Haitians Sent Home

She stopped dead. From the line of luxury high-rises to her left, residents used binoculars to spy the scene unfolding below them.

A few feet from Lalitananda, two policewomen waded into the water to fish out the motionless body of a gaunt black man. He wore blue plaid boxer shorts and a ripped mesh basketball jersey. The rescue workers laid him on his back with his feet pointing toward the ocean.

As she peered at the young man, Lalitananda said a prayer. "God, if there's any life in him, let him be resuscitated. Let him know he really reached his goal — the shores of America."

Nearby, Charles, a young orphan, trudged through the chop to the beach. Then he began pacing, looking for his older brother, who had disappeared during the voyage. Charles clung to the hope that his brother had been locked away somewhere on the boat.

Two crew members, he would later claim, saw him and growled, "We'll kill you if you tell anyone your brother died."

Daniel Batiste, 25 years old, also waded ashore. He had assumed his death would have come before this day. It was the first land he had seen in 22 days. Where am I? he thought and joined dozens of other dazed Haitian men, women, and children on the sandy beach.

Rescue workers shepherded Charles, Daniel, and 99 others from the spot behind The Beach Club's opulent condo towers to a nearby fire station, and draped them, shivering and bruised, in white blankets. They were offered water and dry clothes to replace garments that reeked of fuel.

After a few minutes, Lalitananda left the scene. She couldn't stop looking behind her at the corpse on the beach. He must have been a very good soul, she thought.

The man pulled to shore would later be identified as 24-year-old Haitian refugee Lifaite Lully. He was pronounced dead at 8:15 a.m., and his body was covered with a white sheet. Soon the boat wobbled free from a sandbar and ran aground on the beach. Authorities found one refugee onboard in shock and tightly grasping two ropes.

The men, women, and children had boarded that flimsy 40-foot sailboat to escape curses, slavery, political slaughter, and hunger. Smugglers had crammed them into the hold like animals, along with concrete bags to prevent capsizing. They had lost their way, and after food and water were exhausted, survived for a week on Colgate toothpaste, salty rice, and seawater.

Right minds wafted to sea. Those onboard the ship claim crew members bludgeoned some passengers and killed one, maybe more, before they finally made it to the States. It was the largest landing of Haitians in the continental United States since October 2002, when more than 200 migrants reached Key Biscayne, according to the U.S. Coast Guard.

Local Haitians and advocates sprang into action. A 15-day hunger strike, a massive street protest, and headlines across America demanded fairness for the troubled souls. Then the noise stopped. For the past eight months, bewildered family members have watched as the government has warehoused their loved ones in secrecy behind barbed wire in Pompano Beach and sent them back to Haiti one by one. Prayers to God or vodou spirits haven't saved them. Nor have immigration lawyers.

"The whole world saw them on the TV," says Cedelia Calixte, a 28-year-old Fort Lauderdale resident and godmother of a refugee in his twenties who was deported on Halloween. Family members have not heard from him since. "They put them away like they were going to do something, and when everybody was sleeping, they sent them away, piece by piece."

From some angles, the Broward Transitional Center on Powerline Road in Pompano looks like the Quinta Inn it was supposed to become before the government took over and opened the center in 1998. People lounge on benches. Soda machines and pay phones punctuate outdoor hallways. Balconies face a courtyard with a shoddy putt-putt course where Midwestern families might have slathered on sunscreen to tan in the Florida sun.

But here pay-per-view is not an option. Small rooms fit six in bunk beds. A line of hundreds of refugees in crossing-guard orange snakes through halls and spills outside at mealtime. Fences at least 10 feet high and topped with barbed wire divide women from men.

Up to four hundred men and 200 women live at the center. They await immigration court decisions on their requests for asylum in the United States. Asian, Hispanic, and Eastern European faces are sprinkled throughout the place. Five months after the landing in Hallandale Beach, a few of the Haitians remain. Many have been sent home to a country corroded with crime and poverty.

