All events · After the Wall
The Detention of Haitian Refugees at Guantánamo Bay
1991–1995 · Americas
Confinement
Confined
34,000
The figure adds the peaks of the two phases and may count some people twice; no cumulative count of those who passed through the base was found. In the first phase the Supreme Court records that the Coast Guard intercepted over 34,000 Haitians in the six months after October 1991 and that the base's temporary camps, with a capacity of about 12,500, were full by May 1992; the Congressional Research Service records about 10,490 Haitians paroled into the United States after screening. About 300 screened-in refugees who tested HIV-positive (A. Naomi Paik) were held apart until the camp closed in June 1993; a White House memo of spring 1993 counted 187 still held, some 162 adults nearly all HIV-positive and about 25 children. In the second phase Migration News (UC Davis) records about 21,400 Haitians held at the base in August 1994, of whom over 16,000 returned after President Aristide's restoration in October 1994; the remaining 3,900 who refused a payment offer were returned from 5 January 1995.
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What happened
After the military coup that overthrew President Jean-Bertrand Aristide in September 1991, tens of thousands of Haitians fled by boat. The United States Coast Guard intercepted them at sea and, from November 1991, held them in tent camps at the Guantánamo Bay naval base, where immigration officers screened them for asylum claims. When the camps reached capacity in May 1992 President Bush ordered interdicted Haitians returned without screening, an order the Supreme Court upheld in Sale v. Haitian Centers Council (1993). Some 300 refugees who had passed the credible-fear screening but tested HIV-positive were barred from entry under the immigration ban on HIV and held apart in a separate camp. In June 1993 Judge Sterling Johnson Jr. of the Eastern District of New York found that their indefinite detention, lack of access to counsel and inadequate medical care violated due process, called the facility 'nothing more than an HIV prison camp', and ordered them released; the camp closed and the case was settled in 1994. In 1994 the base was used again as a 'safe haven' holding about 21,000 Haitians, most of whom returned after Aristide's restoration, with the last 3,900 returned compulsorily in January 1995. The post-2002 detention of terrorism suspects at the same base is covered in the entry on extraterritorial detention at Guantánamo Bay; scholars including Paik have traced its legal and historical lineage to the Haitian camps.
Parties
The United States Coast Guard intercepted Haitians fleeing the 1991 military coup at sea and held them at the Guantánamo Bay naval base, including about 300 asylum seekers held in a separate camp because they had tested HIV-positive
Disputed
Whether the base lay beyond the reach of the US Constitution and of the duty of non-refoulement was contested: Judge Johnson held due process applied there, while the Supreme Court in Sale upheld returning Haitians intercepted on the high seas, and the 1994 settlement vacated Johnson's orders.
On the death toll
No defensible figure exists. None of the court records, government documents or scholarship consulted gives a count of deaths in the Guantánamo camps. Paik quotes a New York AIDS housing activist's view that the conditions and length of detention led to 'a huge number of unnecessarily early deaths' among the HIV-positive refugees after release, but this was not quantified. Deaths at sea and of people returned to Haiti are outside this entry and were not counted.
Documented forms of violence
Arbitrary Detention
The indefinite detention without due process was found unlawful by Judge Sterling Johnson Jr. in Haitian Centers Council v. Sale (1993), as summarised by the Civil Rights Litigation Clearinghouse and analysed by A. Naomi Paik.
Formal findings
- United States District Court for the Eastern District of New York (Judge Sterling Johnson Jr.) (1993) — Haitian Centers Council v. Sale, 823 F. Supp. 1028 (8 June 1993): denying service organisations access to give legal advice violated the First Amendment; detention conditions including lack of access to counsel, inadequate medical care, disciplinary procedures and indefinite detention violated the screened-in Haitians' due process rights; and refusing to parole the HIV-positive refugees violated the Administrative Procedure Act. The orders were vacated under the 1994 settlement after the government had complied with them. — source
Movements mapped
- Intercepted at sea → Guantánamo, 1991-92 (peak occupancy)12,500
- Intercepted at sea → Guantánamo safe haven, 1994 (August 1994 population)21,400
- Guantánamo → Haiti, compulsory returns from January 19953,900
Countries touched, on present-day borders
Cuba, Haiti
Sources