Elian Battle Shifts to Capital

Impassioned calls for congressional investigations and a storm of protest broke over Washington on Easter Sunday, following the raid by federal agents that reunited young Elian Gonzalez with his father.

Critics, predominantly Republicans, accused the Clinton administration and SWAT team agents of the Immigration and Naturalization Service of using excessive force and acting without court approval. Some charged the Clinton administration with spurning human rights and kowtowing to Fidel Castro by helping Juan Miguel Gonzalez take his boy back to Cuba.

And Elian’s Miami relatives carried their high-profile crusade to Washington, demanding renewed access to their former charge. “Let me see this boy. I know this boy needs to see me too,” said Marisleysis Gonzalez, a cousin who has helped care for Elian in Miami.

She even suggested that a published photograph showing the 6-year-old smiling happily in his father’s arms was a fake--a charge rejected by government officials and others who saw Elian here with his father.

Government officials fired salvos in return. They charged Elian’s Miami relatives with negotiating in bad faith, said that force was used only when all else had failed, and accused Republican critics of “Monday-morning quarterbacking at its worst,” in the words of Deputy Atty. Gen. Eric Holder.

All available evidence Sunday indicated that the reuniting of Elian with his father, infant half-brother and stepmother seemed to be proceeding amicably. The family is expected to spend several days in seclusion at Andrews Air Force Base in suburban Washington before relocating to the Wye Plantation conference center on Maryland’s Chesapeake Bay, site of 1998 Mideast peace talks.

The few visitors who were allowed inside the sheltered quiet of what appears to be a small house on the grounds of the air base reported that Elian was playing happily, snuggling into his father’s lap and even comforting his baby brother when he cried.

Affection Between Boy, Father Called ‘Real’

The Rev. Joan Brown Campbell, former secretary-general of the National Council of Churches and an advisor to Juan Miguel Gonzalez, said of Elian: “He had his arms around his father, there was real affection there that cannot be manufactured. It was affection born of many, many years of caring. And his love affair with his little brother is wonderful to watch.

“I’m a grandmother of seven children,” Campbell said, “and I saw this little boy with his father for over 2 1/2 hours . . . it’s the way in which he comfortably crawls up on his father’s lap, puts his arms around him, calls him Papa. . . . At one point the baby started to cry and Elian walked over and very tenderly patted him on the back, patted him on the cheek, gave him a kiss.”

In Miami, quiet was restored after demonstrators protesting Elian’s removal from Little Havana had roamed the streets Saturday, setting fires, throwing rocks and bottles and clashing with police. More than 300 were arrested.

And in Havana, Castro called Saturday “a day of glory for our people,” and praised U.S. officials for reuniting Elian and his father.

But Holder expressed discomfort at finding himself on the same side of an issue as Castro. “All that Fidel Castro stands for is abhorrent to me. The decision, quite frankly, that Juan Miguel Gonzalez is making here is a different one than I would make, I suspect, for my child. But it is his right to raise his boy where he wants to and that is all we were trying to do.”

For all the verbal fury, however, there were signs Sunday the controversy--which began nearly five months ago when Elian was plucked from the ocean after a shipwreck that claimed his mother’s life--might be entering its final phase.

Much as Republicans appearing on television Sunday decried the Miami raid, for example, members of the Senate Judiciary Committee who spoke out were focusing more on policy questions that they might explore than on hard-edged accusations of misconduct. Their caution reflected both the legal complexities and the unspoken, but deep, divisions within their party.

Early opinion polls counseled political caution. A CNN-Gallup poll taken Saturday showed overwhelming public support for the reunification and for giving Juan Miguel custody of his son, although those surveyed were evenly divided on whether too much force had been used.

Potentially more important, unless federal judges hearing the next round of legal arguments decide to break new ground, final disposition of the case could come relatively quickly, legal authorities said.

On Sunday, however, passion was the order of the day.

“What is going on here, and I hope the American people--especially the American people that love freedom and hate tyranny--understand . . . is an unconstitutional act that is a frightening act. And we all ought to be very concerned and we ought to hold people accountable that have done this,” House Republican Whip Tom DeLay (R-Texas) said on NBC-TV’s “Meet the Press.”

Sen. Bob Smith (R-N.H.), who accompanied the Miami relatives to Washington, accused the Clinton administration of appeasing Castro.

“There was no hesitation on the part of this administration to sacrifice innocent lives to achieve their own agenda. And the agenda this time was diplomatic relations with Fidel Castro, so Elian was expendable,” Smith said during the news conference on Capitol Hill. “I’m ashamed of my government.”

