Deported or Dumped?

Canada and the U.S. are deporting criminals back to the Caribbean -- criminals who were born there but, in many cases, raised in North America. Whose problem are they?

At first glance, Reggie Pierre seems to fit in fine in La Plaine, a dusty village just outside the teeming, polluted, and impoverished Haitian capital of Port-au-Prince. After closer observation, however, it's clear something is off -- his hip-hop patter, the well-pressed cargo pants, the gold chain around his neck, even the way he walks. Young Haitian men swagger; Reggie struts, as though he's ready to leap into your face at the slightest challenge.

Reggie is black and twenty-four years old and can banter in broken Creole with the old men at the cockfight ring next to his mother's house. But when you ask him to talk about himself, Reggie is transparently blan -- the Creole word for any foreigner of any colour.

"I don't take welfare," he says, as if the Haitian state has ever been capable of providing any form of social assistance. "I don't like asking people for anything. I'm like a strong soldier. Only myself and the man upstairs knows what I'm going through."

What Reginald Pierre is going through is, in his mind, a form of exile. He considers Ottawa his home. That's where he moved at thirteen with his father and stepmother. That's where he did much of his growing up, and where the two young girls he fathered will probably grow up too. And it's where Reggie never bothered to apply for citizenship even though it almost certainly would have been granted. It was a crucial oversight: Ottawa was also where Reggie began dealing drugs and where authorities, in 1998, after his second arrest for dealing crack, said enough is enough and deported him back to Haiti.

Now Reggie Pierre is a member of a special underclass in Haiti: one of roughly 3,000 young men who were born there, managed to escape the country's grinding poverty by moving to Canada or the U.S., but were deported because they committed serious crimes. Some were in North America for just a few months or years; others came as children and spent their formative years here. Almost all served their time in North American jails and prisons and then, after being declared undesirable by immigration authorities, were put on a plane back to Haiti. Often in shackles, always in shame.

Haiti isn't alone. Virtually every Caribbean country feels the burden of the deportations, especially from the U.S., which, in 1998, deported 55,500 "aliens" on criminal grounds, 3,700 to the Caribbean. (By the end of 1999, numbers were up substantially with the Immigration and Naturalization Service boasting it was deporting 1,200 criminals per week, about half for drug crimes.) Defenders of the deportations say Canada and the U.S. are just getting rid of bad apples, many of whom shouldn't be here in the first place. But The Caribbean Community (CARICOM) says that, frequently, the deportees have little more than place of birth to connect them to the region. The organization has complained about what it calls wholesale dumping of deportees with "no forewarning" and maintains that the deportees are responsible for much of the increase in crime in the region.

Criminal deportations get little publicity, but they're not uncommon. One indictable offence is enough to get you thrown out of Canada if you don't have citizenship. In 1999, Canada deported 1,092 people on criminal grounds, many to the Caribbean and most after drug convictions. Jamaicans alone account for nearly two-thirds of those deported to the Caribbean region. But Jamaica, even if its economy isn't bustling, is not Haiti. Haiti is the poorest country in the western hemisphere. Seventy percent of the workforce is unemployed; 80 percent of the population live below the poverty line. The average per capita income is about $500 per year. Existence there has been described as "life without living." For deportees sent back -- and since 1993, Canada has deported 124 Haitians -- it's worse: purgatory, without redemption. The deportees -- even though they're black, street-smart, and of Haitian origin -- are social pariahs. Haitians treat them with contempt because they are seen to have squandered a golden opportunity. "They went to a rich country and turned that opportunity into a disaster," a Haitian cabinet minister says. "Nobody's going to have sympathy for them. They are feared, to say the least, and they are always under suspicion."

The deportees can be found all over in Haiti, in the shadows. Down a filthy alleyway in Port-au-Prince, I found twenty-eight-year-old Georges Pincherl. Georges had immigrated to Canada with his mother when he was four and was raised and educated in Montreal. As a teenager, however, he got involved with one of the city's Haitian youth gangs and into petty thievery and drug dealing. Now, in the fetid apartment he shares with a half-dozen other jobless men, Georges reminisces about Canada. "I miss the weather," he says. "The snow too. I miss my friends, my family, my uncles, my brothers, and my mom. I miss roast beef. I miss the Burger King."