"Every time I say things can't get worse for the Haitians, they do, so I've stop saying it," says Cheryl Little, executive director of the Florida Immigrant Advocacy Center, which handled 37 of the Hallandale refugees' cases. "There have been so many harsh measures directed at Haitians it's hard to envision an end in sight."

Indeed Haitians have been leaving their half of the island of Hispaniola, about 700 miles from Miami, on boats for decades.

Many fled in the 1960s to escape the terror, torture, and killing at the hands of François "Papa Doc" Duvalier and his Tonton Macoute thugs. When the dictator died in 1971, his son, Jean-Claude "Baby Doc" Duvalier, continued the violence, and the exodus burgeoned. Often forgotten is that some 25,000 Haitians arrived in South Florida around the same time 125,000 Cubans landed during the 1980 Mariel Boatlift. But because of the 1966 Cuban Readjustment Act, which gives residents of Fidel Castro's island special rights, Cubans were allowed to stay while most Haitians were denied asylum.

In 1981 the Reagan administration ordered the Coast Guard to stop suspected Haitian boats and turn them around. It was believed the economy, not politics, brought them here. And that wasn't good enough for the federal government.

After Baby Doc was ousted in 1986, political instability continued. It worsened after the democratic election of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. He took office in February 1991 but was violently overthrown seven months later. Three years into Haiti's military rule, the United States led a 21,000-strong force that pried control from the regime and returned Aristide to power.

In the years that followed, American presidents continued to turn away Haitian boats. Beginning in 2001, the federal government adopted a secret no-release policy for Haitian asylum seekers, while refugees of other nationalities were freed at a 91 percent rate, according to a Florida Immigrant Advocacy Center report. The second Bush administration gave the strange rationale that releasing Haitians could stoke terrorism — that terrorists might start posing as Haitian refugees.

"God help us all if our government can't tell the difference between a Middle Eastern terrorist and a Haitian boat person," Little quips.

Despite Aristide's 2004 exit from the country and recent political stability under President René Préval, Haitians have continued to flee because of widespread kidnappings, gang violence, and destruction caused by hurricanes. In 2004, Tropical Storm Jeanne left 300,000 Haitians homeless and 3,000 dead and submerged parts of Port-de-Paix and the island of Tortue, from which the March ship departed.

Despite these many travails, the U.S. government has not extended to Haitians temporary protected status, which would allow them to stay in the States while their country heals. It regularly bestows the relief to Honduras, El Salvador, and Nicaragua, where suffering has been less constant.

"There's no question that Haitians fully qualify. It's completely senseless," says Steven Forester, a senior policy advocate at Fanm Ayisyen Nan Miyami, or Haitian Women of Miami. "The reason they don't get it is blatant discrimination and racism and a lack of political power."

Daniel Batiste is one of 21 Haitians still locked in the Broward Transitional Center. It's November 1. His hair is short, and he wears a federal-issued neon orange shirt and pants, white socks, and leather sandals.

He is gawky and shifts his weight like an anxious teenager when he greets a New Times reporter. Teased about not looking his interviewer in the eye, he quickly glances up and reveals a wide smile and a gap between his front teeth. He sits and folds his hands on his lap.

His lanky legs stretch below the long wooden table in the fluorescent-lit room lined with books. Not far away is a computer lab and sterile cafeteria. Federal officials, who took nearly four months to decide whether to grant an interview, allow him only 30 minutes for the meeting. You might think it's either a glacial-moving bureaucracy or part of a strategy to keep the refugees' stories from the public eye.

Eyes cast down, Daniel begins to tell his story in an unwavering voice so soft that one must strain to listen.

His family lives in a concrete-block, dirt-floor home in Port-de-Paix. His mother birthed 17 children, and he was among a lucky handful that survived. His father worked construction until he fell from a coconut tree. "No more heavy lifting," the doctor said.

Daniel finished the 10th grade after sporadically attending school. He hoped to study film, but his family couldn't pay the tuition. His parents made a living hawking second-hand clothes imported from the United States for a 10 to 20 percent cut of the profits.

His older cousin, Wisler Telcy, lived next door and worked as a tailor. He gave Daniel small jobs like pinning folds in trousers in exchange for food. In 1995, Telcy fled Haiti on a boat and settled in South Florida.

