Haiti: The Free Black Republic’s Broken American Dream
How many people will continue to trust Biden, after he chose to curry favor with immigration hardliners and endanger basic human rights?
Haiti, an island nation located in the Caribbean Sea, does not share a land border with the United States or Mexico.
However, citizens of such a country have chosen to flee Haiti in droves in the last decade or so, and have started to migrate or seek asylum in the United States in different ways to pray for refugee opportunities. Recently, a large number of them arrived at the Southern Border, near the Texas town of Del Rio. The Biden administration, which has been overwhelmed by internal and external problems, seemed unprepared for this situation and dealt with the refugees in an inhumane manner, launching the largest deportation operation in U.S. history. While this series of actions received their due condemnation, the American society is collectively reflecting the uncomfortable truth: when thousands of Haitian refugees chose to trek to the U.S.-Mexico border to apply for asylum after all the hardships, risking their lives and the possibility of being deported at any time, Americans began to realize that this crisis was a humanitarian disaster that had been mismanaged by the U.S. for tens or even hundreds of years.
Haiti was the first predominantly black country in the world to break away from colonial rule. In addition to colonists from Europe, the main population of the region then known as Saint-Dominique was hundreds of thousands of slaves from Africa. Beginning in 1791, inspired by the American War of Independence, revolutionary Toussaint L’Ouverture, who grew up in an enslaved Black family, led Haitians who did not want to remain slaves to rebel against the French colonists who had long used the area as a plantation, and officially ruled the region in 1799. Soon after, L’Ouverture was imprisoned by Napoleon’s General Charles Leclerc and died, but L’Ouverture’s second-in-command, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, reaffirmed independence and carried out a bloody massacre of the whites and mixed-races still left in Haiti. Shortly afterwards, Dessalines ascended to the throne and was assassinated a few years later by those discontented with his dictatorship; since then, Haiti has not had an effective political system and has been in a perpetual cycle of military dictatorships and coups d’état.
How American Exceptionalism Ruined Haiti
After Thomas Jefferson, the third U.S. president who ardently supported slavery, took office, he revoked the U.S. government’s recognition of the L’Ouverture regime in order to curry favor with France and Napoleon. Fearing that Haiti’s independence would trigger the dissolution of slavery in the United States, the U.S. government refused to recognize Haiti’s legal status until after the American Civil War, and even considered colonizing it for a time. To further ensure absolute U.S. status in the Caribbean, the U.S. military took control of Haiti’s government and finances after the Civil War and directly occupied Haiti after 1915 to ensure that the U.S. would not face attacks from the Caribbean during wartime. This occupation lasted until 1934. During the Cold War, the U.S. government supported the military dictators, Francois Duvalier and his son Jean-Claude, to ensure that communism would not emerge in the vicinity of the United States. The Duvaliers had long used a secret police system to maintain their position and condone corrupt bribery. During Duvalier’s tenure, Haiti became the poorest and most underdeveloped country in the world, and tens of thousands of people were killed for opposing the military dictatorship. As the Cold War came to an end, Reagan his successor, George H.W. Bush, realized that the dictator had outlived his usefulness and launched an embargo on Haiti, which led to Jean-Claude’s ouster and Haiti’s move toward a democratically elected system.
Jean-Bertrand Aristide became Haiti’s first democratically elected president in 1991, but was overthrown and expelled in a military coup less than eight months later. Fearing that the problems in Haiti would once again affect its interests in the Caribbean, the U.S. government had a heated debate about how to respond to the situation and eventually decided to intervene militarily in Haiti. The international situation at that time was fraught with crises: in addition to the refugee crisis caused by the coup in Haiti, international public opinion debated how to intervene in the Yugoslav civil war. Biden, then a senator from Delaware, was among those who expressed an opinion, and the attitude he showed in an interview was very cold: “If Haiti just quietly sunk into the Caribbean, or rose up 300 feet, it wouldn’t matter a whole lot in terms of our interests.” Although the entire interview centered on how to intervene in Yugoslavia, this indifferent answer unquestionably showed the traditional attitude of U.S. diplomacy toward Haiti.
