Relatives Ask U.S. to Stop Repatriating Haiti Children

In an emotional news conference punctuated by wailing and fits of anguish Friday, relatives of 260 unaccompanied Haitian minors being held in a detention camp at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, pleaded with the Clinton Administration to stop the forced repatriation of the children and allow them to come here.

This month, about two dozen children have been sent back to Haiti as part of a continuing U.S. policy to return Haitian immigrants to their home now that the democratically elected government has been restored there.

But, advocates say, many of the children sent back have no relatives or means of support.

“We have been getting calls from these children, who go home to find they are in danger,” attorney Cheryl Little said. “It makes no sense when they have family here willing to care for them.”

Mimose LaRose tearfully said she had been told that her 16-year-old daughter had been returned to an aunt in Haiti.

“But I don’t have a sister; she doesn’t have an aunt,” she said, sobbing. “I have no idea in whose hands she is. Please send the child back to me.”

A letter from the Guantanamo children to President Clinton was offered in support of the relatives’ entreaties as well as appeals from Amnesty International, the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees and some Hollywood stars, including Gregory Peck, Robert Redford, Michelle Pfeiffer and Danny Glover.

Returning the children to Haiti against their will was “a shocking thing, hideous, a source of great shame,” said Oscar-winning director Jonathan Demme, who attended the news conference on behalf of Artists for Democracy in Haiti.

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Most of the Haitian minors still at Guantanamo have been in the barbed-wire detention camp for eight months and have been the subject of a continuing court battle. In November, a U.S. District Court judge in Miami ordered the Administration to permit them into the country on the same humanitarian grounds on which Cubans were allowed in. But that order was reversed by an appeals court.

Even those Haitian children without relatives in the United States will be cared for, said Father Tom Wenski, a priest at Miami’s Notre Dame d’Haiti Catholic Church, under a sponsorship program set up by a predominantly Cuban American coalition in Miami.

Operation Angel, in cooperation with the Justice Department, is aiding the resettlement of as many as 500 Cuban refugees who arrive here each week from Guantanamo and has offered to help Haitians too.