Pages for a Customs and Border Protection listing at Miami International Airport. After a while we got through.
“Someone just called me,” I said. “About an elderly man and his son.”
“I’m familiar with them,” the man who replied said. In his few words, I could hear the disdain, which perhaps was always in his voice, but seemed nevertheless particularly directed at me. “They came here with no papers and tried to get in-”
“They have papers,” I tried to explain.
“I’m sorry,” he said, “but I have two flights coming in.” Then he hung up.
“We have to go to the airport,” I told my husband. We were only fifteen minutes away and were not getting anywhere on the phone.
At the closed American Airlines counter at the airport, we found a Haitian janitor who directed us to the entrance to the Customs and Border Protection offices. They too were closed. Standing outside the metal doors, I dialed the offices’ number again.
Another male officer picked up.
“Someone called me,” I said, ”about my uncle, Joseph Dantica. He should be with his son, Maxo.”
“They’re right here in front of me.” This was the kindest and most polite-sounding voice yet.
“I’m in the airport,” I said.
“Yes?”
“I’ve come to pick them up.”
His long pause indicated some kind of misunderstanding on my part. Something had been said to me that I’d obviously not fully grasped.
“We only called to notify you that they’re here,” he said. “They’re not being released. They’re going to Krome.”
My heart sank. The year before, I had been to the Krome detention center as part of a delegation of community observers organized by the Florida Immigrant Advocacy Center. A series of gray concrete buildings and trailers, Krome was out in what seemed like the middle of nowhere, in southwest Miami. During our visit, a group of men in identical dark blue overalls had been escorted into a covered, chain-link-fenced, concrete patio rimmed by rows of barbed wire. The men walked in two straight lines, sat at the long cafeteria-style tables and told our delegation their stories. They were Haitian “boat people” and in addition to their names identified themselves by the vessels on which they’d come.
“My name is…,” they said. “I came on the July boat.” Or “I came on the December boat.”
Some invented parables to explain their circumstances. One man spoke of mad dogs-gang members-threatening him and forcing him to seek shelter at a neighbor’s house, the neighbor being the United States. Another sang about a mud slide, meaning the Lavalas or Flood Party, that had washed everything away. Another asked us to tell the world the detainees were beaten sometimes. He told of a friend who’d had his back broken by a guard and was deported before he could get medical attention. Some detainees fought among themselves, sometimes nearly killing each other as uninterested guards looked on. They spoke of other guards who told them they smelled, who taunted them while telling them that unlike the Cuban rafters, who were guaranteed refuge, they would never get asylum, that few Haitians ever get asylum. They said that the large rooms where they slept in rows and rows of bunk beds were often so overcrowded that some of them had to sleep on thin mattresses on the floor. They were at times so cold that they shivered all night long. They told of the food that rather than nourish them, punished them, gave them diarrhea and made them vomit. They told of arbitrary curfews, how they were woken up at six a.m. and forced to go back to that cold room by six p.m.
I’d seen some men who looked too young to be the mandatory eighteen years old for detention at Krome. A few of them looked fourteen or even twelve. How can we be sure they’re not younger, I’d asked one of the lawyers in our delegation, if they come with no birth certificates, no papers? The lawyer answered that their ages were determined by examining their teeth. I couldn’t escape this agonizing reminder of slavery auction blocks, where mouths were pried open to determine worth and state of health.
One man, who had received asylum but had not yet been released when we visited, showed us burn marks over his arms, chest and belly. His flesh was seared white, with rows and rows of keloid scars. It seemed like such a violation, to look at his belly, the space where the scars dipped farther down his body. But he was used to showing his scars, he said. He had to show them to a number of immigration judges to prove he deserved to stay.
I’d sat across from an older man, a man who looked like he might be around my father’s age, who’d said, “If I had a bullet, I’d have shot myself already. I’m not a criminal. I’m not used to prison.”
The shame of being a prisoner loomed large. A stigma most couldn’t shake. To have been shackled, handcuffed, many said, rubbing that spot on their wrists where the soft manacles were placed on them soon after they made it to the American shore, “I have known no greater shame in my life.”
I’d met a young man from Bel Air. His eyes were red. He couldn’t stop crying. His mother had died the week before, he said, and he couldn’t even attend her funeral. He told me his mother’s name, and when he described her house, the house where he used to live in Bel Air, I could see it. It was not far from my uncle’s house.
“Can I speak to my uncle?” I asked the customs officer, who, it seemed, was patiently waiting for me to get off the phone.
“That’s not allowed,” he said.
“Please,” I said. “He’s old and-”
“He’ll contact you when he gets to Krome.”
Alien 27041999
My uncle was now alien 27041999. He and Maxo had left Port-au-Prince’s Toussaint Louverture Airport on American Airlines flight 822. The flight was scheduled to leave at 12:32 p.m., but was a bit delayed and left later than that.
On the plane, my uncle attempted to write a narrative of what had happened to him on a piece of white paper. He titled his note “Epidemie du 24 octobre 2004.”
“Un groupe de chimeres ont detruit L’Eglise Chretienne de la Redemption,” it began. “A group of chimeres destroyed Eglise Chretienne de la Redemption.” He then gave up writing sentences to simply list what had been removed or burned from the church, including the pews, two padded ballroom chairs used at wedding ceremonies, a drum set, some speakers and microphones.
Once they got off the plane at around two thirty p.m., my uncle and Maxo waited their turn with a large group of visitors in one of the long Customs and Border Protection lines. When they reached the CBP checkpoint, they presented their passports and valid tourist visas to a CPB officer. When asked how long they would be staying in the United States, my uncle, not understanding the full implication of that choice, said he wanted to apply for temporary asylum. He and Maxo were then taken aside and placed in a customs waiting area.
I don’t know why my uncle had not simply used the valid visa he had to enter the United States, just as he had at least thirty times before, and later apply for asylum. I’m sure now that he had no intention of staying in either New York or Miami for the rest of his life. This is why, according to Maxo, he had specified “temporary.” Had he acted based on someone’s advice? On something he’d heard on the radio, read in the newspapers? Did he think that given all that had happened to him, the authorities-again those with the power both to lend a hand and to cut one off-would have to believe him? He planned to stay at most a few weeks, a few
