Biden’s Anti-Black Border Patrol

The United States has always gone to extraordinary lengths to exclude Haitian migrants.

Images of mounted Border Patrol agents wielding whips against Haitian migrants at the border in Del Rio, Texas, flooded news networks and social media on Sunday, September 19 as six deportation flights to Haiti took off, with six more scheduled the next day. Border Patrol agents’ acts of physical abuse were accompanied by verbal assaults. VICE News reported that one agent yelled, “This is why your country’s shit, because you use your women for this!” at several Haitian women carrying food and personal belongings.

Although Biden’s White House has condemned and promised to investigate the Border Patrol’s visible forms of abuse against Haitians seeking asylum from intersecting political, economic, and environmental crises, the administration—like many before—continues to mete out exceptional discrimination and violence against Haitian migrants. Especially behind the scenes through policies of mass detention, interdiction, and deportation.

Migrant rights organizations, including the Black Alliance for Just Immigration (BAJI), the Haitian Bridge Alliance, and the UndocuBlack Network, have rightly connected these images to legacies of slave patrols. Indeed, there is a long history of using the border to criminalize Indigenous, Mexican, Asian, and Black people, control their mobility, and restrict their efforts at liberation. The Border Patrol was established in 1924 at the height of nativist sentiment when Congress and the public called for a police force to police the US-Mexico border. Before the Border Patrol, there were the Texas Rangers, established in 1823 to aid in what historians have called a race war between Anglo settlers against Indigenous nations and Mexican landowners. The Rangers were also called on to ensure that the institution of slavery could thrive by hunting enslaved people trying to escape bondage for freedom. Texas Rangers went on to help establish the Border Patrol in 1924.

There is also a more recent connection, to histories of US colonialism and militarism in the Caribbean—extending from slavery, the Haitian revolution, US occupation, and ongoing freedom struggles—and their Cold War afterlives.

In the 1970s and 1980s, rooted in Cold War foreign policy and racism, the Carter and Reagan administrations restructured the US detention system and extended US executive authority abroad in the formation of new, off-shore exclusion measures. Reagan’s associate attorney general Rudy Giuliani was a key architect of new detention and interdiction policies that targeted Haitians alone, including establishing the argument that Haitians are economic, and therefore “illegal” migrants, rather than political refugees. Acting as diplomat, Giuliani made way for these policies by forging close ties with Haiti’s corrupt dictator, Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier, through Coast Guard assistance and training-exchange programs to develop the world’s first migrant interdiction program on the high seas, directed solely at Haitians. This was accompanied by US economic coercion in the form of foreign aid and a new free trade agreement called the Caribbean Basin Initiative which only served to keep Haiti locked in dependency and exploitation.

In the 1970s the arrival of a growing number of Haitian asylum seekers by boat to U.S. shores generated a racist reaction among Floridians and calls for state and federal officials to halt the influx. U.S. officials responded by holding Haitians in county jails in South Florida. Activist and legal aid networks sprung to their assistance, decrying the human rights violations of Haiti’s Duvalier dictatorial regime and linking the oppression in Haiti with the injustice in the United States. Articulating demands for Haitian justice in anti-racist, anti-imperial terms, activism on behalf of Haitian migrants invited state retaliation. Arriving Haitians experienced family separation—husbands from wives, parents from children—scattered in jails, prisons, and INS detention centers across the country. Eight-year-old Rosiline Dorsinville was separated from her father and spent two weeks in the West Palm Beach city jail before she was discovered by Haitian community leader and activist Father Gerard Jean-Juste.`1

Tapping into longstanding xenophobic notions of Haitian pathology, INS also subjected Haitian migrants to medical inspections and delousing measures, with male migrants developing a mysterious gynecomastia from forced medications and the toxic prison environments of the Krome and Fort Allen detention centers in Miami and Puerto Rico in the early 1980s. INS often detained pregnant women, in violation of its directive to release them. Haitian women also reported experiencing reproductive violence and medical abortions. This history of abuse makes the Border Patrol agent’s misogynistic comments to Haitian women all the more ironic--not to mention how they also evoke president Trump’s 2018 reference to Haiti and African nations as “sh*thole countries.”

“Haitians have always fought back against the U.S. government’s cruelty by demanding dignity.”

Haitians have always fought back against the U.S. government’s cruelty by demanding dignity. Staging hunger strikes and sit-ins in detention, they collaborated with allies on the outside and civil and human rights groups who organized marches and caravans, and reported on dire conditions in detention. Jesse Jackson’s rainbow coalition and 1984 presidential campaign elevated US mistreatment of Haitian migrants to national attention, connecting it to US wars in Central America and the Sanctuary movement, drawing further ire from the Reagan administration.

