Cuban Americans Applaud Ruling by High Court

Cuban Americans on Friday hailed as just -- if long overdue -- a U.S. Supreme Court ruling that hundreds of Mariel boatlift refugees and other Cubans could not be kept indefinitely in federal detention after serving prison terms for crimes they committed in America.

Many of the 747 Cubans have been imprisoned for years, some following convictions for petty offenses, because they cannot be deported to Cuba. The communist government of Cuban President Fidel Castro has refused to take them back.

“The concept of indefinite detention without being charged with a crime is anti-American,” said U.S. Rep. Lincoln Diaz-Balart. The high court’s ruling, said the Miami Republican, was met with “unanimous relief and admiration” among Americans of Cuban origin like himself.

“For us, it is a good thing for our community,” said Camila Ruiz, director for government relations at the influential Cuban American National Foundation. “It is something our community has worked for for years. These individuals have served out their terms and now want to become productive members of society.”

The Supreme Court’s 7-2 decision Wednesday took the same standard it applied in 2001 to a legal immigrant and extended it to foreigners never granted formal admission to the United States.

Under that standard, foreigners who are liable to deportation but cannot be repatriated may not be detained longer than six months if they pose no risk to the community.

Manny Van Pelt, spokesman for the Homeland Security Department’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement, said most of the long-term Cuban detainees are at the Krome Detention Center west of Miami or in lockups in New Jersey and Pennsylvania.

Van Pelt was unable to provide details Friday on the detainees’ convictions.

But one critic of the Supreme Court’s decision, referring to a Hollywood movie about a Mariel refugee who went on a crime spree in America, said, “We are primarily talking about Scarface.”

“They deserve to go home” to Cuba, said Richard Samp, chief counsel for the conservative Washington Legal Foundation. “The only reason they are in this country at all is because their host country won’t take them back, which is not surprising. Who wants to take back a bunch of convicted, hardened criminals?”

In the case ruled on by the Supreme Court, one of the two Cuban plaintiffs, Sergio Suarez Martinez, had been found guilty of burglary, theft and assault.

The other, Daniel Benitez, had been convicted of assault and possession of a firearm.

Both were kept in immigration custody after they had served their sentences. They filed suit to demand their release.

During the 1980 Mariel boatlift, about 125,000 Cubans entered the United States, including some felons rousted from Cuba’s prisons by Castro’s police and dumped into the Florida-bound flotilla. Once in America, some of the Marielitos did commit serious crimes, including murder and rape.

But Mark Dow, author of “American Gulag: Inside U.S. Immigration Prisons,” said that in researching his book, he interviewed other Cubans who had spent years in federal lockup after being found guilty of misdemeanors.

In one case, Dow said, a Cuban was sentenced to 90 days in Beaumont, Texas, for cocaine possession, then held for 16 years in immigration “administrative detention” before being released to a halfway house.

“Many have served more time in detention than they did for their original crimes,” Dow said. “Those years cannot be given back to them.”

Dow rejected the notion that the Supreme Court decision would loose a pack of Scarface-like thugs onto U.S. streets.

The Cubans affected by the court’s decision, he said, are likely to have committed as varied an array of offenses as an equivalent number of Americans with criminal records.

“If we were talking about citizens, we wouldn’t bat an eye that they were leaving once their sentences were completed,” Dow said.

“Many of these detainees had simply given up,” said Cheryl Little, executive director of the Florida Immigrant Advocacy Center in Miami. “Many of them had believed they would never see the light of day. Now the Supreme Court has thrown them a lifeline.”

Van Pelt said Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s attorneys had not had time to determine the logistics of Wednesday’s ruling, including the time and method of the Cubans’ release.

But he said an earlier Supreme Court ruling in Zadvydas vs. Davis had allowed federal authorities to detain foreigners deemed a national security risk or a threat to the public.

“Under Zadvydas, there is a provision for us to detain people, and assuming that the [same] rules apply, it’s possible that there could be continued detention under special circumstances for certain aliens,” he said.

The Supreme Court’s decision also applied to 173 non-Cubans who could not be deported to their home countries for various reasons, Van Pelt said.

Times researcher Jenny Jarvie in Atlanta contributed to this report.