Near the Port-au-Prince waterfront, I talked to a man in his mid-twenties, raised in Miami but shipped back to Haiti. He tried living on the streets as a common thief and had to survive vigilante mobs, gangs, and police thugs. "I'm lucky to be alive. But I'm getting out of here somehow," said Reginald Alquante. He'd already made one attempt to escape -- two days in a leaky boat on the open sea with little food or water, before being picked up by the U.S. Coast Guard near the Bahamas. Now he is back living in a shack along an open sewer in the slum of Cité Soleil, with a wife and four children. Reginald spends part of his time hawking crude wooden carvings that nobody buys. The rest of it he spends committing crime to support himself. As our interview ended, Reginald threatened me if I didn't give him money. It was a jarring reminder that many of these deportees are hardened criminals. A few of them, like my guide, find occasional work as translators or drivers but this is rare.

Reggie Pierre came to Canada at the raw age of thirteen. His father enrolled him at André Laurandeau Secondary School in Vanier, a traditionally francophone neighbourhood in Ottawa. He was a good kid, and smart, but fell in with a group of tough Haitian-Canadian kids. On his sixteenth birthday, he stayed out all night to party with his friends, and his father was furious. "Haitians are different from Canadians," Reggie says. "When you're bad you get your ass beat. When my dad came home he was vexed, and he beat me. I went out the door and I never came back."

He spent the next few months in a shelter. Finally his father, Jean-Ulrick Pierre, found an apartment for Reggie and his brother. But Reggie was determined to be independent, he says, and so he needed quick money. He found it dealing drugs. Equipped with a pager, Reggie became a small-time crack runner on the streets of Ottawa. "I used to buy an eight-ball -- that's about three and a half grams -- for about three hundred dollars and make about twice that much in profit."

In November, 1996, on downtown Bronson Street, he was arrested for the first time, carrying twenty-five rocks of crack cocaine. He remembers the details vividly, the guns, and the command, "Freeze. Police. You're under arrest."

"I remember, it was Sergeant Greg Brown and his partner, a black dude with dreads. The guy wanted five [rocks] for a hundred dollars. Didn't even ask about the quality. I should have been suspicious."

Reggie thought he was lucky. A judge released him on his own recognizance, and he was back on the street. But two months later, he was arrested again, another trafficking charge. This time the judge was less sympathetic.

"I remember Reggie, a good-looking kid," says his lawyer, Jean Richer. "He just couldn't believe that this was going to happen to him. I told him, 'You've just been caught twice and we're just in the middle of a big crackdown on crack cocaine.' He wasn't a bad kid, but he did what he thought he needed to, to survive, and what he did just wasn't acceptable here."

Richer argued in court that drug enforcement in Canada is essentially racist. Young black crack dealers, he said, are punished much more severely than the white, middle-class traffickers who deal in powder cocaine. Richer also noted that his client was the father of a young girl, Taynikua, and was expecting another child. (Richer didn't emphasize that the children would have different mothers.) The judge was unmoved: on May 13, 1997, he sentenced Reggie Pierre to two years less a day.

Eighteen months later, immigration officials told him that deportation proceedings were beginning. In a panic, Reggie called his father. "He told me they just wanted to scare me, that I wouldn't get deported." But he was wrong. In November, 1998, Reggie Pierre was on an airplane back to Port-au-Prince. "I had one bag, and I was still wearing my jail shoes. I felt dead when I got here. My first reaction was teardrops. I knew deep in my heart it was a miserable life."

Reggie's mother, Mary, a laundrywoman in La Plaine, cooks, cleans, and provides for him. His father sends his son money when he can -- last Christmas he mailed $100 (U.S.). With no connections and the stigma of being a deportee, Reggie says he couldn't find a job even if he looked for one, so he doesn't. His mother says she'd do anything to get out of Haiti, and Reggie says he would too. His greatest fear, he says, ambling through his neighbourhood, is a violent death.

