Caribbean countries should refuse to accept deportees from the United States, according to Families for Freedom.
Families for Freedom is a multi-ethnic, New York-based immigrant rights network. Formed in 2002, members of the group are immigrant prisoners, their families, and individuals at risk of deportation.
“If deportees are causing such a problem, stop taking them back,” said Subash Kateel, one of the conveners of the group. “If the countries refuse to take them, the United States will have to keep them, they will be forced to get other hearings and then freed.”
According to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, between 1996 and 2002, some 1.1 million people have been deported to countries across the world; more than 50,000 of them have been sent to the Caribbean and almost 13,000 to Jamaica.
Legal immigrant
“The United States is treating the rest of the world like its dumping ground,” said Kateel of the deportation problem. “For an immigrant, besides being killed, being deported is the biggest fear. Everything you do is based on that.”
Under current U.S. law, a legal immigrant can be deported once they have broken the law.
Kateel sees this as being double punishment. “When an immigrant has committed a crime, they go before the courts and they are convicted and imprisoned. As far as society is concerned, they have paid their dues. But once they have served their sentence, they face the additional punishment of deportation,” he said.
It is this double punishment that Mark Linton, a Jamaican deportee, knows all too well.
Linton, 29, faced with a charge of possession of an illegal firearm, said that he was told by the prosecutor in his case that if he pleaded guilty, he would face lesser jail time.
“Nobody told me that I would be deported once I got out,” Linton told The Weekly Star.
Two months and three detention centers after his initial three-year jail sentence, he was sent back to Jamaica. Two years later, he still has nightmares about it. “I feel bamboozled. Every single night I think about it and I know that if I had fought the charge I would still be in America with my family,” he said.
Linton is among the lucky deportees. He has a job and he still has family members who are willing to help him. “My uncle gave me my job and he told me not to tell people I was a deportee. Jamaicans would look down on me. Those who know, do.”
According to Kateel, Jamaica is one of the nicer places for deportees in the region. “In Guyana, deported persons are detained. In Haiti, they are tortured,” he said.
It’s for these reasons, as well as the destruction caused families by deportations, that the group is trying to get the laws changed. “Deportation is one of the worst human rights offences in the world,” said Kateel.
He said that a recent informal poll, carried out by Families for Freedom in the Flatbush area and other parts of Brooklyn, revealed some stunning statistics. “Almost every person we spoke with knew at least one person who had been deported,” Kateel said.
