Perilous Journey

A year later "Baby Doc" Duvalier left Haiti under pressure. "We all thought, 'Great, we can close lots of our files, our work is over, a new day has dawned,'" Little recalls. But her jubilation was premature. A succession of wobbly governments rose and fell as military factions jostled for power. People began fleeing in greater numbers, and interdiction on the high seas increased dramatically. The Coast Guard bragged about its 90-percent success rate of catching refugees. According to a report submitted to the House Judiciary Committee in November 1991, during the previous ten years, 22,940 Haitians had been picked up by the Coast Guard. Of those thousands, only eleven were considered to have credible claims for asylum.

On September 30, 1991, a military coup toppled President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, who had been chosen by nearly 70 percent of Haitian voters during the December 1990 elections. For almost two months the United States suspended repatriations. When they began again on November 18, the Haitian Refugee Center filed suit against Secretary of State James Baker.

"We argued that the Haitians were entitled to a fair interview as to why they fled Haiti before being forcibly returned," Little recounts. The center's lawsuit pointed out that the interviews often lasted no more than five minutes and were conducted by INS officers with little or no knowledge of conditions in Haiti. Even the name of Raoul Cedras, the coup leader and de facto head of state, was unfamiliar to them. In making their case, Little and other lawyers for the center described instances in which repatriated Haitians had been arrested and tortured. Some escaped the country a second time, only to find themselves back in front of an unsympathetic asylum officer yet again.

The lawsuit was heard by District Court Judge C. Clyde Atkins, who issued three separate restraining orders blocking repatriations, and prompted the INS to replace its interviewers. By mid-January 1992, the new interviewers were judging 85 percent of claims made by the boat people to be credible. In the wake of Atkins's order, those hearings were being held at the Guantanamo naval base in Cuba.

But problems in the asylum process quickly returned: The Guantanamo operation was hopelessly -- even dangerously -- disorganized, the percentage of successful asylum claims plummeted after INS interviewers were officially encouraged to deny cases, and most disheartening, Judge Atkins's orders were overturned. On January 31, 1992, the U.S. Supreme Court voted eight-to-one to lift the ban on repatriations, and in late May, President George Bush directed the INS to repatriate Haitians without investigating their asylum claims at all.

By that point Little had left the Haitian Refugee Center to coordinate legal assistance to Haitians for Florida Rural Legal Services. In August 1992, Steven Forester returned to his former post of supervising attorney. Looking back, the lawyers describe the struggle to ban repatriations as a victory, despite their ultimate defeat at the Supreme Court. Although they failed to outlaw the policy, the center's lawsuit resulted in more than 10,000 Haitian refugees being allowed to journey to Florida from Guantanamo to pursue their asylum claims (at least 26,000 refugees were sent back to Haiti). The Guantanamo refugees were divvied up among various nonprofit legal-assistance organizations, who volunteered to carry their claims to court.

While Forester was working on other projects away from the Haitian Refugee Center in the late Eighties, the center's charismatic founding executive director, Father Gerard Jean-Juste, resigned. A search committee made up of board members selected Rolande Dorancy to replace him. The 27-year-old Haitian woman, chosen from an undisclosed pool of applicants, had little administrative experience, and her appointment in October 1990 raised concerns about the secretive methods of the search committee. Forester, in particular, was disturbed, and he argued vehemently (to no avail) with other members of the board that the selection process should be reopened.

Dorancy soon clashed with members of her legal staff, prompting the resignations of Cheryl Little and staff attorney Esther Cruz in 1992. Sources say the conflicts ranged from trivial gripes such as misplaced telephone messages to more troubling charges that Dorancy directed the lawyers to ignore the asylum cases of those refugees who did not support Aristide. Little's high-visibility role as the center's spokeswoman also rankled Dorancy, who was troubled by the image of a white woman speaking for the Haitian community.

By the spring of 1993 the legal staff, which had totaled thirteen at its peak, began to shrink as employees left and were not replaced. The sole Creole interpreter began doubling as a receptionist. In the first of a series of detailed memos, Forester, now back as supervising attorney, warned of inadequate financial and legal resources, and volunteered to spend three months as a fundraiser. He also offered to arrange for one of the center's former fundraisers to return on a volunteer basis.

Neither suggestion was adopted, but for a brief period of time financial concerns were subsumed by external developments. After months of national lobbying, refugee advocates were rewarded in October 1993 by the announcement of a moratorium on Haitian deportations that remained in effect until the summer of 1995. In the meantime, however, discontent with Dorancy's administrative skills mounted.