"Here people get killed like nothing. Especially at nighttime, you can get shot by mistake." Reggie talks about the zenglendos -- Creole slang for violent criminals who operate in gangs and are seen as the non-political descendants of the dreaded Tonton Macoutes of the Duvalier era. "If I do anything wrong, they're going to come after my family. So this is the corner of land they give me. I stay here." Unaware of the irony of a criminal complaining about the crime rate, he adds, "There's no law down here. I'm sorry if I say that, but it's true."

Reggie's father, Jean-Ulrick Pierre, a naturalized Canadian who works as a cleaner in Ottawa, doesn't blame the government, the police, or anyone other than his son for Reggie's predicament. "He's my blood and it hurts me, but he should have known how to behave in a country that wasn't his own. The people who come here are lucky. They get everything they need to succeed. But Reggie went down a wrong road. He's a child but, my God, he didn't want to live by the rules."

For their part, Canadian immigration officials say that, as a matter of practice, only serious criminals or repeat offenders are thrown out. "It's a fine balance," says Dick Graham, an official with the enforcement branch of Citizenship and Immigration Canada. "We're trying to do the best thing for Canadian society and the individual. When people come here and do not take out citizenship, they do not have a right to stay in Canada that is total, and if they're breaking the rules then a decision has to be made." Graham said that most offenders who are long-term residents, are, in fact, allowed to stay. A wide range of criteria is examined, Graham says, "Is this person a danger to Canadians, how's the guy supporting himself, what sort of family ties does he have, has he been working, how long has he been here. If there is hope for them, the chances are the person will not be deported. In a small number of cases, however, we remove them."

Graham adds deportation is a two-way street: "We get people from other countries who we don't particularly want back."

The federal government has toughened its stand -- and the law -- in recent years, largely owing to two high-profile murders in which men slated for deportation were arrested and charged. The killings of Vivi Leimonis and policeman Todd Baylis within weeks of each other in 1994 sparked public outrage and led to Law C-44, also known as the Just Desserts Law, after the Toronto restaurant where Leimonis was gunned down in a brutal robbery. One man implicated in her murder, O'Neil "Tiger" Grant, was later found not guilty but at the time of his arrest seemed the perfect culprit. A twenty-two-year-old crack addict, he had accumulated eighteen convictions -- for weapons, drugs, and assault charges among others. He was also almost a foreigner: he had moved to Canada when he was eleven. Clinton Gayle, the man accused -- and convicted -- of shooting Baylis in the head at point-blank range, came to Canada younger -- he was eight -- and amassed an equally frightening string of convictions while still a teenager. He had twice been ordered deported -- and twice avoided it -- by June, 1994, when he murdered Baylis. C-44, passed into law the following year, streamlined the deportation procedure by closing various avenues of appeal. For example, people ordered deported after being convicted of serious offences are now prohibited from then claiming refugee status. A new bill, which died when the federal election was called in October, would have stiffened the law further.

The United States government has also cracked down and in a harsher manner. Under the 1996 Anti-Terrorist Act, non-citizens convicted of aggravated felonies and drug charges are deported automatically and without recourse to the courts. Length of residence, family ties, humanitarian considerations -- none of these factors are taken into account any more. On the ground in Port-au-Prince, it often means the American deportees are even more lost than those from Canada, since not only did they usually leave Haiti as younger children but they generally speak less -- if any -- Creole.

Critics say the deportation policies of both countries are grossly unfair. "I think it's more of an effort just to get rid of immigrants, and, perhaps, particularly immigrants of colour," says Michelle Karshan, an American who is the foreign-press liaison for Haitian President René Préval and the founder of Alternative Chance, a group that helps deportees in Haiti. Karshan says the deportees are usually only technically Haitian and are largely products of North American society. (In the case of cop killer Clinton Gayle, Sergio Marchi, then minister of immigration, agreed, saying, "He was a product of Canada," though immigration officials insist generalities cannot be drawn.) Karshan says many of the deportees were members of a demographic traditionally distrustful of authority -- young black men in poor, inner-city America -- and simply hadn't bothered to get full citizenship. A green card or a social-insurance number was generally all they needed. "Imagine never ever being able to go home again," says Karshan. "I'm not excusing them for crimes they have committed, but that's why there are prisons and that's why there are support services, and we've spent decades, centuries, in the U.S. and Canada developing ways to help people."

