Legal Commentary

Obama Asks Clinton and GW Bush to Lead Haiti Effort

By Jeralyn

President Obama has named former presidents Bill Clinton and GW Bush to lead the Haiti relief efforts.

While Clinton and GW's father, H.W. Bush, did an admirable job during the 2004 Tsunami, one has to question the selection of GW Bush, given his dismal performance during Katrina, and his administration's unfair, punitive policies on Haitian immigrants, which included keeping them locked up in detention facilities even after immigration judges ordered them released pending hearings. [More...]

Last December, President Bush signed an Executive Order declaring a new policy that all immigrants arriving in the U.S. illegally by ship would be detained pending final decisions on their asylum claims. All except Cubans, who under a law passed in 1966, are allowed to remain in the community, with relatives or sponsors. The Executive Order allows the INS to continue to detain the Haitians even after an immigration judge has ordered them released on bail. The Government says it detains Haitians as a deterrent to others in Haitai trying to make the journey to the U.S. Critics attack the discriminatory treatment, asking why Haitians must remain in jail while Cubans are allowed to remain at liberty.

The New York Times in 2006 noted that under Bush, Salvadorans, Nicaraguans and Hondurans were granted temporary protected status but Haitians were kept locked up.

Will Bush make an effort to get his Republican friends in Congress to grant TPS to the Haitians now? He should. They need it.

Who's next? Brownie? Cheney to implement a plan to expand Guantanamo and move the Haitians there?

At a Pentagon briefing today, Gen. Douglas Fraser, who heads the U.S. Southern Command, said Guantanamo is “a resource that’s available if we need to take advantage of it for various reasons. So we’re looking across the region to just understand what the possibilities are there.”

Full post as published by TalkLeft on January 14, 2010 (boomark / email).