And the latest round of the Haitian crisis has had the devastating impact of the January 2010 earthquake in Port-au-Prince, in addition to the fallout from military involvement more than two decades ago. The earthquake, measuring 7.0 on the Richter scale, claimed the lives of at least 200,000 people, and a large number of survivors who might have survived died in agony a few days after the quake due to a lack of medical facilities and poor infrastructure. The quake was followed by a cholera epidemic of unprecedented proportions, resulting in the loss of even more lives; shockingly, the epidemic was triggered by the contamination of water sources by toilet waste from UN peacekeepers that had spilled into the river. The desperation of not being able to trust anyone led to a state of anarchy; massive chaos and looting made rebuilding incredibly difficult, and a large number of Haitians finally made up their minds to leave the country.
Haitian Immigrants Were the Subject of Discrimination for Decades
It is not news that the U.S. immigration and justice systems have long used brutal methods to deport and harass asylum seekers attempting to leave Haiti for the United States; rather, this is an unspoken consensus among those working in this area for a long time. According to immigration researcher Carl Lindskoog, the way the U.S. government began using the inhumane practice of indefinite immigration detention to deter would-be immigrants from entering the U.S., was the result of an earlier influx of Haitian refugees that triggered the entry of large numbers of Black refugees into the United States.
Prior to 1981, the U.S. had a policy of “parole” for those who entered the U.S. border without legal formalities, detaining only those deemed to be a public threat. However, after a large number of Haitian refugees who could not tolerate Duvalier’s brutal rule landed in the United States by boat in the 1970s, the U.S. government imprisoned the refugees for multiple reasons of racism and not wanting to anger Duvalier. After Reagan became president in 1981, he became unhappy with the tendency of large numbers of Haitians to still want to enter the United States and enacted a watershed law that began detaining without bail all Haitians who could not show legal papers. In order to ensure that this law did not violate human rights but only targeted Haitian immigrants, the Reagan administration expanded the law, thus affecting the large number of Central American refugees fleeing the civil war and arriving at the U.S.-Mexico border. The Guantanamo prison, which is now used to hold religious terrorists in the name of extraterritoriality, was first put into use to hold Haitian refugees intercepted by the U.S. Coast Guard.
In 1996, the U.S. government under President Clinton formally codified immigration into criminal law and mandated the detention of all asylum seekers, persons awaiting deportation, and criminal aliens for indefinite periods. This law was originally ruled unconstitutional in 2001, but was once again allowed by a new Supreme Court decision in 2018.
The Cause of the Recent Haitian Migrant Surge
After the devastating earthquake in Haiti, the country’s political situation faced the possibility of collapse at any moment. After the then president’s term ended in 2011, the Clintons, who were sent by Obama to help the situation in Haiti, strongly endorsed the candidacy of Michel Martelly, a former musician with no political experience. Martelly appeased to U.S. interests during his tenure and was long accused of corruption. During his tenure, Senate elections were repeatedly postponed because of the inability to reach consensus with the opposition parties, and the public was filled with despair over the political ecology.
In 2017, Jovenel Moïse, a businessman, was successfully elected president in a highly unstable political climate. Due to political instability, this election was held twice, in 2015 and 2016. Opposition parties believe his term ends in February 2021, but Moïse insists his term does not end until 2022. Out of political distrust in a country with a population of more than 10 million, Moïse received enough votes to become president by just 600,000 votes. During his tenure, allegations of corruption have persisted, and Moïse made moves to dissolve parliament and rely on decrees to protect his power from challenges. In addition, he planned to hold a new constitutional referendum, which, if passed, would strengthen the president’s powers. With a government mired in corruption, Haiti’s cities were dominated by militaristic gangs, and rapes, kidnappings, murders and robberies are too numerous to count.
