Among migrants encountered at the U.S. southern border who end up on a flight back home, Haitians still lead the way.
"A worrying rise in the number of Haitian refugees arriving by boat off the Florida coast is raising questions about a long-standing immigration practice that determines why some fleeing migrants are processed into the United States and others are quickly returned to Haiti despite making it into U.S. territorial waters.
In at least four different boat arrivals in the past five months, Haitian migrants who jumped off unseaworthy, overloaded vessels and into the waters off the Florida Keys were plucked out by federal agents and brought to land for processing — while those who stayed onboard were transferred to U.S. Coast Guard cutters for repatriation.
One of the latest examples of the practice came Saturday, when 113 Haitian nationals onboard an overloaded sailboat jumped into the shallow waters off the Florida Keys while 186 others remained on the vessel. Those who remained on board the boat were placed on a Coast Guard cutter and repatriated Tuesday to Cap-Haitien.
Two days later, a similar scenario played out when a second boat arrived on Monday night after running aground in the shallow waters off the Middle Keys. By the time federal agents arrived, 109 people were already on land and had been taken into custody. However, 14 others who remained on the boat were immediately taken away by the U.S. Coast Guard.
'This wet foot, dry foot policy and sort of strict adherence to it has been a concern to advocates for 30 years. It is for that very reason it is very, very dangerous,” said Randolph McGrorty, executive director of Catholic Legal Services, which is run by the Archdiocese of Miami. 'People jumping into the water to avoid captured interdiction, it’s really dangerous and it always has been'.
Muzaffar Chishti, a lawyer and senior fellow at the Migration Policy Institute, says the U.S. Coast Guard and Customs and Border Protection are guided by a protocol forged out of a 1993 Supreme Court decision that upheld both Presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton’s policy of returning Haitians intercepted at sea back to Haiti without an asylum hearing — unless they say they have credible fear of harm if they are returned.
But while there is a protocol on what to do about those found on board, he suspects what is happening is the result of a lack of policy governing what to do about those found wading or swimming in territorial waters.
'Once you’re in territorial waters, and they are not on the Coast Guard cutter, the fallback arrangement is to bring them to land. What happens on land, we don’t know', Chishti said, echoing another concern among Haitian advocates about the Department of Homeland Security’s veil of silence surrounding Haitian migrants. 'They don’t have a protocol to deal with people who are not on boats and since they don’t, they treat them as if they have entered the U.S. territory and then they treat them for asylum screenings somewhere on land'.
Like McGrorty, Chishti believes that the practice is 'an incentive for people to take risks', which he called 'disturbing'.
Since January, the administration has forcibly repatriated more than 20,000 Haitian migrants, including more than 6,800 intercepted at sea by the Coast Guard, according to the United Nations’ Office for International Migration. The repatriations have surpassed that for all of last year, when 19,629 Haitians were repatriated from the U.S., and consist mostly of border crossers who came into the U.S. at the Mexican border". -Jacqueline Charles, Miami Herald
The very concept of “refugee” needs to be eliminated from the international system. There's nothing good that stems from permitting foreigners to invade other countries under the guise of “refugee” status. It is neither humane nor empathic to go about ensuring that there will be no civilized societies left anywhere in the world.