Interview of Drew Aiken with Defend Haiti

Defend Haiti

Miami, USA  — Interviewed by Defend Haiti, Drew Aiken from the University of Miami Human Rights and Immigration Clinic depicted how awful deportees’ living conditions are in Haiti after the disaster. The Clinic, she said, are asking the United States government to stop deportations to the earthquake-ravaged country or to consider some humanitarian factors before sending people there.

Defend Haiti (DH): When and why did the Human Rights and Immigration Clinic project start?

DA: It began last year in January 2011 after the U.S. restarted deporting people to earthquake-ravaged Haiti. We discovered then that deportees were detained in horrible conditions in Haiti’s detention centers. One of them, Wildrick Guerrier, even died of cholera.

On January 6, 2011, the Human Rights and Immigration Clinic, along with the Center for Constitutional Rights, Florida Immigrant Advocacy Center, Haitian Women in Miami (FANM), Alternative Chance and the Loyola Law Clinic and Center for Social Justice filed an emergency petition for precautionary measures with the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) to halt the roundups, detention, and imminent deportations of hundreds of Haitian nationals by the U.S. government. The Inter-American Commission granted and recommended not to deport people to bad medical conditions or people with strong family ties in the US. Then the Immigration Clinic worked with the Commission to make sure that the US government complies with those recommendations.

DH: The Human Rights Clinic met deportees in Haiti during a trip down there. Can you tell us more about their living conditions?

DA: The Human rights Clinic went to Haiti in February 2012 to Haiti to update the Inter-American Commission about how the deportees are doing there.

Their living conditions are very bad. A lot of them don’t have any job and are living in tent camps. Many of them have serious health conditions including HIV. One deportee we met had a serious injury, it was infected, and living in an unsanitary tent made the infection worse.

Moreover, many deportees have U.S. citizen children living in the States and now they are unable to support them. So the family impact is very great on the people in the U.S., their families are ripped apart by those deportations.

Deportees are much stigmatized in Haiti, so it’s very hard for them to get employment. Some are lucky enough to be with family, but it’s not the case for much of them. The conditions on the ground are very bad, there are still half of million people displaced, there is not enough food, water, or medicine. And it’s worse for deportees because they don’t have any ID so they have much trouble finding help.

We met deportees in Haiti’s detention center. It smells, it’s filthy, detainees are screaming. A lot of people deported from the U.S. are detained automatically in Haiti without any process even though their convictions in the U.S. were very minor and in some cases carried no prison sentences.

DH: What can the Human Rights Clinic do exactly in this situation?

DA: That’s what we have been working on, we take the pending deportation cases in the U.S. to the Inter-American Commission, and then we have working meetings in Washington DC with officials. We discuss how the government is complying with the commission’s recommendations: first stopping deportations, but specifically considering humanitarian factors before deporting anyone such as family ties in the U.S., medical conditions and so forth.

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We went especially to Haiti to document the deportees’ situation and say to U.S. government:

“those people you send there don’t have water or medicine and are living under tarps”.

DH: The Human Rights and Immigration Clinic asks stopping deportations of those who are not yet deported, but what can be done for those already deported to Haiti?

DA: It is very difficult for a deportee to come back in the U.S., perhaps some cases could be reviewed but it’s very hard. But in Haiti there is a reintegration program that U.S. government has set up for them, and we want to be sure that they get services from this. We want to make sure they get all the help possible. Besides this, some deportees’ organizations are also trying to help them to adapt to their new country, the culture.

Many deportees landing in Haiti were born in the US or elsewhere, they probably have tattoos, they don’t speak creole, so people look at them differently and many times they’re blamed for crimes they have not committed. They’re targeted and stigmatized. We are very concerned about their safety.

DH: The US government continues to deport people after the January 12 earthquake. How many were deported since then and does the UM Clinic really contribute to lowering the number of deportees to Haiti?

While we remain highly concerned that States continue to forcibly remove Haitian nationals, we believe that our advocacy has had some positive effect on the U.S.’s deportation policy.

For example, we believe that the number of individuals deported from the U.S. since the January 2010 earthquake – over 468 (there were 468 deported from January 2011 to February 2012, but we do not have the totals for March 2012; the total is probably over 500 since approximately 50 people have been deported per month for the past 6 months) – is lower than the 700 per year anticipated by the U.S. government.

Additionally most individuals who have been granted precautionary measures by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights have not been deported from the U.S. Thirty-five of the 55 beneficiaries of precautionary measures have not been deported.

We hope that the number of deportation gets smaller or comes close to zero. Haiti is still so fragile and this is putting a burden on a country that already lacks so much.

 

VIDEO: The case of Samuel Durand ( 5 min).

 

Source: Defend Haiti  | stophaitideportations.org