Trump’s vile lies obscure reality that Haitian immigrants come to America for freedom and opportunity
On a sultry morning in 1980, residents of the pastel mansions that lined Palm Beach on Florida’s east coast were taking their usual walk along the water’s edge, hoping to beat the stifling heat due to arrive later in the day. They were rich folks who did not much care to share “their beach” with those less financially fortunate.
So, these people were incensed when they saw what appeared to be several large black trash bags defiling their little piece of paradise. But as they approached, the “bags” morphed into dead bodies, dead Black bodies, dead Haitian bodies.
In my office at U.S Coast Guard Air Station Miami, as at every other law enforcement agency in the area, the phones rang nonstop.
“How could the Coast Guard let such a thing happen?” people inquired indignantly.
Not that they were concerned about the human tragedy before them, just that their privileged bubble was shattered with too much reality. They did not want to hear that it was a huge ocean and that the Coast Guard had a very finite number of ships and aircraft at our disposal.
But they obviously had the ear of powerful people because in short order we were tasked with a much-expanded role in a recently initiated Coast Guard program, the Haitian Migration Interdiction Operation (HMIO).
Memories of those efforts so long ago were rekindled by the recent, and recurring, repugnant lies of a current resident of that very same stretch of beach, Donald Trump, now a legal Florida resident at his Mar-a-Lago enclave. The hallmarks of his entire political career, and his whole life for that matter, were to traffic in fear, in hate, and in racism, a life in which all the values we Americans profess to hold dear paled to insignificance in his pursuit of material gain, power and ego aggrandizement.
Living in Florida for 15 years, I came to know many Haitians personally, and, almost to a person, they were kind, generous, intelligent, cheerful, diligent and God-fearing people. Trump, who accused the legal Haitian residents of Springfield, Ohio, of eating their neighbor’s pets, is, by comparison, a malevolent little man-child.
From the moment Trump came down the escalator in 2015 to declare his intention to run for president to his recent unhinged, “They’re eating the dogs,” comments during and after his debate with Vice President Kamala Harris, his life has been a running commentary of racism, xenophobia and hatred.
He constantly promotes fear of “the other,” be they different due to race, religion, ethnicity, gender, country of origin or sexual orientation. He is a frightened, cowardly little man who knows deep down he would not survive for long outside his insular world of wealth and privilege. I cannot help but compare him to the thousands of Haitians who braved the 700-mile open-ocean journey from Haiti to the United States in rickety, old, overcrowded sailboats, many of whom we found shipwrecked on some rocky outcropping while on our HMIO patrols.
The Coast Guard estimated that up to 50 percent of those who attempted this treacherous voyage did not survive. These people knew the risks, but the siren song of freedom was strong.
I spent a quarter-century in the military and in federal law enforcement and thus understand on a granular level the need for security, for controllable borders and for the rule of law. Our immigration system is a complex system of interrelated dynamic components, but it can be tamed, given the political will to do so.
Trump, however, has no desire to truly address the problem other than with a bumper-sticker slogan, “Build that wall.” But show me someone who builds a 20-foot wall and I will show you someone who brings a 24-foot ladder to the party!
The recent bipartisan border bill, although not perfect, would nevertheless have made for some dramatic improvements, the likes of which we have not seen in 40 years. But Trump had his sycophants in Congress kill the bill because the border crisis is the underpinning of his campaign, and by doing their job and working toward a solution, they would have made Trump’s campaign largely irrelevant.
Trump is telling little old ladies at his rallies that, “Hordes are coming across the border, and they will cut your throat while you are making breakfast in your own kitchen.” Inspirational talk, right up there with FDR’s, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”
Wait a minute, no it is not!
With Trump’s nonstop fearmongering, people are worried about their safety rather than real problems such as who will be paying into the system to support their Social Security and Medicare benefits. The U.S. population, like that of most industrialized nations, is aging rapidly, and we need a constant and large infusion of young people to immigrate to our country to support our aging population.
The COVID-19 crisis, with its massive loss of migrant labor, crops rotting in the fields and the dramatic increase in food prices, foreshadowed what a disaster it would be if Trump even got a good start deporting millions of undocumented people, as he says he will do.
There is broad agreement among economists that without those 11 million or so undocumented folks, the American economy might spiral out of control. Springfield, Ohio, is a microcosm of this phenomenon. Granted, there are sudden growth issues that the influx of so many people has caused, and which the federal government should help address. But Springfield was a dying Rust Belt city for decades and is now one that the new hardworking Haitian arrivals have turned around.
As mentioned earlier, these are complicated issues, and it was obvious from the Noticias Univision town hall in South Florida on Oct. 16, in which Trump participated, that he does not understand the most basic mechanisms of our immigration system. Do not take my word for it, just watch his nonanswers to the immigration questions on YouTube. Trump is obviously intellectually lazy, and it is startling how little he understands about our government even after spending four years in the White House.
The Haitians of Springfield, Ohio, have Temporary Protected Status (TPS), meaning that they have been given, at least temporarily, asylum from the violence that has gripped Haiti, which is basically a failed state at this point.
The U.S. bears much of the blame for the situation there, as we have constantly and negatively intervened in the country since the Haitian people won their independence from Napoleon’s armies in 1804, the only people in the Western Hemisphere besides our own to throw off the yoke of a great colonial power and become a free country.
For 30 years in Haiti, the U.S. supported the Duvalier father and son dictatorships, from 1957 to 1986, and, indirectly, their paramilitary secret police, the Tontons Macoutes.
When we, as members of the Coast Guard, intercepted Haitians en route to the U.S., we would return them to Haiti via Coast Guard cutter. It was common for at least some of those we returned to be murdered by the Tontons. A particularly gruesome method they used was “necklacing,” in which people were made to kneel, their hands were tied to their ankles, a car tire was placed around their neck and filled with gas, and then the gasoline was lit.
After seeing the result of such cruelty, I, along with others, refused to return people in our charge to Haiti, choosing to leave the Coast Guard instead. I had 18 years of service at the time, two years short of a lifelong retirement payment. But we all owe it to ourselves to maintain the moral high ground, which is something I am not seeing in certain quarters of our political leadership as they kowtow to Donald Trump, a man who has much, much more in common with the Duvalier dictators than with our brave immigrants who are “yearning to breathe free.”
Jim Petersen was a Marine Corps officer during the Vietnam era for eight years, served 10 years in the USCG mostly as director of federal law enforcement at USCG Air Station Miami, and retired from the 1085th Medical Company, Air Ambulance, South Dakota National Guard.
Photo: a public domain image of a 1994 rescue of Haitian immigrants by the U.S. Coast Guard, posted on wikimedia commons.
