For 1,800 Haitians - Freedom

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."