President Biden campaigned for the presidency, promising a more humane immigration system, but immigrant rights advocates say he’s continued the very same cruel and inhumane policies as under Trump. Between The Lines’ Scott Harris spoke with Jemima Pierre, associate professor of African American Studies at the University of California Los Angeles, who assesses the current plight of Haitian refugees on the U.S. southern border and the root causes of migration.
JEMIMA PIERRE: For us at the Black Alliance for Peace is the spectacle of these Haitians and other black migrants, I have to say, being brutalized is really what caught people’s attention. What hasn’t caught people’s attention and what hasn’t been reported has been the backlog of immigrants and the thousands and thousands of immigrants stuck both at the Del Rio border, but also in Tapachula, which is the southern Mexican border with Guatemala and also in Tijuana, Mexico as a direct result of U.S. immigration policy against people coming to claim asylum. So the story about Del Rio is really an important one to think about and to really tell you what’s going on, apparently they’re saying 30,000 migrants had been sitting under that bridge since the second week of August. So it’s fascinating that it’s only last week that we heard about them.
And we only hear about the Haitians because the reality is they’re Cubans, they’re Ghanians, they’re Cameroonians. In addition to the South American migrants or Colombians, they’re all kinds of different migrants there. And, so for me, it’s really interesting to see how this is being played out, how it’s being focused solely on the Haitians, even though that’s clear and important — but focusing on the Haitians, as far as I’m concerned, is exceptionalizing the Haitian aspect of the migration issue and leaves out what the U.S. is doing to other migrants and its policies in general.
SCOTT HARRIS: The issue of racism and U.S. refugee policy and immigration policy is huge. And I wondered if you would discuss that with particular attention to the history of racial discrimination against Haitian refugees. And we can go back to the ’80s and ’90s when Haitian refugees who have been fleeing violence and instability in Haiti — much of it resulting from U.S. intervention. But we had tens of thousands of Haitian refugees deported to the Guantanamo Naval base before it was a prison for accused terrorists after 9/11. Tell us a bit about the consistent history of discrimination against Haitian refugees, if you will.
JEMIMA PIERRE: Guantanamo — and lot of people might not know that the first place where they held prisoners, the first group of prisoners held there were people, asylum seekers. And I have to stop and say, it’s everyone’s right to go up to any country – there’s nothing illegal about claiming asylum. And people have to remember this because you and I have the right to leave if you feel persecuted, to go to another country. It’s our legal right — international law, as well as U.S. law — to ask for asylum. What’s happening is that these people are being denied the opportunity to ask for asylum and for Haitians in particular, there’s this long history, Guantamano Bay where, in the early ’90s the U.S. was behind (two) coup d’etat(s) that removed the first democratically-elected president (Jean-Bertrand Aristide) of the country in all its history.
And then, the coup plotters terrorized the supporters of that administration, killing thousands of them and people ran away. But, you know, even before that, you have Ronald Reagan. It was Ronald Reagan who actually set the stage for the conditions that we see today at the border, because in 1980, his administration led a crusade against Haitian asylum seekers, turning back those who were running from a (Jean-Claude Duvalier) dictatorship that the U.S. supported, turning back thousands and thousands of asylum seekers and imprisoning them in the Krome detention center in Miami Dade, Florida. I don’t know if people remember the Krome detention center and it was an mass imprisonment, and it looked like even Giuliani back in the day, back in the time who was a deputy attorney general, then basically said, “These detention centers could create the appearance of concentration camps over black people.”
So this goes back a very long time to the ’80s. It goes back to U.S. policy against Haitian migrants and black migrants in particular, but also other migrants. And so, Title 42 is fascinating in the sense that the CDC basically labeled Haiti as a high risk for COVID, considering the U.S. is a place that has the most number of COVID (cases). They redefined Haiti as a place where COVID is rampant when we know that’s actually not true. Right? So then they can say, “Well, Title 42. We cannot bring them in.” Even though most of these migrants have not been in Haiti for three, four or five years. We joke, I live in California. We joke, actually the largest undocumented population that we never hear about are Canadian migrants who are living here without fear of being sent back to Canada.
And so this history is horrendous. It’s terrible. And the images that we see are only the tip of the iceberg, because right now these migrants have been disappeared. We don’t know, only between 2,000 and 4,000 have been deported over the past five days, but there were, you know, 30,000 at the border. Before that there was 120,000 in Tapachula. And so we have to ask, and that’s the first question — “Why are there all these migrants at these borders. What’s going on?”
