Perilous Journey

But the forces behind the decline of the Haitian Refugee Center are not so simple. Nonprofit organizational specialists, sent here by the Ford Foundation in January to try and help the center get back on its feet, shake their heads in befuddlement at the group's administrative procedures. Financial records are in such disarray that the center's auditors, the accounting firm Kitaif, Goode & Company, have attached disclaimers to recent statements and audits prepared by the firm, pointing out that the figures may not accurately reflect the center's financial status because of its bookkeeping practices. One of the organizational specialists, Clarence Elliot, hypothesized during a recent visit to Miami that the problem lay in culturally distinct approaches to management.

Although Elliot, who happens to be a black American, was trying to be tactful, his observations sting those Haitians who reflexively attribute the center's precarious circumstances to racism. Criticism such as Elliot's is thus interpreted as an unfair judgment that Haitians are incapable of running their own affairs. Tony Jeanthenor, president of the center's board of directors, says he believes that certain people (whom he declines to name) want to undermine the center because it is a black organization. Guy Victor, for his part, initially refused to speak to a white reporter because "white reporters will never write anything positive about our community."

The decades of abuse, humiliation, and indignity that fuel such statements are documented in the reams of legal pleadings filed over the years by lawyers working for the center, as well as in academic studies and opinions penned by federal judges, urging better and more just treatment of Haitian refugees.

But the wretchedness of the Haitian experience in the United States can have unintended consequences. To the same degree that refugees have been victimized, their defenders and spokesmen have gained moral legitimacy, power, and clout. Within the community, the standing of the Haitian Refugee Center is virtually unassailable, which has enabled a succession of executive directors to avoid both external scrutiny and internal accountability, often to the detriment of the people they seek to help.

The Haitian Refugee Center was formed in 1973 under the auspices of the National Council of Churches to protect the rights and promote the welfare of refugees fleeing the brutally repressive regime of Jean-Claude "Baby Doc" Duvalier. Led by Ira Kurzban, a Miami immigration attorney who has worked closely with the center since its founding and is currently an advisor to the Haitian government, a group of lawyers set about challenging the government's treatment of Haitian refugees. Among their first successes was securing a guarantee that nearly all refugees would be given the opportunity to ask for political asylum. Soon after that, however, the lawyers uncovered a sweeping government scheme to systematically identify and deport Haitians. Well documented by government memos, it was called the "Haitian Program."

It started with what lawyers referred to as a "bait and switch" operation. Work authorizations were offered to the Haitians during the Seventies, but in 1978 they were suddenly withdrawn and the applicants were placed in deportation proceedings. "The only reason that Haitians were given work permits was so that the government could find out who were illegal aliens and deport them," says Irwin Stotzky, a law professor at the University of Miami who participated in many of the lawsuits filed by the Haitian Refugee Center.

Asylum hearings were accelerated. While the average workload of an immigration judge had been one to ten hearings a day before the program began, afterward it increased to as many as 80 hearings a day, Kurzban remembers. Almost without exception the cases ended badly for the Haitians.

At least 4000 asylum seekers were slated for deportation by 1979 when the Haitian Refugee Center filed suit in federal court challenging the program. During the trial, the center's attorneys, including Kurzban and Steven Forester, sought to establish not only that the procedural flaws in the Haitian Program had denied refugees due process, but that Haitian asylum claims were justified by the savagery of Duvalier's rule. "We brought in all the evidence about the political conditions that they had ignored when processing the claims," Kurzban recalls.

The trial attracted journalists from around the nation who produced stories about the notoriously inhumane Port-au-Prince prison called Fort Dimanche, as well as rigged elections, torture, beatings, and disappearances. In the end, Judge James Lawrence King condemned the Haitian Program and ordered that the 4000 claims be reheard. In a lengthy and scathing opinion, King wrote, "Over the past seventeen years, Haitian claims for asylum and refuge have been systematically denied, while all others have been granted. The recent Haitian Program is but the largest-scale, most dramatic example of that pattern."