12559: Herald Article: Refugees face a test of faith (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: Dan Craig <dgcraig@si.rr.com>

Refugees face a test of faith
BY LIZ BALMASEDA
lbalmaseda@herald.com

The refugee boat that brought Jesiclaire Clairmont to this country
sailed on an act of faith, its name resounding of strange ironies
mirrored between hostile shores: Si M'ap Viv Se Jezi -- If I Live, It's
Because of Jesus.

It's the same slogan the mother of six displayed in her home in a
strife-torn coastal shantytown at Gonaves in northwestern Haiti. It's an
affirmation she clung to in chaotic times, on nights when political
thugs broke up her church meetings, when her home was attacked, when she
ran toward the sea to hide behind the rocks.

Since the wooden sailboat ran aground in Biscayne National Park on Dec.
3, the 44-year-old former fish vendor has come to realize that her
survival may indeed require divine intervention. More than seven months
after Clairmont, her family and 181 fellow evangelical Christians
reached the United States aboard the flimsy 31-foot boat, she is still
locked up in a maximum-security prison west of Miami International
Airport.

Although they passed the Immigration and Naturalization Service's
"credible fear" test, most of the others also remain in detention,
fighting deportation. A few have already been deported.

Imprisoned, Clairmont shares the sad distinction of the Si M'ap Viv
passengers: It was their arrival that triggered a secret U.S.
immigration policy to keep Haitian boat people away. The unwritten
policy makes it virtually impossible for any of them -- or any other
Haitian boat refugee who reaches U.S. soil -- to gain parole, much less
political asylum. A senior INS official admitted in court that he had
changed the rules, arguing that they would prevent a mass exodus from
Haiti.

Clairmont's asylum plea has already been denied, as have the pleas of
her 24-year-old son, Renand Prophete, who is at the Krome detention
center, and her 21-year-old daughter, Lina Prophete, who shares her cell
at the Turner Guilford Knight Correctional Center and her days of hourly
checks, strip searches, chronic nausea and loneliness.

EMPTY DAYS

Meanwhile, Clairmont's two teen sons spend days in their cousin's house
in Miami's Little Haiti, suspended in a state of waiting. Daniel and
Emmanuel Moise, 17 and 14, are free. Immigration authorities released
them when their father was granted political asylum five months ago.

Their father, Ernest Moise, a 40-year-old fisherman, sometimes finds
them crying, missing their mother. They don't understand how an
immigration judge could order her deported back to Haiti.

"She would die there because they've already attacked her," Daniel says.

To him, the definitions of justice are clear. He lived in his mother's
house in the populous Raboteau slum, shared her life, her fears and all
the vulnerable hours she spent at church. The boys huddled with her for
nine days in the leaky, windowless hold of the Si M'ap Viv as it fled a
city burning in violence. How, Daniel wonders, could one judge decide
that he should stay here while another one decides that his mother
should go back?

His family's conflict epitomizes the contradiction of U.S. policy toward
Haitians. Citing Haiti's political crisis and rampant lawlessness, the
Bush administration refuses to release hundreds of millions of dollars
in aid to Jean-Bertrand Aristide's government. Yet it punishes those
fleeing the chaos, jailing them, isolating them from loved ones, denying
most of their asylum requests, singling them out.

ONLY HAITIANS

The policy, forced into the light by a discrimination lawsuit, applies
only to Haitians, who, like other asylum seekers, were routinely granted
parole and given a year to prepare their cases.

Three days before the Si M'ap Viv ran aground at Caesar Creek, park
rangers picked up five Cuban boat refugees on a nearby key and, by
policy, set them on the path to parole.

But the Haitian policy's impact has been devastating to the migrants.
Stories of politically motivated beatings, shootings and burnings have
been lost in the accelerated processing of the refugees' claims.
Incomplete and poorly worded asylum applications are testimony to the
refugees' lack of access to meaningful assistance and representation.

Ernest Moise was given three weeks from the day he filed for asylum to
find a lawyer and prove his case. His nearly blank application suggests
that he was lost and poorly assisted.

Question: "Why are you seeking asylum? Explain in detail the basis for
your claim. (Attach additional sheets of paper as needed.)"

Answer: "Because of insecurity. I am afraid for my life."

Luckily for him, lawyers from the Florida Immigrant Advocacy Center,
which keeps a Creole-speaking paralegal at Krome, called on fellow
immigration attorneys to help with the Si M'ap Viv caseload. Moise's
case went to Randy McGrorty, the head lawyer at Catholic Charities Legal
Services. They had less than a week to prepare for the asylum hearing.

FAMILY REPRESENTED

McGrorty interviewed Moise and put together a case for his entire
family, including Clairmont, their two teenage sons and her two older
children from a previous relationship. But on the day of the hearing,
McGrorty, the 39-year-old Wisconsinite who came here nine years ago to
help Haitian detainees at the Guantánamo Bay Naval Base, ran into one of
those dilemmas all lawyers fear -- his clients seemed to contradict each
other.

"He told the court they were married. She said they weren't. We had no
choice but to sever their cases," McGrorty recalls.

LINGUISTIC PROBLEM?

But what seemed to be a contradiction might have been a linguistic
confusion.

When asked about their relationship, both of them described a common-law
marriage. Although they no longer lived together, both said they were
raising their children together and arrived here as a family unit. But
that's the kind of nuance that gets lost in the haste.

McGrorty took a chance and kept the trial date for Moise. It was a good
move for him.

"Ernest's story was simple and straightforward," the lawyer recalls. "He
spoke well. He didn't embellish. It was the voice of the fisherman."

Immigration Judge Denise Slavin, one of the outside judges brought in to
expedite the Si M'ap Viv cases, granted him asylum that same day, Feb.
22. She also released Daniel and Emmanuel, who had been detained with
Ernest Moise in a local motel.