Leaders of Canada's Haitian community agree. "It's a phenomenon of exclusion," says Antoine Dorsaint, the head of a large Haitian group in Montreal. "These kids are mostly raised here, and this is where they got on the road to crime. It's this society that is responsible." Lionel Laviolette, Haiti's consul in Montreal, says that since the deportees have no attachment to Haiti, "when they arrive, there is nothing for them to do other than to join criminal gangs, and that's what they do."

Critics say the U.S. and Canadian governments are also hypocritical, sending back mostly young, petty criminals, while continuing to harbour more affluent Haitians who are wanted for human-rights violations back home -- people like Emmanuel "Toto" Constant and Carl Dorelien. Constant was head of a vicious right-wing group called FRAPH, which was behind thousands of killings, rapes, and other abuses while the military controlled Haiti. He now holds a green card and lives a comfortable life in Queens, New York, and the U.S. government won't extradite him, it's widely believed, because of services he rendered to the CIA while he lived in Haiti. Dorelien is a former Haitian army colonel living in Port St. Lucie, Fla., and wanted on charges connected with the 1994 Raboteau Massacre in which as many as fifteen pro-democracy activists were killed during a military sweep of a seaside shantytown. A jury recently sentenced twelve soldiers and paramilitaries to life imprisonment for their part in the massacre, and the Haitian government wants the U.S. to extradite Dorelien, among others, to face charges. But Dorelien seems to be leading a charmed life. Not only has he avoided extradition, but in 1997 he won a $3.2-million jackpot playing the Florida lottery. "It's a very confusing message in terms of justice," says Michelle Karshan.

It's also confusing in terms of international politics. Since the early 1990s, Haiti has received more Canadian aid than any other country except Bangladesh -- about $250 million worth in total. Canada has also played a vital role in the rebuilding of Haiti's police forces since the country's military regime was ousted in 1994. Scores of police from the RCMP and various provincial and municipal forces have been sent to train and advise Haitian recruits, teaching them everything from how to fire a gun and make an arrest to how to interrogate prisoners and earn the support of the community. They learned human rights, forensic science, and respect for the Constitution. Still, the police are undermanned, underpaid, and under-equipped, and now Canada and the U.S. are making their work harder by exporting hundreds of criminals. "It's a real contradiction," says a leading Haitian politician, who adds that the police just don't have the expertise to deal with the "sophisticated" new criminals.

A small army of desperate young men is the last thing that Haiti needs, says Fritz Longchamp, Haiti's minister of foreign affairs. When I met him in June, he was in the midst of a crisis with Haiti's island neighbour, the Dominican Republic. Six Haitians, including a pregnant woman, had just been killed when Dominican soldiers fired on a fleeing truck that had crossed the frontier. Also, there are domestic concerns about the street violence: Haiti's international "friends" -- the U.S. and Canada among them -- had strongly criticized his government's position on the recent election results. But Longchamp said he considered the deportee issue a top priority, especially since the U.S., its detention centres overflowing, had recently stepped up the rate of deportations. Entire planeloads of deportees, he claimed, were arriving at Port-au-Prince's decrepit airport.

"It's having a terrible impact on Haiti," the minister said. "These deportees are responsible for an increase in acts of violence in this country." Longchamp said some of the worst deportees were working as "hired guns" for Haitian crime figures. Car thefts and robberies were way up. "We talk about hundreds of deportees now, but by the end of the year, they will be in the thousands. And in ten years, five to six thousand of these criminals will be walking our streets." Or perhaps not.

Worried about this flood of "imported" criminals, Haiti now keeps many of them in grossly overcrowded prison cells for months at a time without charges or trials after their arrival in Port-au-Prince. Recently, in a police station in the town of Thomassin, high in the hills outside Port-au-Prince, ten deportees were being kept in a cell that measured sixteen square metres. Some hadn't eaten in two days and all of them had to beg the guards for water. When the temperatures dropped at night, they huddled under two unwashed blankets for warmth. One of the inmates had tried to hang himself a few days earlier, but his cellmates cut him down.

