Supreme Court OKs Return of Haitian Refugees

The Supreme Court on Friday night cleared the way for the Coast Guard to forcibly return about 10,000 Haitian boat people to their strife-torn island nation.

The deportations, which had been blocked for more than two months by a federal judge, could begin “in a matter of days,” a senior State Department official said.

About 15,000 Haitians have fled their nation since the Sept. 30 military coup that overthrew their first democratically elected government.

The court’s 6-3 ruling came on an emergency petition by the Bush Administration, which argued that as many as 20,000 Haitians are preparing to leave their country and that a makeshift tent city for Haitian refugees at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, is filled to capacity.

The court, in a brief order, lifted a stay issued by U.S. District Judge C. Clyde Atkins in Miami, clearing the way for the forced repatriations pending a full resolution of the legal issues by the U.S. 11th Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta. Dissenting were Justices Harry A. Blackmun, John Paul Stevens and Clarence Thomas.

After the high court ruling, Ira Kurzban, an attorney for the Haitian Refugee Center in Miami, which sued to block the deportations, said that Administration officials who had declared a “so-called emergency” would be interviewed to “test their veracity” and that the refugee center would ask the Supreme Court to reconsider. He said he also hoped to win in the appeals court.

But forced repatriations will continue until the appeals court rules, lawyers familiar with the case said Friday night. The appeals court has twice ruled against the refugee center.

“Clearly, the federal courts are retiring from the fray,” said Arthur C. Helton, an attorney with the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights. “Congress has declined to enter into the fray. It’s incumbent on the executive branch to do the right thing.”

Rep. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) said earlier Friday he would push for a vote early next week on legislation, now pending in a House subcommittee, to prevent the forced repatriation, the Associated Press reported.

Administration officials were unsure how quickly the Haitians could be returned. Recent estimates were that up to 1,000 a day could be taken back, but the precise number has not been determined.

As of Friday, about 9,800 refugees were at the Guantanamo Bay naval base and another 2,000 were on board cutters, the Coast Guard reported. About 1,400 Haitians found to have plausible asylum claims have arrived in this country, according to the Immigration and Naturalization Service, and another 2,000 await transport to the United States.

About 6,500 refugees at Guantanamo Bay have been determined to be ineligible for asylum, and those would be the first to be returned, officials said.

The Haitians began boarding boats to flee their nation about a month after Haiti’s first elected president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, was ousted in a coup led by the Haitian military.

The Bush Administration, which sharply condemned the coup, initially hesitated to return the boat people, temporarily breaking with a decade-old policy of promptly returning virtually all Haitian refugees. But a few weeks later, fearing an uncontrollable flood of tens of thousands of Haitians, the Administration resumed the repatriation policy.