A military coup in Haiti in 1991 removed the democratically-elected President Jean-Bertrand Aristide and unleashed a wave of terror on the popular movement from which Aristide had emerged. A new exodus of asylum seekers fled Haiti. President George H.W. Bush deployed the interdiction program to block the Haitians from reaching American shores and established a processing center and detention facility at the U.S. naval base in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. Over intense international outcry, many of the asylum seekers were returned directly to Haiti. Despite promises while running for President that he would reverse the Bush administration’s cruel treatment of the Haitians, once elected Bill Clinton continued his predecessor’s policy of blocking Haitian asylum seekers from U.S. shores and detaining them in the offshore facility of Guantánamo. Legal challenges to the U.S. Haitian policy reached the Supreme Court in 1993 but the high court refused to halt the government’s program. Hundreds of HIV-positive Haitian asylum seekers languishing in long-term detention at Guantanamo Bay also challenged the U.S. government through protests, hunger strikes, and outright rebellion. Along with an international solidarity campaign and legal challenges, some of those Haitian asylum seekers in Guantánamo were eventually able to win entrance to the United States. As A. Naomi Paik has shown, these asylum-seekers carried the burden of exposing the inhumane conditions, leading to the camp eventually being closed.

2010 brought an earthquake in Haiti and new migration patterns. Many Haitians now at the border were initially displaced by the 2010 earthquake or Hurricane Matthew of 2015. Perhaps this is one reason Biden’s climate czar John Kerry has labeled climate change the biggest national security threat facing the nation, inviting further securitization of the border in response. The Caribbean Basin Initiative was strengthened and superseded by NAFTA, further displacing migrants from Mexico, the Caribbean, and Central America, now accompanied by the militarized Caribbean Basin Security Initiative.

The Biden administration recently extended Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for Haitians in the United States since July 29, acknowledging that conditions in Haiti are too dangerous to force their return. But it has refused to acknowledge that the same dangerous conditions remain for the hundreds of Haitians it has returned to Haiti in the past week. Meanwhile, deportations and abuses in detention continue.

Just as in the past, when U.S. exclusion, detention, and abuse of Haitian asylum seekers produced wide ranging protests and solidarity campaigns, today’s movement to defend Haitians from violence is growing rapidly. On July 8, 134 human rights, humanitarian, immigration and women’s rights organizations called on the Biden administration to provide protection for Haitians in the U.S. following the assassination of Haitian President Jovenel Moise. Many more joined the call after thousands of Haitian asylum seekers gathered in Del Rio, Texas. While it appears that the Biden administration has broken up the encampment in Texas and returned many to Haiti, the solidarity campaign continues.

The Haitian Bridge Alliance, BAJI, UndocuBlack Network, and African Communities Together have filed a complaint against the Department of Homeland Security’s civil rights abuses of Haitians at Del Rio, Texas, including blocking access to lawyers and providing due process in allowing Haitians to exercise their right to apply for political asylum. They are also on the ground in Texas and Haiti providing assistance.

Guerline Jozef, the executive director of Haitian Bridge, says the most important historical lesson is “how the fear of the Other created the system we have today.” Please follow the work of these organizations on social media, share their witnessing, and consider donating to them directly.

Recommendations for Biden:

Immigration historian and senior advocate at Refugees International Yael Schacher has also drawn up a list of immediate actions the Biden administration can take instead of expelling Haitians.

Parole to shelters Haitians flown from Del Rio to other parts of the border. These shelters can provide Haitians with care and support making travel arrangements. After joining family and friends in communities across the country, Haitians can pursue asylum and immigration relief in immigration court.
Open ports of entry to processing asylum seekers. Haitians have traditionally sought entry at ports, which have been closed to asylum seekers since the start of the pandemic. This would require that the administration put in place meaningful COVID-19 mitigation measures and implement promised reforms to asylum processing and adjudication that move away from detention and increase due process.
Not only hold particular agents accountable for mistreatment of Haitians but make meaningful reforms to the way the Border Patrol handles asylum seekers. Those Haitians abused in Del Rio should be witnesses in agency investigations and be eligible for immigration relief in reparation.
Stop appealing a federal court decision deeming expulsions under Title 42 unauthorized by U.S. law. Instead, reaffirm a commitment to access to asylum and non-refoulement and show humanitarian leadership on the worldwide problem of pushbacks at borders. A concrete way to do this that could prevent expulsions of Haitians to serious harm would be to shift the U.S. position on abiding by non-refoulement under article 7 of the International Convention on Civil and Political Rights.
Cooperation with other countries in the Americas should focus not on returning Haitians to Haiti and hindering mobility but on upholding the human rights and labor rights of Haitians, establishing legal migration pathways, and ensuring Haitians have secure legal status. The United States should encourage Mexico and Chile to create humanitarian, family unification, and work visas available to Haitians. The Biden administration should work with other countries to address the problem of separated and mixed status Haitian families and to ensure Haitian parents of children born in the United States, Mexico, Chile, or Panama can regularize their status in those countries.

Notes

Image Credit (Cover): Detained Haitian men and women speak to each other through the fences at the Krome Detention Facility in Miami, 1982. Photo courtesy of Michael Carlebach. Michael L. Carlebach Photograph Collection, University of Miami Special Collections.

Image Credit (Side): Rescue Committee for Haitian Refugees Press Release, December 4, 1978. American Committee for Protection of Foreign Born Records, University of Miami Special Collections

Press Release, “Priest discovers 8-year-old child of Haitian Refugee Jailed for Two Weeks by Immigration Authorities,” Rescue Committee for Haitian Refugees, December 4, 1978, American Committee for Protection of Foreign Born Records, University of Miami.

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