The director-general of Haiti's ministry of the interior, Lubraine Bien-Aimé, makes no apologies for the harsh conditions in Haiti's jails. "There's no TV, no swimming pools, and not much food or water; the prisons here aren't the same as in the United States and Canada. It's tough, but we're a country with a lot of problems. And these deportees, they made a choice to commit crimes. We want them to know what it means in Haiti when you get caught for breaking the law."

Apart from personal privation, the deportees have another problem to contend with: a corrupt police force. While some detainees are released when a relative comes forward and promises to care for them, Michelle Karshan says, others have been told by Haitian police that their parents in the United States have to pay a bribe of as much as $30,000 (U.S.) if they want their children released. If the money isn't forthcoming, the young men face months, and even longer, in what Karshan calls "life-threatening conditions."

Bien-Aimé says he's heard about police extortion. But the government is powerless to do anything about it, he insists, because no one is willing to come forward with hard evidence, apparently afraid that police would retaliate.

Longchamp said that ideally he would like to see the high rate of deportations begin to ebb. Failing that, he wants the United States and Canada to agree to a plan whereby Haitians convicted in those countries will be shipped to Haiti to have part of their sentences served here "so they become known to our justice system." For that to work, he says Haiti would need foreign aid to build new detention centres, and assistance for programs that would help reintegrate the deportees into Haitian life. It sounds like an elaborate play for more aid money and may be just that. But behind Longchamp's proposal lies an impossible-to-answer question: Beyond the formalities of passports and citizenship documents, at what point does an immigrant become a product of his new country? We warmly embrace as our own successful athletes and entrepreneurs who arrive in Canada as adolescents or adults. Should we also take more responsibility for those who don't work out so well, even if they neglect to get their citizenship?

Longchamp's proposal is also, almost certainly, wishful thinking. Six years after the American-led restoration of ex-priest Jean-Bertrand Aristide to the presidency, foreign governments are less and less keen to pour money into Haiti. An economic resurgence that many expected hasn't happened. The country has become increasingly corrupted by cocaine, and there's a growing mood of despair. Aristidism was supposed to replace Duvalierism and the right-wing military death squads, but so far, it has been a flop.

The striking gap between rich and poor hasn't closed since the advent of democracy in Haiti. If anything, it's become worse. Construction of lush new villas in the airy heights of Pétionville and Kenscoff, overlooking the capital, is booming. The streets grow more and more potholed, but brand-new Jeep Grand Cherokees and Ford Expeditions are everywhere. Flights between Port-au-Prince and Miami are usually full, the casinos are doing good business, and the capital now boasts a half-dozen Internet cafés. New banks and service stations are sprouting -- financed, it's believed, by the flood of illicit narco-dollars. But little of this new wealth is trickling into Haiti's sprawling, squalid slums, the worst in the hemisphere. Some critics say it's this disparity the government should be worried about, rather than a few hundred ex-convicts with a questionable grasp of Creole.

Michael V. Lucius feels otherwise. Lucius is one of the new breed of Haitian law enforcers. Small, intense, he talks in clipped sentences about his job as commissioner of the Bureau of Judicial Information. On his office wall hang diplomas from the Canadian Police College in Ottawa, and an American police institute in Jacksonville, Florida. Commissaire Lucius wears a crisp blue-striped shirt and dark-blue pants, and on his belt he carries a walkie-talkie and a cellphone that rings constantly.

One of Lucius's jobs is to keep track of deportees like Reggie Pierre. It's an impossible task. "Just imagine, these deportees come from first-world, developed countries, with well-equipped police, and then they are dumped into this country, and they run wild. Our police can barely handle things here as they are." Over and over again, he talks about the "technology" of crime: the deportees, he says, bring with them sophisticated new methods of car theft, kidnapping, what have you.

