Judge Orders All Haitians Freed From U.S. Camp

In a stinging rebuke of Clinton Administration policy, a federal judge Tuesday ordered that a barbed-wire detention camp at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo, Cuba, be closed immediately and that Haitian refugees held there for 20 months be released to “anywhere but Haiti.”

Most of the more than 150 Haitians still held at the camp on Cuba’s southeastern tip have tested positive for the human immunodeficiency virus that causes AIDS. A few are children and other dependents.

In a 53-page ruling, U.S. District Judge Sterling Johnson Jr. of New York strongly castigated the Clinton Administration for operating “the only known refugee camp in the world composed entirely of HIV-positive refugees.” He called camp conditions “squalid,” blasted the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service for “deliberate indifference to the medical needs” of the refugees and ruled that holding the Haitians in “arbitrary and indefinite detention” violates their rights to due process under the U.S. Constitution.

Johnson said that the Haitians are being held in a manner “usually reserved for spies and murderers” and added that their “continued imprisonment . . . serves no purpose other than to punish them for being sick.”

He added: “The Haitians’ plight is a tragedy of immense proportion, and their continued containment is totally unacceptable to this court.”

Johnson also ruled that advocates for the Haitians have a First Amendment right to interview the detainees and ordered the government to provide them immediate access to the camp.

Attorneys for the Haitians hailed the ruling, which comes in response to a lawsuit filed two years ago. They passed the news to their clients at Guantanamo by telephone.

“They were screaming with joy,” said Michael Ratner, a New York-based lawyer with the Center for Constitutional Rights. “They were dancing in the camp they were so thrilled. Even I was crying.”

Ratner said that he hopes all the Haitians at Guantanamo will be brought into the United States within a week to 10 days. He said that resettlement agencies already have arranged to house the Guantanamo Haitians in New York.

It was not clear whether the government would appeal the decision. At the Justice Department, spokesman Dean St. Dennis would say only that “the matter is now under study.”

The Haitians still at Guantanamo are the last of some 250 so-called “legal limbo” refugees who have both credible claims for political asylum and the AIDS virus. Ineligible to be repatriated to Haiti, where they might be persecuted by the military government, neither could they routinely be brought to the United States because of a ban on HIV-positive immigrants, according to U.S. officials.

Nonetheless, over the last six months, some 75 Haitians with full-blown AIDS have been paroled into this country on humanitarian grounds and resettled in New York, Miami and Boston. Most of those arrived after Johnson ruled in March that the sickest of the refugees must be brought to the United States if they could not be adequately cared for at Guantanamo.

Robert Rubin, an attorney with the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights in San Francisco, co-counsel in the lawsuit, said that ending the “horror of Guantanamo” could serve to boost the credibility of the Clinton Administration in other global trouble spots. “If the U.S. expects to exert any moral authority with European nations regarding Bosnian refugees, it must act lawfully and humanely toward Haitian refugees in our own region of the world.”

Over the last 20 months, when only HIV-positive refugees and their dependents were being held, Guantanamo was visited often by American doctors, journalists and legislators--and condemned widely. Physicians with Doctors of the World, a humanitarian assistance group, visited the camp in February during a protest hunger strike and described conditions as “a medical and public health outrage.”

They cited unsanitary toilets, a lack of adequate running water and a prison-like atmosphere that they called “a disgrace.”

Judge Johnson agreed. He called Guantanamo “nothing more than an HIV prison camp presenting potential health risks to the Haitians held there.”

In response to a reported comment from an INS spokesman that the quality of medical care given the Haitians is not critical since they are doomed anyway, Johnson expressed particular ire. “It is outrageous, callous and reprehensible that defendant INS finds no value in providing adequate medical care, even when a patient’s illness is fatal,” he wrote.

In deciding in favor of the plaintiffs’ arguments that the Haitians, while in the custody of U.S. authorities, share the constitutional guarantees accorded to all in this country, Johnson noted: “If the due process clause does not apply to the detainees at Guantanamo, (the government) would have discretion deliberately to starve them or beat them, to deprive them of medical attention, to return them without process to their persecutors or to discriminate among them based on the color of their skin.”

In Miami’s Little Haiti, the news Tuesday afternoon of both the judge’s ruling and the resignation of Haitian leader Marc Bazin set off a storm of speculation among people on the street.

After the military coup that drove elected Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide from power in September, 1991, the George Bush Administration set up a tent city at Guantanamo to house the thousands of boat people who began to flee the impoverished country for the United States. In the spring of 1992, the camp held 12,500 refugees. Most were repatriated.

The U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay is America’s oldest overseas military base.