US begins deportation of Haitians

[Hannah Bell]

The US deported 27 Haitian nationals last Thursday, resuming forced repatriations to the devastated country a year after the massive earthquake struck of January 2010. The Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) plans to send 700 immigrants back to Haiti this year, ignoring the objections of human rights groups, which insist that the move is equivalent to a death sentence.

ICE spokeswoman Barbara Gonzalez has justified the deportations by arguing that all those sent back are “criminal aliens,” having been convicted in US courts of various violations of the law. All have already served sentences in American prisons.

One of those on Thursday’s flight was Lyglenson Lemorin, an individual persecuted by the US state for several years. Under the Bush administration, Lemorin was arrested as part of an anti-terrorism sting operation against what came to be known as the Liberty City Seven. The government used entrapment to fabricate a case against a group of Haitian immigrants for supposedly planning to blow up the Sears Tower in Chicago. “Poorly educated and practically destitute, the defendants didn’t seem to have the means to engage in jihad, or to train with weapons or explosives, court records show,” notes the Wall Street Journal. It took three trials for the government to get any convictions, with even the prosecutors acknowledging that the supposed plot was more “aspirational than operational.”

For his part, Lemorin was acquitted in the second trial, a development considered a significant blow to the Bush administration’s efforts. He had moved to Atlanta with his wife and children well before the other members of the alleged terrorist group were even arrested. His acquittal, however, did not prevent the government from continuing to incarcerate Lemorin, a legal US resident, on the grounds that he remained “a threat to national security” and should be deported. Thus, since 2007, Lemorin has languished in US jails, only now to be sent back to Haiti, a country from which he emigrated as a young child.

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2011/jan2011/hait-j24.shtml