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Article Excerpt
IN A POEM CALLED "BOTPIPEL" (BOAT PEOPLE), HAITIAN FELIX MORRISEAU Leroy (1912-1998) writes:
Nou tap kouri pou Fo Dimanch Nou vin echwe nan Kwom Avni. We were running from Ft. Dimanche We washed ashore on Krome Avenue.
Morisseau assumed his audience would recognize not only the first line's reference to the notorious prison and torture center in Port-au-Prince, but also the name of the US immigration detention center in Miami where so many Haitians and others have ended up. Morriseau wrote these lines in the 1980s. At about the same time, Amnesty International sued on behalf of a group of Haitian trade union activists allegedly tortured at Fort Dimanche; and, in a court battle over the 2,100 Haitian asylum seekers locked up at the Krome Avenue detention camp and elsewhere, then-Associate Attorney General Rudolph Giuliani claimed that there was "no political repression" in Haiti and that dictator Jean Claude "Baby Doc" Duvalier had "personally assured him that Haitians returning home from the United States were not persecuted" (UPI, 1982). Giuliani also explained, in a panel discussion on public television, that confining the Haitians "is not punishment ... it is detention for the purpose of adjudicating someone's right to be here.... We need an orderly process, and detention aids the orderly process." His point seems reasonable enough, taken at face value. But Giuliani went further, denying the reality of incarceration. When even a top immigration official admitted the Haitian asylum seekers were "in jail," Giuliani countered that while the facilities look like jails, they are not jails. He continued: "If [the Haitians] attempt to leave, they are stopped from leaving.... There is usually [a] perimeter security, [but] they are not held behind bars, they are not locked behind bars at night" (Annenberg, 1984). In fact, the Haitians were held not only at Krome but at the Ft. Allen detention center in Puerto Rico as well as "Federal correction facilities in Kentucky, New York, Texas and West Virginia" (Jaynes, 1982). On the television panel, federal judge Marvin Shoob was the voice of common sense: "We have people who have been incarcerated for three years, and Mr. Giuliani says this is not punishment.... Cuban detainees have been incarcerated in a maximum security prison in Atlanta, the toughest prison in the United States, and the government says this is not punishment."
The semantics matter. Functionary Giuliani's lies were integral to detention policy and remain so. The Haitians must be economic, not political refugees, or else the United States incurs legal obligations to offer them protection (from regimes we have happened to be supporting). And although the administration uses detention as a deterrent to other potential asylum seekers, in violation of international refugee norms--and uses detention more generally to coerce a range of noncitizens to drop any legal claims they might have and to leave--this cannot be "punishment" because, if it were, the detainees would have certain due process rights.
MANY PEOPLE FIRST HEARD ABOUT IMMIGRATION DETENTION AFTER September 11, 2001. But on September 10, the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), an agency of the Justice Department, already held about 23,000 detainees in its custody. Since March 2003, the Department of Homeland Security's Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has managed immigration detention. The people in custody are called "detainees" but they are, in fact, prisoners, held in federal penitentiaries, private prisons, local jails, and "service processing centers" while awaiting deportation or legal proceedings. These detention facilities can be found in 49 of the 50 states as well as in Puerto Rico, Guam, and the US Virgin Islands.
Between 1995 and 2007, the average daily population of US immigration detainees increased from about 6,000 to more than 27,000. While recent enforcement has driven the numbers up rapidly, the major reason for the increase is...
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