights violations for 
Haitian asylum seekers. Title 42 grew out of the Trump White House 
effort to close off the southern US border. It uses the pandemic as the 
pretext 
<https://theconversation.com/haitian-migrants-at-the-border-an-asylum-law-scholar-explains-how-us-skirts-its-legal-and-moral-duties-168556?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=bylinetwitterbutton&fbclid=IwAR0u9aoEfiPuRJr22_0cYsolKcmvZF3Q0LTUTazhgEZgZqTuVZR9unEmN70>to 
stop refugees from entering the US. It has been referred to as “Trump’s 
Invisible Wall”.

Under Title 42, the US has effectively eliminated the right to asylum in 
violation of US and international law. [/ed: In response to widespread 
protest and advocacy, the Biden Administration has since announced that 
it will end implementation of Title 42 on May 23rd, but legal challenges 
by Republican-led initiatives put that date in question/]. Masquerading 
as public health policy, Title 42 permits refugees to be summarily 
expelled from the US by any border agent without having access to apply 
for asylum or other humanitarian relief, immigration courts, or legal 
counsel. Hundreds of thousands of people are being denied the right to 
seek protection, not only Haitians, but refugees from around the world.

Since September, over 20,000 Haitians to date have been forcibly 
returned to Haiti. In one recent month, 49 chartered flights left the US 
filled with Haitian refugees. Often chained and shackled, without food 
or water, they are dropped off at the Toussaint Louverture Airport in 
the Haitian capital, Port-au-Prince, with nothing to their name. Some 
are women 35 to 36 weeks pregnant.

On another front of global US policing, in collaboration with Caribbean 
countries like the Dominican  Republic and Bahamas, the US Coast Guard 
extends its armed patrols far into the Caribbean to hunt down and return 
Haitians before they ever get near US borders. During one week in late 
January 2022, the Coast Guard intercepted 88 Haitians near the Bahamas 
and returned them to Haiti. Another 191 Haitians were intercepted near 
the southern Bahamas.

We can’t talk about this country’s indefensible treatment of Haitian 
refugees without addressing the role our government plays in creating 
the circumstances that drive people to flee. Eighteen years of foreign 
intervention and occupation since the 2004 US-backed coup overthrew 
President Jean-Bertrand Aristide have brought only widespread misery, 
insecurity, and violence. The immediate US/UN occupation response to the 
2010 Haiti earthquake that killed over 200,000 people was heightened 
military presence in and around Haiti because the Obama administration 
feared an exodus of refugees. A democratic Haitian government would have 
begun to repair Haiti, restore infrastructure, housing, sanitation, 
education, health care, food security - all efforts the Aristide 
government was undertaking before the coup. Instead the US launched the 
infamous Bush/Obama/Clinton Build Back Better plan - an undisguised 
global corporate/NGO grab-bag to plunder Haiti’s resources and make a 
profit.

Since then, the US has steadfastly backed a series of corrupt and brutal 
regimes in Haiti headed by the PHTK party. Government affiliated death 
squad gangs have paralyzed the country with the worst kidnapping wave in 
Haitian history. Death squad violence targets grassroots communities for 
their political resistance. People are literally unable to leave their 
homes for fear of being kidnapped, raped or murdered. Nowhere is safe. 
Thousands of people have been, and are, being killed, including many 
journalists.

We need to unpack the racism of the mainstream media that talks as if 
these things are endemic to Haiti or to a “failed state” or to African 
people in general. They repeat one racial trope after another and fail 
to make the connection between the horrific conditions facing Haitians 
and the US-orchestrated policies that have created them.

The US border industry maintains secret detention centers across this 
country which are designed to deny people access to the outside world - 
to family, attorneys, interpreters and the media. Haitian refugees in US 
custody are being detained in freezing crowded cells without adequate 
food or water, without sanitation or basic medical care, and without 
knowing why or for how long.

Often what many of us know about refugees comes from the images we see 
of thousands of people massed at the border. We don’t know who each of 
these people are. But each has a story.

Here is the story of one Haitian man currently in US custody, told to a 
member of Haiti Action Committee. He and his family owned a plot of land 
in Haiti where they planned to build a home. Local agents of the PHTK 
ruling party came to take their land. When the man and his family 
resisted, the man’s father was shot and killed. Eventually, the son fled 
to the US. His wife remained in Haiti. The agents returned again to 
seize the land. When his wife, then six months pregnant, stood up to 
them, she too was murdered. Now this man, bereft of this family, waits 
in an ICE facility hoping that the US will recognize his claim to asylum.

After Haiti’s 2010 earthquake, Brazil became a main destination for 
Haitians leaving their country. Brazil used its position as the lead 
country in the UN occupation force (MINUSTAH) to recruit Haitians with 
the promise of work  as Brazil was preparing for the World Cup and 
Olympics. After years of low-wage labor helping build the infrastructure 
for these major events, Haitians found themselves disposable and no 
longer welcome. By the thousands, they left Brazil for Chile, and as 
conditions became even more deplorable there, to the United States.