That week, Judge Slavin granted at least two other asylum pleas, a
rarity in the assembly line that is immigration court. Two sitting
judges, Kenneth Hurewitz and Neale Foster, are assigned to Haitian
detainee cases.

Moise became one of the principal plaintiffs in a class-action lawsuit
filed March 15 in federal court by immigrant advocates, who had been
pressing for the detainees' release for two months. The INS had
continued to detain him even after he won asylum, saying it planned to
appeal. But INS officials released Moise, weakening the lawsuit.

McGrorty's Haitian-American colleague, Natasha Pierre, had no such luck
representing Clairmont and her two adult children on April 1. Even after
learning that Clairmont's teenage sons had been granted asylum, and that
deporting her would leave the boys without their mother, Judge Hurewitz
denied her plea. He ordered that Clairmont and her adult children be
sent back to Haiti, concluding that her testimony was "vague,
inconsistent and not detailed."

Although her lawyers believed that Clairmont had a strong case, they say
it was difficult to draw it out of her.

"She's a woman with very little education. But she had a good claim,"
says Pierre, who has appealed the judge's decision to the Board of
Immigration Appeals in Falls Church, Va.

NOT A SIMPLE STORY

What Clairmont did not have was a simple story. She speaks in winding,
often disjointed narrative punctuated with religious references. She
describes a dangerous existence where bullets whip by, where beatings
are routine, where going to church marks you as a government opponent.

"Are you a member of the opposition?" she was asked.

"I am an evangelical Christian," she replied without a beat.

Her stories don't always make sense. But even when her calculations of
time seem off, she describes a peril consistent with reports by
international human rights groups. Even the State Department's most
recent report noted the violence in Gonaves and stated: ``Torture and
other forms of abuse are pervasive. Police frequently beat suspects."

Clairmont's home city, sprawled across a parched, desolate plain, framed
by mountains scarred by erosion, is the city where Haitian independence
was proclaimed in 1804. Today, Gonaves is a hotbed of the opposition,
which nurtures supporters in tiny, beleaguered evangelical churches. On
the chaotic night that Clairmont crammed her family onto the sailboat,
protests flared in the streets.

As she expected, the violence only worsened. On the day the U.S. Coast
Guard brought the Si M'ap Viv passengers ashore, a mob claiming loyalty
to Aristide's Lavalas Family party stoned a journalist and hacked him to
death.
Days later, as thugs attacked the National Palace in Port-au-Prince, two
members of the opposition MOCHRENA party were burned to death in
Gonaves.

Clairmont's story, as those of the other detainees, has drawn the
interest of high-profile supporters from Congress, the Florida
Legislature and the civil rights arena. Dignitaries have streamed
through the correctional center to investigate reports of harsh
conditions. Last week, INS Commissioner James Ziglar toured the prison
with a delegation of political and civic leaders.

But for all the vigorous pleas from elected officials such as U.S. Reps.
Carrie Meek, D-Miami, Lincoln Díaz-Balart, R-Miami, and Ileana
Ros-Lehtinen, R-Miami; U.S. Sens. Bill Nelson and Bob Graham, both
D-Fla.; and a particularly relentless state Sen. Kendrick Meek, D-Miami,
the Bush administration has not budged on the issue.

Unless the de facto Haitian policy is rescinded, Clairmont and other
Haitian detainees may have little hope of avoiding deportation. U.S.
District Judge Joan A. Lenard diminished the detainees' chances when she
tossed out the discrimination lawsuit on May 17 without a hearing.

Advocates hope an appeals court will put an end to the detention order
that was quietly handed down Dec. 14 by Peter Michael Becraft, an acting
deputy commissioner in Washington, D.C. In their July 12 appeal, they
noted the policy's impact:

"The release rate for Haitians who had passed their credible fear
interviews dropped from 96 percent in November 2001 to 6 percent for the
period December 14, 2001, to March 18, 2002."

And they said Miami immigration judges not only failed to consider
individual merits of release requests, they "quickly issued virtually
identical boilerplate denials."

In court documents, Becraft has claimed that the ''parole criteria''
were simply adjusted to discourage further risky voyages out of Haiti.
And the INS points to the drop in arrivals in the subsequent months as
proof that this adjustment is working.

But questions arise: If this policy was really about safety, then why
was it a secret? Why did it take a court challenge to bring it to light?
And how could a secret policy prevent an exodus from Haiti?

Certainly, such hard-line policies can help gubernatorial races in
Florida. In 1994, Democrat Lawton Chiles got a boost from the wholesale
detention of Haitian and Cuban refugees at Guantánamo Bay.

Eight years later, some immigrant advocates speculate that the secret
policy was hatched in the Oval Office as a campaign contribution to the
president's brother. But Gov. Jeb Bush has called for equal treatment of
the Haitian detainees. And although he has not hammered the point, he
has certainly demonstrated more support for Haitian detainees than his
prospective opponent Janet Reno did as U.S. attorney general.

FAINT HOPES

The inaction has left immigrant advocates to console their depressed
clients, even though their own hopes of success are dim.

Often exasperated, one of Clairmont's lawyers, McGrorty, reaches for a
biblical metaphor to spell out the tragedy of the boat named If I Live,
It's Because of Jesus.

He places the flight to Egypt in a modern-day context.

"If you apply this policy of asylum, it's clear that Jesus would have
gotten asylum. But his parents would have been returned," he concludes.

But Jesiclaire Clairmont's children, who haven't seen their mother since
February when guards took her from the detention motel to Turner
Guilford Knight, don't want to think of such a scenario. Asked what
would happen to them if their mother were deported, they said in stark
unison:

"We cannot live without our mother."

http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/3701470.htm