I quote some statistics from Alternative Chance, the private Haitian organization set up to assist new deportees. Its numbers show that half of the deportees are men convicted of non-violent, drug-related crimes: petty crooks and dealers. Hardly the vanguard of a serious new crime wave.

Lucius grimaces at the mention of Alternative Chance and, without answering the question, invokes the story of one of the organization's most prominent members. Touché Caman, a Haitian-American, moved to the U.S. when he was five and spent almost all his life in Stamford, Connecticut, before ending up back in Haiti for dealing drugs. There he became a protege of Karshan's and an articulate poster boy for the plight of the deportees. But after several years of going straight -- and living in extreme poverty -- Caman robbed a small bank specializing in micro-credit for peasant farmers. "One of the worst crimes in Haiti in recent times," says Lucius, seized either by hyperbole or forgetfulness.

In spite of all the political violence that Haiti is known for, there is a widely accepted notion that not long ago the country was a peaceful paradise where premeditated crime was unknown. The myth has its roots in the fact that crime rates were extremely low largely thanks to very effective and very severe policing by community members themselves. Thieves were traditionally set upon by vigilante mobs and often killed. Some individuals considered a problem to the community were dealt with in more imaginative ways, including "zombie-fication" by a poison extracted from pufferfish and mixed with other ingredients.

That golden era, when there was no "criminal culture," looms large in the collective memory of most Haitians, including the senator-elect Yvon Neptune, a former spokesman for Aristide and now a rising power broker in the country. "I grew up in Haiti until I was twenty-one," Neptune says in his downtown Port-au-Prince home, protected by bodyguards and secure behind a high wall, "and I can tell you, that finding a dead body in the streets would have been very disturbing. Just taking a knife and hurting someone would be psychologically repulsive. But nowadays it's different."

The madness of Duvalierism was one factor, he says, as was the increased movement of Haitians between Haiti and the U.S. Ignoring the fact that crime rates in North America have been dropping for two decades, Neptune insists that crime is "rampant" in the U.S. and Canada, and that the deportees are just bringing their lifestyles with them. "If you were to study all the Haitian deportees, how old they were when their parents left Haiti, what their family life was like, I'm quite sure you would see that their criminal behaviour has to do with a culture where criminality is so rampant. Are they really Haitians, or are they now Americans?"

What Neptune doesn't mention is that even without the deportees, Haiti has its own homegrown brand of criminality, bred of the country's deepening, extreme poverty, its divisive politics, and, more recently, cocaine.

Its corrosive impact on civil society is hard to ignore. Early in June, in the coastal community of Grand-Goâve, forty kilometres south of the capital, two yachts loaded down with an estimated 4,000 kilograms of cocaine were swarmed by villagers. "It was like watching pigeons eating corn," said a woman called Laura of the fighting that broke out over the booty. Still, she decided to join in and grabbed a few kilos for herself, only to be immediately attacked. "A man grabbed my feet, knocked me down, and stuck a gun in my ear. I let him have the coke. I'd rather have my life than a couple of kilos." Two people were killed in gunfire, including the town's mayor. He died from shots to the stomach, in a struggle with one of his bodyguards over eight kilos of cocaine.

Despite the violence the drug brought with it, a Haitian man on the bus ride from Grand Goâve to Port-au-Prince predicted cocaine would be Haiti's salvation. He noted that 130 tons of coke have been shipped through the country from Colombia in the last two years. Soon, he said, the country would have to start seeing some trickle-down benefits. "You just watch," he said. "Haiti will be a rich country in two years."

It's a fantasy, of course, but these are the only things that seem to thrive in Haiti these days: fantasies and paradoxes. The American and Canadian governments spent tens of millions of dollars here in the 1990s in an effort to help build a civil society, yet they continue to test it by shipping back criminals, some of whom are more North American than they are Haitian. This paradox bewilders Haitian officials, and it confuses people like George Pincherl, the deportee who lived most of his life in Montreal. "I feel Haitian," he says, "but I feel a part of me living in Canada. I know this is my country, but if I had the chance to leave and live again in Canada, I would go, I would go." His voice trails off, his shoulders slump. He knows that, too, is fantasy.

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