Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here: The United States, Central America, and the Making of a Crisis

by Jonathan Blitzer

This geopolitical ambiguity raised legal questions in immigration court. When, in December 1972, a boat with sixty-five Haitian men, women, and children arrived in Pompano Beach, Florida, The Miami Times ran an editorial that framed the matter clearly: A moment of truth has arrived for our local immigration officials who so casually go about their almost daily task of processing Cuban citizens landing in South Florida after having escaped the Castro regime. Should the procedure be any different for the dark-skinned Haitians? While Cubans were immediately admitted and set on a path to permanent residency within a year, the Haitians were thrown into detention centers. The INS set bond between five hundred and a thousand dollars, and the detainees were relegated to a separate legal track known as an “exclusion hearing,” an expedited form of deportation predicated on the legal fiction that they’d never, technically, entered the US.