U.S. Deports 1st 23 of Cuban ‘Undesirables’

Implementing a new federal court ruling, the government Thursday deported the first group of “undesirables” among the 125,000 Cuban refugees who reached U.S. shores nearly five years ago during the controversial Mariel boatlift.

The planeload of 23 returnees, all convicted criminals, left Dobbins Air Force Base in Georgia on orders of Atty. Gen. William French Smith hours after a federal appeals court in Atlanta overturned a lower-court ruling that had blocked the deportations.

December Agreement

Smith told a news conference that the go-ahead from the U.S. 11th Circuit Court of Appeals would help “normalize” U.S.-Cuban immigration policy in accordance with an agreement negotiated by the two nations last December. Under terms of that pact, the United States plans to return about 2,700 so-called Cuban “boat people” over the next two years who have criminal records or serious mental disorders, he said.

Smith stressed, however, that the 100 to 150 Cubans who will be returned each month “represent only a small percentage of the persons who came to the United States in the Mariel boatlift.” The vast majority, he said, “have incorporated themselves into American life and now are being processed by the Immigration and Naturalization Service for legal resident status.”

Reported Orderly

Wearing blue prison uniforms, the first returnees were taken in handcuffs in two buses from the Atlanta federal penitentiary to Dobbins Field, 90 minutes away. There, they boarded a chartered Boeing 727 jetliner for the 2 1/2-hour flight to Havana. Reporters on the scene said that the process appeared to be orderly, and Smith said that no trouble was reported.

Two dozen armed federal agents accompanied the group back to Cuba. The first returnees included four murderers, eight armed robbers and several persons convicted of aggravated assault, according to a list of U.S. and Cuban convictions furnished by the Justice Department.

Despite the U.S.-Cuban agreement, announced Dec. 14, deportation of “undesirables” had been delayed by separate rulings of Atlanta-based federal Judges Marvin Shoob and Charles A. Moye Jr.

Shoob had ruled last October that illegal Cuban immigrants had a right to additional hearings in their efforts to obtain political asylum in the United States. On the same grounds, Moye recently blocked deportation proceedings against 16 members of the first group of returnees, declaring that the government was showing “unseemly haste” in its plans to send them home.

Refusal to Block Plan

But after the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals stayed Shoob’s decision last month, Supreme Court Justice William H. Rehnquist refused to block the government’s plan to deport the first returnees. And on Thursday, the same appellate court overturned Moye’s order, holding that federal law “provides that excludable aliens who have committed serious crimes or are threats to the security of the United States may be returned, notwithstanding their claims for asylum.”

A lawyer for the Cubans said that he planned no appeal of Thursday’s ruling in view of Rehnquist’s earlier action. “I think it would be futile,” attorney Dale Schwartz of Atlanta said.

The 2,700 Cubans on the deportation list are those who were in U.S. prisons or mental facilities as of last November. By far the largest group--a total of 1,500--is in the Atlanta penitentiary. Smith said that it has cost the U.S. government $41 million a year to incarcerate them.

Although Shoob and Moye had given weight to some Cubans’ contentions that they might face “persecution” if returned to the Caribbean island, Smith told reporters: “We have received assurances from Cuban officials that they will be treated in accordance with applicable Cuban law.”

And despite former President Jimmy Carter’s characterization of the boatlift as “the freedom flotilla,” Smith said Thursday: “We’re going to do everything we can to make sure this kind of immigration emergency never occurs again.”

Diana Rector, a Times researcher in Atlanta, contributed to this story.