For 1,800 Haitians--Freedom

By Janice Castro

A federal court upholds their release from 14 detention camps

"Viktoua net! [Complete victory!] They are going to free you! They have to free you!" Marc Garcia, the Miami radio commentator known as Marcus to the 437 Haitians at Krome Avenue Processing Center who tune in his daily Creole-language broadcasts, was all but shouting the good news into his microphone last week. In Atlanta, a three-judge panel of the Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit had just refused to block a federal district court decision ordering the release "forthwith" of 1,800 Haitian immigrants who have been imprisoned for about a year in 14 U.S. detention camps. The Department of Justice said the first detainees could be freed by the end of the month.

The release of the Haitians is the result of a yearlong legal battle by human rights activists to modify the tough immigration procedures enforced since last summer by the Reagan Administration as part of its effort to discourage illegal immigration into the U.S. (Almost 1 million illegal aliens were caught in 1981, and nobody knows how many managed to enter undetected.) Under the Reagan policy, the Justice Department's Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) began to detain undocumented aliens, who had been apprehended as they entered the U.S., at federal prisons and abandoned military bases in Florida, Louisiana, Kentucky, West Virginia, Texas, New York and Puerto Rico. Previously, immigration policy had been to release such illegal aliens on parole while the courts examined their appeals for political asylum or other legal status.

The majority of these detainees were Haitians picked up along the Florida coast. Rather like the boat people of Viet Nam, the Haitians risked their lives to flee starvation and poverty in "Baby Doc" Duvalier's dictatorial regime, making the 700-mile journey in rickety, overcrowded vessels. Many drowned when their boats broke up at sea, and their bodies sometimes washed up on the plush resort beaches of South Florida. Haitians who made it alive to the U.S., but were unlucky enough to be caught as they landed, were immediately locked up. The only way out was to return to Haiti; most preferred to stay.

After months of confinement, many of the Haitians developed symptoms of severe depression; at least 29 tried to commit suicide. Hundreds of others complained of blinding headaches, stomach cramps and other ailments, which they attributed to uncertainty as to how long they would be held and concern for their impoverished families back home. The longer they waited for their status to be determined, the more desperate they became. At Krome, a forbidding enclosure surrounded by high watchtowers and double cyclone fences topped with barbed wire, one detainee explained why he had stopped eating the camp's food: "How can I eat when I've been here 13 months and I have eight children at home who are starving to death because I can't provide for them?" Said Alan Pierre, 23: "We didn't invade the United States, we didn't carry dope, yet we are treated worse than dogs."

At Fort Allen in Puerto Rico, 707 Haitians were forced to live in tents in sweltering 90DEG heat and rain, even though several unused buildings on the base offered better shelter. One INS official said that the harsh conditions in the camps were intended to discourage other aliens from trying to enter the U.S. illegally. Last month, however, representatives of the Organization of American States visited Fort Allen to determine whether human rights abuses were taking place. In past years the O.A.S. has examined alleged abuses in Argentina, Chile, El Salvador, Haiti and other countries, but never before have such charges been investigated in the U.S.

Meanwhile, immigration officials took other measures to discourage the Hai tian flight: in some instances, the Coast Guard apprehended Haitians at sea and returned them to authorities at Port-au-Prince, even though the terrified aliens pleaded that Baby Doc's government views attempts to flee the country as a crime.

Human rights activists charged that the treatment of the Haitians was dis criminatory. Said Harriet Rabb, director of the Immigration Law Clinic at the Columbia University law school: "The Jus tice Department singled out the Haitians because they are a small group and have not organized themselves politically." Michael Posner, executive director of the New York-based Lawyers Committee for International Human Rights, called the Haitian detention "a political decision, not a legal decision. The Haitians became the scapegoats for an immigration policy that is not working. And the fact that the Haitians are black has been an added burden on them."

In a class-action suit filed on the Haitians' behalf, Federal Judge Eugene P. Spellman ruled that the detainees should be released on a legal technicality: the INS had promulgated the tough policy without having given the proper advance notice required by the Federal Administrative Procedure Act. But Spellman rejected charges that there was any racist bias in the regulations.

Spellman's release order applies only to the 1,800 Haitians who were covered by the class-action suit. It does not, for example, affect 53 other Haitians who have been held since last July at a detention center in Brooklyn; they filed a similar suit in New York federal district court but lost on appeal. Posner also notes that Spellman's decision "left the door open" for a reinstatement of the detention program "if the detention plan is recast and made subject to rulemaking in the proper way." The INS has made it clear that it plans to do just that, as one way to discourage the increasingly unmanageable numbers of illegal immigrants from troubled areas. The Administration has announced plans to build, at a cost of $35 million, two new detention cen ters in Virginia and Oklahoma, with a combined capacity of 2,000.

--By Janice Castro. Reported by Bernard Diederich/Miami and David S. Jackson/Washington

With reporting by Bernard Diederich, David S. Jackson

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