IN MY OPINION / COMMENTARY: She's the face of immigration policy
By ANA MENENDEZ - Miami Herald
PORT-AU-PRINCE -- Marie Thelusma lives now in a borrowed house off a rutted street in a suburb called La Plaine. Monday, she sat beneath a zaman tree and cried for the little son who waits for her in Miami.
''My son, they tell me he don't eat now, just water and bananas. He has gotten so thin, like this,'' she said and held up her pinkie. She wept quietly for a moment and wiped her tears. Then she whispered, unable to finish her sentence: ``I am afraid for him. What if he gets sick? If something bad . . . ''
Since she was deported to Haiti in February, Marie has rarely left this house off Lilavois Street, afraid of the armed gangs that have moved into La Plaine and carried out spectacular kidnappings.
Her husband, Jean Arne, visited in March, but she refuses to let her son, who is 4, travel to see her.
''My country is not secure. Even my husband, when he came, he was careful on the street, he don't sleep,'' she said. 'All night, he was waking me, `Flor,' -- he calls me Flor -- `I hear some
firings.' ''
Not long ago, she said, a 6-month-old baby was kidnapped for ransom. The family paid what it could, but it wasn't enough for the kidnappers, who took the money and then killed the child. ''They killed the baby and threw him over the fence,'' Marie said.
It has been seven weeks since she's seen her own son. She talks to him every day. And every day he says the same thing to her: ``I miss you.''
HER NEIGHBORHOOD
I wrote about Marie in March and traveled this week to Haiti to meet her. The drive to La Plaine from the heights of Petionville took us through a neighborhood of half-completed homes, down streets clogged with tap taps, or jitneys, and over a bridge high above a trickle of muddy water. The last stretch of road before Marie's house had potholes like shallow swimming pools.
The government cannot meet the people's basic needs for water and safety. Electricity is a luxury, even for the luxurious: The hills are full of grand houses that disappear each night into the darkness.
Port-au-Prince is one of those cities -- the world is full of them -- where the promise of its people stands in contrast to the venality of its powerful.
That Marie now calls the city home against her will is due, in large measure, to U.S. immigration policies that have turned people like her into an abstraction.
Marie used a bogus passport to get out of Haiti and -- the United States says -- lied to try to get asylum. But she has no criminal record, and her salary in Miami, where she worked as a security guard, helped support her family in the States and her aunt in Cap Haitien.
Her case reads like a bureaucratic bad dream. She was hauled off by immigration agents at 5 a.m. in front of her son and husband. She was deported three weeks before a residency hearing, where she would have likely received a green card because her husband is a U.S. citizen.
Marie wonders if the whole thing is a mix-up: Her deportation order was for Marie Thelusma, her maiden name. Her residency hearing was for Marie Arne, her married name.
Desperate, her husband has hired another attorney in Miami who sent Marie a form for reentry, though a different form says she can't go back for another five years.
''At immigration, they said I could come back in six months,'' she said.
Exasperation has given way to sad resignation.
EACH ON THEIR OWN
For now, her husband, a furniture assembler in Miami Gardens, is trying to manage the family on his own.
''A neighbor picks up my son from school and keeps him until my husband can pick him up at 11. A 4-year-old boy,'' said Marie, crying again. ``My husband, he tells me he gets home and he just sits on the couch until 3 and 4 in the morning.''
Miles away in Port-au-Prince, Marie does much the same. She cannot work and lives off the money her husband can send. Even if she weren't afraid to leave the house, chances are no one would hire her. She landed here as part of a wave of deportees -- many of whom, unlike Marie, have criminal records.
The deportees have been dropped into an unstable city, often without a support system or a way to make a living. In a perverse twist on the old impulse to vilify immigrants, the deportees are often blamed for kidnappings and the nighttime lawlessness.
Although more and more noncriminals are being deported to Haiti, Haitians still regard deportees with suspicion.
''I say I am deported because of paper, not for any crime,'' Marie said. ``But the way they look at you, it's like you did something.''
Growing up in Cap Haitien in the 1980s, all Marie wanted to be was a nurse. Then her mother died, and all she wanted was to get to America.
She did in 2000, fell in love, married and had a son. But Marie's American dream was short and bittersweet. She lives now with friends in a little house behind a high wall in a city that was never home. Running water is rare; electricity more rare. At night, the house fills with mosquitoes. The nights are so dark, she cannot see across the room. And no one dares go out after 6:30 p.m.
For people like Marie, fear is one of life's constants. She used to fear the nighttime knock of the U.S. immigration agents. Now, she fears kidnappers in the dark.
The man who drove us to Marie's house, Jean-Pierre, talked to her about trying to get asylum in Canada.
''My son could be with me there,'' she said. She brightened for the first time that afternoon.
STRIVING FOR PATIENCE
Before night fell, we left Marie and La Plaine. Back over the potholes, past goats and children playing in the dry riverbed. The word ''patience'' was painted everywhere, on tap taps, walls, storefronts: La patience de la vie.
''Patience,'' Jean-Pierre said. ``That's what Haitians live on.''
U.S. Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez has called mass deportations ``not humane or moral.''
They also split up working families.
The Arnes are one of them. These aren't numbers we're sending back to unstable and dangerous places. These are mothers like Marie, who cries for the son she was forced to leave behind.
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