And Oklahoma Gov. Frank Keating, a former FBI agent and Justice Department official responsible for overseeing the INS, went on “Fox News Sunday” to equate the government’s action with throwing a fleeing child back over the Berlin Wall at the height of the Cold War.

“If a mother had been shot by an East Berlin border guard and tossed the child over the wall just before she died, we would never send the child back,” Keating said. “This child’s mother gave her life so that this boy could breathe freely.”

Government officials were equally determined in defending their actions.

“This was the last resort,” INS Commissioner Doris Meissner said Sunday. “We have been committed to reunifying the child with the father. That is our legal position. That is also the right thing to do.”

Meissner said that she and Atty. Gen. Janet Reno--and particularly Reno--”have made heroic efforts, way above and beyond the call of duty, to work out circumstances where this could occur.”

“But in the final analysis, when it wouldn’t and couldn’t, we took the action that was required, and it was successful,” she said. “Everybody is safe. It was done properly.”

Perhaps the most startling development Sunday was the suggestion that the happy-looking child in the photograph released by lawyers for Juan Miguel was not Elian.

The charge ricocheted across the country after Miami relatives raised it in Washington. They suggested the boy beaming in Juan Miguel’s arms on Saturday had longer hair than Elian, did not seem to have a missing tooth and was wearing a different shirt.

Attorneys representing the family dealt with the issue gingerly. Kendall Coffee, a Miami lawyer representing Elian’s great-uncle Lazaro Gonzalez, was asked about the charge on ABC-TV’s “This Week.”

“Well, we’re examining that issue and we’re going to do it carefully and responsibly before we take a position,” Coffee answered. “Obviously, the community’s concern is he had a very short haircut at the time he was taken. He seems to have a good bit more hair [in the photo], and unless they were developing some hair product with the boy on the flight up to the north, then our community is very, very suspicious.”

Meissner said she did not see the changes in Elian’s appearance claimed by the Miami relatives:

“His hair looks pretty short to me,” she said in a television interview. “I was standing outside of the house, and I was with people who had the camera that took that photo. . . . I am sure it’s an authentic photo, but I can’t tell you that I saw it taken.”

Meissner, who appeared on CBS-TV’s “Face the Nation,” acknowledged that the tactics used to take Elian from the small house in Miami were harsh but said they were standard procedure and succeeded in avoiding dangerous complications.

“An enforcement action like this is a frightening event--there’s no question about it,” she said. “It’s the reason that we didn’t want to take an enforcement action, and that we tried through all of the months of this effort to reach a cooperative resolution.

“But once an enforcement action takes place, it has to take place very quickly, which this one did, and the agents need to be in charge. That is what they did. They announced themselves when they came, when they went into the house. They told people to stand aside. They asked for cooperation. They did not receive cooperation.”

Meissner contradicted critics such as DeLay, who insisted agents had improperly failed to get court authorization for entering the house. “We had a search warrant, which we got from a federal judge around 6 o’clock [Friday] evening,” she said. “It was a perfectly legal, properly carried-out operation.”

Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.), a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, was among those who excoriated the government for action without court approval.

“I believe that the Senate Judiciary Committee should take a close look at the propriety of the government breaking into the uncle’s house in the middle of the night,” he said. “If you have a criminal suspect charged with a crime, suspected of a crime . . . there has to be a court order to authorize a search and seizure. . . . When you have governmental action as forceful as this, you put an independent judge magistrate between the government and the individual.”

In a break with the administration, Democratic Sen. Bob Graham of Florida appeared on ABC-TV to accuse President Clinton of reneging on a promise not to raid the Miami house in the middle of the night.

The raid occurred shortly before dawn for tactical reasons, officials said. But Graham said that “the promise that had been made to me [by Clinton during a White House meeting] had been abrogated.”

Graham said Elian was removed even though negotiations were ongoing between the Florida family members and Justice Department officials.

But Gregory B. Craig, Juan Miguel’s lawyer, said there had been no real progress in the talks because the Miami relatives were insisting on joint custody and “cohabitation” rights while Elian’s status remains under review in the courts--conditions unacceptable to Elian’s father.

Holder said the family had been unyielding on central points.

“It seems to me that the blame for what happened, if there is any blame to be assessed, is on the family that professed to love this boy, and yet put their own interests above his and forced the federal government to do that which we did in getting him out of there,” he said.