By 2001, Daniel had begun working for a political party to earn some money, and a few years later his brother Jeremie took over as chief security guard for a local delegate with Aristide's party, Lavalas. When the president was ousted in 2004, Jeremie ducked into hiding.

Two years later, after Préval came to power, Jeremie returned to live with his family. He wrongly believed his life was no longer in danger. On February 7, Daniel says, an angry mob knocked on the family's door around 9 p.m. His brother answered it.

"You were the one we were after. Come out," Daniel recalls hearing. The mob carried Jeremie by his arms and legs from the living room. His father yelled, "They took Jeremie!" to wake the house, and Daniel and his parents followed the gang to the street, where a crowd watched as Jeremie was beaten with a club. Daniel sprinted to a neighbor's house for help. When he returned, he saw his brother lying in a pool of blood. He had been partially decapitated. During the nights that followed, Daniel had trouble sleeping for fear the same would happen to him. He went into hiding in a city along the north coast.

"I realized I was the only one left who could help my family," Daniel says. "In Haiti, even if you finish school, it's not easy to find a job to help your family."

Others on the boat have told similar stories of horror in the Western Hemisphere's poorest nation, according to interviews and federal documents obtained by New Times.

Charles, who wandered the beach that day in Hallandale and is not being identified by his real name, says his uncle made him work like a slave for years after his parents died. He finally escaped at age 16.

Clebert Calixte, a card-carrying election supervisor in his midtwenties from Tortue, says his brother was beheaded in 1996 and a local politician threatened to do the same to him.

Cerisma Federic asserts the leader of a political organization in Port-de-Paix sent men in black bandannas to his home to harass his family after he refused to offer support.

Frannso Brutus, age 32, says his politically active father was found dead, hands tied, head covered, and body riddled with bullet holes, in December 2001. Brutus went on radio to denounce the murder and claims to have been kidnapped twice as a result.

Decidel Blaise contends a political gang set his home ablaze.

The boat was hope for all of them.

"If there are things that make life unendurable in Haiti, people are going to come. Haitians know people die at sea," Forester says. "These are horrendous voyages. People don't make the decision lightly to get in a boat like that."

Federal authorities still try to dissuade them. "The U.S. government continues to discourage any type of illegal immigration. Individuals who take to the sea are putting their lives at risk," says Barbara Gonzalez, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement spokeswoman.

New Times submitted requests to ICE in July to interview all of these detainees. After almost weekly phone calls and e-mails, interviews were set for November. But by then, Cerisma, Decidel, and Clebert had been deported. A request to interview Charles, whose case is perhaps the most controversial, still had not been cleared as this story went to press.

In early March, word surged around Port-de-Paix, a coastal city that spills into shantytowns, that a sailboat destined for Nassau would soon push off from the nearby island of Tortue.

On maps, Île de la Tortue is a crumb that hovers off the northwest coast in the claw-shape landmass of Hispaniola, which Haiti shares with the Dominican Republic. Situated along the Windward Passage, the island lies almost directly across from Cuba and was known for its 17th-century buccaneers. The pirate tradition continues. Nowadays the stowed goods are people.

Daniel Batiste bid his mother, François, goodbye in early March. François knew the trip was dangerous, but she encouraged her son to go. "There's no opportunity here," she told him. "I'm not worried, because I send you with God's supervision."

Daniel and about 40 other people from Port-de-Paix paid a few dollars for the ferry ride to Tortue, which takes an hour or two. On March 6 — which most of the refugees recall as the departure date — men, women, and children collected near shore. They boarded the sailboat with only the clothes they were wearing and a scant supply of food and water. A handful of Haitian men was said to have crewed the peeling red, white, and blue ship.

"On those boats, 99 percent of the time, you don't make it anywhere alive, but I figured that wherever I landed, God would show me a way to stay," said Frannso Brutus, who left a wife and three young children behind. "I didn't know it was going to go down the way it did, but if I did, I would have definitely been afraid."

They didn't dare ask if the boat was stolen.