Haitians who were waved onto U.S.-bound military planes in the days after the island’s quake thought they would be welcomed to the United States with open arms.
Instead, nearly 40 of those Haitians have spent the past two months behind bars.
According to a New York Times article by Nina Bernstein, around three dozen Haitians were detained in Florida immigration jails in spite of the fact that they were brought to the U.S. by military transport. Officials say the Haitians were told before leaving the island that no legal status would be granted them in the U.S.; however, it’s unclear whether that message was clearly communicated. And while many of them had U.S. family members who plead with officials to release them into their relatives’ care, the detained Haitians were only released April 1 after urging from the Florida Immigrant Advocacy Center and a critical New York Times article (“Rushed From Haiti, Then Jailed for Lacking Visas,”March 31, 2010).
The Florida detention slip-up is but one episode of the current bureaucratic nightmare for Haitians living in immigration limbo. While the Obama administration worked quickly post-quake to freeze deportation and extend temporary protected status to undocumented Haitians living in the U.S., a sea of hurdles greet Haitians hoping to benefit from those programs. Application numbers for temporary protected status, which allows recipients to work and stay in the U.S. for 18 months, have been lower than expected, due in part to $500 application fees. In addition to that exorbitant amount, many of the documents required for the application are difficult to track down.
For Haitians still in Haiti, doors to the U.S. are no more wide open. Even as the U.S. government rushed to send aid to Haiti in the wake of the tremors, their message to survivors was clear: stay put. Raymond Joseph, Haiti’s U.S. ambassador, worked with the U.S. to broadcast that stance to Haitians in daily radio messages:
Listen, don’t rush on boats to leave the country,” Mr. Joseph says in Creole, according to a transcript released by the Pentagon. “If you do that, we’ll all have even worse problems. Because, I’ll be honest with you: If you think you will reach the U.S. and all the doors will be wide open to you, that’s not at all the case. And they will intercept you right on the water and send you back home where you came from.
“Homeless Haitians Told Not to Flee to U.S.,” Jan. 18, 2010
In the days after the quake, doctors complained that government red tape was hindering efforts to bring people to U.S. hospitals for treatment.
The U.S. government rightfully worried that a softer stance on immigration would encourage Haitians to cross dangerous waters to Florida’s coast. Officials also feared that the U.S. systems that manage immigration would not be able to handle such an influx.
In part that has been the case. While the numbers of Haitian refugees coming to the U.S. are nowhere near the numbers countries like Chad have hosted in the past, the U.S. has been hard-pressed to anticipate the needs and challenges facing immigrants. The temporary protected status offered to undocumented Haitian-Americans so they could work and support far away family members was smart policy work, but that program is at risk of floundering in a system in need of reform. For Americans paying attention to the humanitarian crisis in Haiti as well as the difficulties Haitians face in the U.S., it should never be more clear that changes in the U.S. immigration system are urgently needed.
