U.S. Deportees in Dire Straits in Haitian Prisons

MIAMI —  The U.S. government is trying its hardest to deport Gertha Clairville to Haiti, a country she was not born in, has never lived in and where she faces certain imprisonment and possible death.

Clairville, 21, is one of hundreds, possibly thousands, of people caught in a 1996 law aimed at U.S. residents who are not citizens. Some have been convicted of relatively minor crimes, such as shoplifting and check-kiting.

Under the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act, noncitizens convicted of a long list of violent or nonviolent offenses can be automatically deported.

The Immigration and Naturalization Service hopes to deport Clairville despite the fact that doing so will leave her three small children to grow up without their mother, and knowing that she will be thrown into a Haitian prison.

“I was born in the Bahamas in 1980 and my parents, who were Haitian, came to the United States when I was 1 year old,” said Clairville, interviewed in prison in Miami where she is awaiting a final decision on her case.

In 1998, Clairville got into a fight with another woman and threatened her with a knife. She was convicted of aggravated battery and sentenced to two years in prison. When she had served her sentence, she was put on a plane with 25 others and deported to Haiti, a country she had never seen.

“When I got there, the officials couldn’t understand me and I couldn’t understand them. They took me to a jail in Port au Prince. I was there for two months,” she said.

She was put in a cell with nine other women. They took turns sleeping on a concrete floor with no blankets and bought their own food and water since the prison did not supply any. A prison officer threatened to rape her and only backed off when she screamed in terror.

“It was terrible. Why did they send me to a place where I wasn’t even born?” Clairville said.

After two months, Clairville’s lawyers from the Florida Immigration Advocacy Center succeeded in having her returned to the United States. She won an appeal to stay in the country in immigration court but the authorities took the case to the Immigration Board of Appeals, which ruled against her. Her lawyer is now trying to take the case to federal court, but Clairville could be returned to Haiti at any time.

In a similar case less than two years ago, Haitian-born Claudette Etienne was convicted of selling a small amount of crack cocaine, an offense that a U.S. judge did not think merited imprisonment.

But the INS deported her to Haiti, where she was imprisoned. Four days later, after drinking contaminated water, she died.

Her body lay unclaimed in a morgue a year later. Her husband, struggling to bring up their two children, lacked the money to bring her home and bury her.

INS spokeswoman Karen Kraushaar said U.S. responsibility for the fate of a deported person ends when the individual leaves U.S. soil. She said the United States had deported 125 Haitians between October 2001 and January 2002, of whom 77 had been classified as felons under the 1996 immigration law.

“Our authority ends with the deportation. We do not have the ability to dictate to a foreign government how to treat its own nationals,” she said.

Asked about conditions in Haitian prisons, she said: “It would be a good idea to visit a Haitian prison before making sweeping statements. It’s all hearsay.”

But the U.S. State Department, in its past two human rights reports, lambasted Haiti for its prisons and for jailing people indefinitely if they are deported by other countries.

“Very poor prison conditions, arbitrary arrest and detention, and prolonged pretrial detention continue to be problems. Many criminal deportees who already served full sentences overseas are put back in jail for indefinite periods of time,” the department said in its 2001 report.

Haitian authorities say that in a country with 85% unemployment, criminal deportees have to be locked up to prevent them from resorting to a life of crime.

A BBC reporter, Andy Kershaw, visited a Haitian prison at Croix de Bouquets in January 2002 and found windowless cells, “dark, fetid and hot as a foundry.” He saw 17 U.S. deportees in a cell that measured roughly 13 feet by 13 feet.

Wendy Young of the Women’s Commission for Refugee Women and Children said she found it astounding that the United States was deporting people to Haiti, knowing what lay in store for them.

“There is a big question whether we are sending people back to torture or even to their deaths. Is this what the United States wants to be doing?” she asked.

Clairville’s three children, ages 6, 5 and 4, are being brought up by their grandmother, who is in frail health. Clairville says the youngest does not even know her.

“I had my baby in jail. They took her away when she was 1 day old,” she said. She fears that if the INS succeeds in deporting her to Haiti once more, she will not survive to see her children again.