The Border Patrol’s recent treatment of Haitian asylum seekers was appalling. But the racism and violence on display go far beyond this terrible incident. They are at the heart of the U.S. government’s policy toward Haitian asylum seekers. And they have been for decades.
In the 1970s, a growing number of Haitians fleeing violence and misery under the U.S.-backed Duvalier dictatorship began arriving by boat on the shores of South Florida. Community residents and local officials called on state and federal officials to do something to keep people they perceived as poor, Black and unwanted out of their communities.
In response, Carter administration officials devised something called the Haitian Program in 1978, which placed the newly arrived Haitians in local jails, denied them permission to work and applied a blanket denial of their asylum claims. This treatment stood in stark contrast to the warm reception the U.S. government extended to the lighter-skinned Cuban asylum seekers fleeing a communist regime in the same period. President Jimmy Carter also aimed to return asylum seekers to Haiti, where danger, torture and death awaited them because of the grip of the Duvalier dictatorship. Worried about the potential of more Haitians seeking asylum in the United States, “the most practical deterrent to this problem [was] expulsion from the United States,” a high-ranking Immigration and Naturalization Service official concluded.
Haitians and their allies condemned the Haitian Program as racist. And in 1980, federal judge James Lawrence King (a Richard Nixon appointee) agreed, striking it down and calling the Carter administration’s treatment of Haitians “discriminatory acts” against “the first substantial flight of black refugees,” all “part of a program to expel Haitians.” By prejudging their asylum claims, the U.S. government was discriminating against the Haitians and violating their right to seek asylum and to due process.
Despite the court’s rebuke of the government’s racist treatment of Haitians, Carter’s successor, Ronald Reagan, picked up where the previous administration had left off. Officials reasoned that caging Haitians might make others think twice before undertaking the journey. They also detained Haitians already in the United States, to keep them confined until they could be expelled from the country.
Where Carter’s blanket Haitian asylum claim denials had been struck down in court, Reagan sought a way around the law. His administration introduced the practice of interdiction, meaning the United States would intercept boats of Haitians before they could reach American shores, which would deprive them of the ability to claim asylum. To make an asylum claim, a person must be in the United States or at its border.
Members of the Congressional Black Caucus condemned the Haitian interdiction program as “racist and inhumane,” in violation of international and domestic law and intending to “prohibit black refugees from entering this country.”