On July 7, 2021, Haiti’s political situation descended into further chaos when dozens of mercenaries brutally killed Moïse and seriously wounded his wife, and on August 14, a 7.2 magnitude earthquake struck southwestern Haiti, killing thousands of people. In this dire situation, Biden said in a public speech that Haiti is a “very unsafe place” and implemented a temporary protective status for Haitian refugees already in the United States. This policy applies to immigrants in the United States who are temporarily unable to return safely to their home country due to extreme political unrest, conflict or natural disaster conditions, and has continued to apply to Haitian refugees in the United States since the 2010 earthquake.
The strict U.S. immigration control system meant that it was extremely difficult to enter the U.S. directly to work or obtain status for those who haven’t arrived yet, and to escape the disaster, many of those who fled since 2010 arrived in Brazil first to join the local construction efforts then underway for the 2014 World Cup and 2016 Olympics. However, as Brazil’s economic and political situation began to decline after 2016, Haitian refugees who could not afford the economic instability began to come to other parts of South America in search of work opportunities. 2020’s coronavirus epidemic made working next to impossible, and Haitians who realized they might not have a home to return to gradually began to move north, looking for the possibility of becoming asylum seekers through the U.S.-Mexico border.
The Mess in Del Rio and Biden’s Disastrous Response
In Del Rio, the U.S. government has erected a 4-meter-high border fence along a stretch of riverbank a few miles back from the U.S.-Mexico border that separates through the Rio Grande. With the Department of Homeland Security received information that a large number of Haitian refugees from South America wanted to enter the United States, the Border Patrol increased its presence here, making it impossible to sneak across the border. In order to retain the possibility of continuing to enter the United States, these refugees had set up a camp under a bridge over the riverbank, desperately lacking the necessary supplies and sanitation.
To reach the camp alone, the refugees had to wade across the waist-deep Rio Grande; not only that, but uniformed U.S. Border Patrol officers armed with horsewhips stood by the river, shouting at them and preventing them from crossing the border. The actions of these rangers were captured by AFP photographer Paul Ratje and spread on social media at an explosive rate, sparking great anger and discontent.
At a time when public sentiment on immigration has been inflamed to its highest point by a series of actions over the course of Trump’s term, it was impossible for the Biden administration to choose to remain silent in the face of these photos. Soon after, the Department of Homeland Security, which manages the Border Patrol, announced it would launch an internal investigation into the incident and suspend the patrolmen on horseback indefinitely. In addition, Biden issued a public statement announcing that the patrol officers who used violence to remove Haitian refugees would face very serious consequences.
However, while Biden and the Department of Homeland Security were aggressively taking a stand, many journalists and activists found this series of actions by the U.S. government to be a distraction: the Haitian refugees had formed a large congregation of more than 10,000 people at the U.S.-Mexico border in Del Rio. This gathering place, with its poor health and security conditions, has the potential to create a further impact on the already unstable border situation. Whether and how to accept these refugees has become a serious challenge for the Biden administration.
The Biden administration’s response to these challenges has been a colossal moral failure; not only has it run counter to the humane treatment that Biden claimed during his election campaign and early days in office, but it has also perpetuated a series of unjust Trump-era laws that have led to the mass deportation of refugees.
In the last year of Trump’s term, in the name of pandemic prevention, the Department of Homeland Security introduced Title 42 of the Public Health Service Act, which allows the U.S. government to temporarily block the entry of non-citizens into the United States for the purpose of preserving the public health. Encouraged by this policy, immigration officials at the U.S. southern border have rapidly deported more than a million immigrants since the beginning of the pandemic, even though CDC officials do not believe this provision is applicable. After Biden was elected president and faced with a dire refugee situation at the southern border, he chose to continue the policy, requiring that Title 42 be continued until the agency’s chief determined that immigrants no longer posed a “serious public health hazard” to the spread of the new coronavirus.