Only the most desperate, determined and courageous people would choose 
to make the arduous 7000 mile journey through Latin America to the 
United States.  Estimates are that in 2021 over 60% of the people 
undertaking the treacherous Darien Gap 
<https://www.migrationportal.org/insight/increasingly-hemispheric-nature-migration-through-americas-demands-regional-cooperation/>through 
Central America have been Haitian men and women; some are pregnant, some 
are single moms, some are children and infants who are facing extreme 
danger and grueling conditions. They have dealt with extreme heat, 
exhaustion and hunger – and been victimized by robbery and rape, all in 
order to reach the U.S.  Del Rio showed us what awaits them if they make 
it.

It’s important to understand that this is not new. For over half a 
century, the US has backed brutal Haitian dictators while expelling 
Haitian refugees back to the dangers they have fled. The first boat 
carrying Haitians fleeing the Duvalier dictatorship arrived in the US in 
the 1960s. All were deported. From the 1970s through the 1980s, as 
Haitians still endured the regimes of Papa Doc and Baby Doc Duvalier, 
the US continued to expedite the swift removal of Haitian refugees.

After the 1991 military coup that overthrew Haiti’s first democratic 
government headed by President Aristide, thousands of his supporters 
were hunted down and killed by the military junta and their death 
squads. The number of Haitian refugees fleeing repression rose 
dramatically. The Coast Guard captured and forcibly repatriated many 
thousands, and imprisoned up to 21,000 Haitians at a time at Guantanamo 
Bay.

This outrage sparked massive worldwide protest. Within the US, a vibrant 
movement consisting of the Haitian diaspora, prominent Black activists 
and artists, college students, churches, human rights, labor and 
anti-imperialist activists emerged. In 1992, 82 year old dance artist 
Katherine Dunham undertook a 47 day hunger strike to protest the Bush 
Administration’s policy of repatriating Haitian refugees. Tennis 
champion Arthur Ashe was arrested in front of the White House along with 
other leading Black activists at a protest organized by TransAfrica and 
the NAACP. Two years later, TransAfrica Forum Director Randall Robinson 
fasted nearly a month to protest the Clinton Administration's policy of 
returning refugees to Haiti without hearings on asylum.

The Haiti Action Committee grew out of this movement. Our first action 
took place thirty years ago when Haiti Action, Bay Area Peace Navy, 
ACT-UP, Global Exchange, and others joined together to protest the  
unjust and racialized policy of the US towards Haitian refugees. With 
the enthusiastic participation  of Haitian community members, the Bay 
Area Peace Navy launched three boats across the San Francisco Bay from 
Berkeley to San Francisco filled with several dozen Haitian passengers, 
some who were formerly refugees. Waiting to welcome the Haitians  at the 
San Francisco pier were 250 demonstrators along with supportive members 
of the City Board of Supervisors ready to present them with flowers. The 
District Attorney at the time,Terence Hallinan, was set to give a 
welcome speech.

The Coast Guard got wind of the action and thought San Francisco was 
threatened with an influx of Haitian refugees. Carrying out official US 
policy, a Coast Guard cutter and helicopter intercepted the boats to 
prevent their landing. Authorities boarded the boats and inspected 
everyone’s papers. Passersby on the San Francisco wharf began chanting 
Let Them Land! Let Them Land! The action made headlines and brought the 
issue right to the shores of the Bay Area. Like today, activism and 
solidarity makes a difference.

The fight for refugee rights has never been more urgent - not only for 
Haitians, but for displaced peoples around the world from Honduras, 
Guatemala and El Salvador, to Syria and Yemen, Iraq, Sudan and more. 
Consistent advocacy work for Haitian refugees is underway among Haitian 
and Black activists, community organizations, churches, refugee rights 
and grassroots organizations.

We embrace this work and join in the demand tostop the deportations 
<https://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/san-francisco-protesters-rally-against-treatment-of-haitian-migrants-at-texas-border/2666052/>. 
No one is illegal. We stand with Haitians and all other refugees. We 
hold the US government accountable for its criminal inhumane violations 
of refugee rights and we demand an end to US intervention in Haiti.

Stand with Haiti! Stop the Deportations!

US, Biden Administration:

Stop Funding Terror in Haiti

-- 
Haiti Action Committee
PO Box 2040
Berkeley,CA 94702
Website <https://haitisolidarity.net>
YouTube <https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCjujXAgb681TkRNdEo1hh5Q>
Facebook <https://www.facebook.com/HaitiActionCommittee>
Twitter <https://twitter.com/HaitiAction1>

Celebrating 30 years of solidarity with the anti-colonial grassroots 
struggle for dignity, democracy and self-determination of the Haitian 
people!

<https://haitisolidarity.net/donate/>

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