Immigration being unfair to Haitians

[Moorbey]

By ANA MENENDEZ (amenendez@MiamiHerald.com), Miami Herald, May 4, 2008

http://www.miamiherald.com/news/colu...ry/520300.html


Wilbert Benoit, father of two, taken away on a dark morning. Marie Thelusma arrested in front of her baby boy. Francieuse Lafortune, new mother, locked up while she was still breast-feeding. Fabienne Josil, five weeks pregnant, dragged away after fainting.

Not in Haiti -- here in South Florida. Of all the tragedies that visit Haitians -- famine, rioting, drownings -- the most heartbreaking are the ones we can stop: the breakup of working families.

Zealous immigration cops are arresting and deporting hundreds of mothers and fathers, not just separating parents from their kids, but sentencing relatives in both countries to even greater hardship.

Josil, the latest one to make the news, was released April 25 after local Haitian activists publicized her story. She was arrested on April 18 as she took out the garbage. She collapsed and suffered uterine bleeding. She was finally released on humanitarian grounds. But Barbara Gonzalez, spokeswoman for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Miami, told The Miami Herald's Trenton Daniel: ``That doesn't negate the fact that she has a final order of removal.''

Jargon and nonsense words may help soldiers carry out their orders. But dulling language also helps render the unacceptable benign.

There is no reason to be removing parents from their children. And over the years, plenty of legislation has tried to protect Haitians in the United States from this fate. Again and again, it has failed.

VICTIM OF LOOPHOLE

Cuban-Americans have the adjustment act. Haitians have only the flawed HRIFA legislation. Even that might have protected Josil, 26, who came to the United States legally with her father, said her attorney, Jeanne Hines. But she turned 21 before her status could be adjusted. New legislation to fix that loophole has support among Florida's delegation. But the measure consistently dies in the House.

Hondurans, Salvadorans and Nicaraguans all have protected status that prevents their deportation due to calamities at home. Haitians do not. And it seems no riot or flood will persuade President Bush to grant it to them.

That leaves Haitians here with little support.

Tally Hustace, 59, is not an immigration expert or a lawyer. She's not even Haitian. But her work as a nurse practitioner at Jackson Memorial gives her a special perspective on what is happening inside Haitian families as immigration steps up deportations.

''The mothers have lost their means of support, and they're just desperate,'' Hustace said. ``I didn't have any idea the immigration policy was creating these types of situations. And it's all done under the cover of darkness.''

Last week, she rushed to the house of a mother of four, whose husband was deported. The woman threatened to kill herself.

''She was thinking if she died, her kids would be in the hands of the state, and they'd be better off,'' Hustace said. She was able to get the mother to a psychologist. ``But that was just one case we knew about.''

MOTHER ON THE RUN

Another nurse at Hustace's clinic told the story of a mother who was under order of deportation and moving every two days from house to house, like a fugitive.

We may never be able to stop the hunger and despair that forces people to flee their homes. But we can put an end to the private cataclysms visited daily on Haitian families in the United States.

Surely, in these times of global calamity, this country can find more pressing things to do than round up men and women whose only crime was to wish for a better life for their children.