Tens of thousands of Haitians have been trapped in Mexico for more than a decade as a result of this provision and the “mandatory stay in Mexico for asylum seekers pending results” policy agreed to with Mexico under Trump’s tenure. In Mexico, these refugees face severe discrimination because of the color of their skin and language, and even their lives are not guaranteed. While many Central American asylum seekers have been given the opportunity to stay in Mexico pending the outcome of their applications, these Haitian refugees are not so lucky: Because the Mexican government refuses to accept them, they are forced to board Immigration and Customs Enforcement planes once they fail to comply with the regulations and are forcibly returned to their home countries.
Despite the Biden administration’s repeated attempts to boost the number of U.S. refugee claims, the recent retreat from Afghanistan has left the U.S. overcrowded with refugee facilities. So, shortly after the U.S. government declared Haiti “very unsafe,” beginning in mid-September, groups of Haitians who did not meet admission requirements were sent back to the capital, Port-au-Prince, and by the 27th, the number had exceeded 4,600. In addition, about 5,000 refugees were allowed to enter the United States to begin their asylum applications, while the other 8,000 or so were asked to remain in Mexico pending the application process.
What’s Next?
The Biden administration’s series of initiatives reveal the continued appeasement of the U.S. political system for anti-immigrant tendencies. The concept of “illegal immigration,” manufactured by U.S. politicians for racist purposes, has become a powerful political pawn. How many people will continue to trust Biden, and his other political promises, after he chose to curry favor with immigration hardliners and continuing to implement Trump-era inhumane policies that put basic human rights at risk? In the sovereign mindset of America’s exceptionalist self-interest above all else, these ordinary people who speak out and seek only a way to live are mere bystanders abandoned and forgotten by the times; like their ancestors who were free but not recognized by the United States, they have no way to escape and nowhere to go.
It is not only Haitian Americans and immigrant rights advocates who feel that who are strongly dissatisfied with this series of Biden administration initiatives. Daniel Foote, the US special envoy to Haiti, also resigned from his post. In his resignation letter, Foote did not give any face to his boss, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, and bluntly stated that he and Biden were directly responsible for the inhumane treatment of the Haitian refugees.
Foote wrote, scathingly, in one such paragraph: “what our Haitian friends really want, and need, is the opportunity to chart their own course, without international puppeteering and favored candidates but with genuine support for that course. I do not believe that Haiti can enjoy stability until her citizens have the dignity of truly choosing their own leaders fairly and acceptably.”
The Haiti struggling with violence revealed in Foote’s resignation letter is the same harsh reality and responsibility that the U.S. government has been trying to avoid for so long, but is now inescapable. The difficulty lies not only in the violence, but also in the fact that the U.S. has long tried to defend its interests in Haiti by virtue of its own authority, thus denying the Haitian people the opportunity and possibility to make their own choices. Moreover, the U.S. government and society seem to be oblivious to this humanitarian catastrophe of their own making, and are at a loss as to what to do in the face of the influx of refugees, who are either repatriated or detained for long periods of time, as if they were fugitives from justice. Meanwhile, corrupt politicians like the Duvaliers, Martelly and Moïse, are trusted unconditionally and got away with it. After Jean-Claude Duvalier stepped down, instead of receiving his due trial in Haiti, he made a deal with the Haiti-based CIA branch and left on a U.S. Air Force plane, living freely in the United States and France for several more decades before returning home when Martelly became president. He died in 2014, without ever being charged with any crime.
The American public has a short memory. Not many people will seriously reflect on the human tragedy that took place in Del Rio and the oppression and discrimination that the U.S. has faced against Haiti since the beginning of time; instead, the people who will talk about it most are the conservative Republicans who call Biden’s current policy “open borders” and want to further tear the situation apart by imposing harsh laws and reverting to Trump-era anti-immigrant rules. conservative Republicans who want to further tear up the situation by imposing tougher laws and reverting to Trump-era anti-immigration rules.
