GTMO Memory Project: Refugee Detentions - Haitians [View all]

[Solly Mack]

A lot to explore at links. Please read. Shameful history of Guantanamo Bay regarding refugees and immigrants seeking asylum in America. Under Trump, how much worse it will be.

The Human Cost of Legal Exception: Haitian Refugees at Guantánamo

While the current notoriety of Guantánamo Bay is focused on its use as a detention center for alleged terrorists against the United States, this is not the first time in history the island has been used to indefinitely detain individuals.

Starting in the early 1990’s, refugees from Haiti were detained at Camp McCalla and Camp Bulkeley. As many as 12,500 could be detained in the camps at any time, and in 1992 the camps almost reached their full capacity. At the height of the influx in 1992, some 34,090 Haitians had passed through the two camps. Conditions in the camps were deplorable. While U.S. officials allowed limited self-governance, decisions such as sanitation and food rationing were made by the military. With such conditions towards the end of the Haitian detention instability and rioting occurred, particularly in Camp Bulkeley – the camp used for Haitians with HIV/AIDS. The prolonged detention ended with most of the refugees being repatriated back to Haiti, some facing torture or even death.


Haitian refugees began leaving before the 1990s. Many fled repression from Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier, whose corrupt regime ended in 1986 only to be replaced by a military junta in 1988. The irony of the refugee crisis is that the U.S. was instrumental in supporting the Duvalier dictatorship as a Cold War ally. The first of the refugees were the wealthy and elite, but by the late 1980’s and early 1990’s the Haitians who would be held in Guantánamo Bay were the poor.

The Haitians refugee crisis at Guantánamo Bay resonates today, and is an example of how Guantánamo serves as a legal exception that allows the U.S. government to detain terrorist suspects indefinitely. Upon leaving Haiti, these refugees were often intercepted by the U.S. Navy or Coast Guard and, due to the implications of illegal immigration and the perceived socio-economic threat of an influx of Haitians by American politicians, Guantánamo Bay became the perfect solution. Once there, they were not considered to be on U.S. land and therefore not subject to the protections afforded to persons on sovereign U.S. soil. Basics such as access to legal representation for asylum claims and protections under international human rights laws, which the U.S. has agreed to observe, were not guaranteed. Guantánamo Bay’s “Legal Black Hole” became the buffer to either force Haitians back to Haiti or risk being detained for upwards of ten to twenty years.

Guantánamo Public Memory Project

Beginning in 1991, over 32,000 men, women and children fled Haiti in makeshift boats. Many were pro-democracy activists seeking refuge after a military dictatorship overthrew President Aristide. Intercepted by the US Coast Guard, they came to crowded camps surrounded by barbed wire at GTMO to pre-screen their asylum claims.

The Immigration and Naturalization Service classified most Haitians in GTMO as “economic migrants”. Despite the political dangers at home, many were quickly returned to Haiti. Others endured lengthy detention as they waited to learn if they could enter the US.

US courts declared that Haitians detained at GTMO had “no substantive rights” under law, but Haitian detainees fought to improve camp conditions and asserted the urgent need for due process. Protesters were punished with solitary confinement and women were made to undergo humiliating physical examinations. “When we protested,” one detainee recalled, “I was beaten…made to sleep on the ground like animals, like dogs, not like humans.”

President George H.W. Bush responded to the crisis in May 1992 by ordering the Coast Guard to stop bringing Haitians to GTMO. The order returned all detainees to Haiti but was criticized for violating the Geneva Conventions’ treatment of refugees. Two months later, about 250 HIV-positive Haitians remained. Through hunger strikes and collaboration with human rights activists and lawyers, these refugees gained entry to the US and won a case to “close Guantánamo” in 1993. But the government maintained its right to hold refugees at GTMO indefinitely, opening the camp for future uses.

HIV-positive Haitians at Guantánamo Bay

In the early 1990s, with the arrival of thousands of Haitian immigrants, Guantánamo Bay served as one of the first sites of mass HIV testing for immigrants. Over 260 individuals tested positive and were segregated in Camp Bulkeley, a tent camp surrounded by barbed wire. Haitians reported limited mobility, poor sanitation, and insufficient and unclean water.

Medical Care at Guantanamo

Guantanamo, including Camp Bulkeley, is served by a Battalion Aid Station clinic and a naval hospital. The clinic has two military physicians, a family-practice specialist, and an infectious-disease specialist. Patients can also be transferred from the clinic to the hospital.

Although the military physicians are capable of providing general medical care to the Haitian detainees at Guantanamo, the facilities are inadequate to provide medical care to detainees with AIDS. The physicians themselves first raised this issue in May 1992, requesting that specific HIV-positive patients be evacuated to the United States because adequate medical care could not be provided for them at Guantanamo. Some of these requests were denied by the Immigration and Naturalization Service. At the trial, the United States conceded that the medical facilities at Guantanamo were insufficient to treat patients with AIDS “under the medical care standard applicable within the United States itself.” One explanation for the refusal to accept the recommendations for transfer was provided by the special assistant to the director of congressional and public affairs at the Immigration and Naturalization Service; the special assistant reportedly remarked to the press, “They're going to die anyway, aren't they?” Judge Johnson characterized the attitude held by the Immigration and Naturalization Service -- that there is “no value in providing adequate medical care when a patient's illness is fatal” -- as “outrageous, callous and reprehensible”5.

Johnson further described what the Immigration and Naturalization Service euphemistically called a “humanitarian camp” as “nothing more than an HIV prison camp”5.