Haitian refugees held at the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base

Most Haitian refugees were interned in a tent camp on a disused air terminal at Guantanamo.

Over the years the United States has interned a varying number of Refugees held at the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base.^[1][2] In 1991 a coup in Haiti overthrew the first democratically elected President of Haiti, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, triggering a flood of refugees.^[3][4][5]

Within six months the USA had interned over 30,000 Haitian refugees in Guantanamo, while another 30,000 fled to the Dominican Republic.^[3] Eventually the USA would admit 10,747 of the Haitians to refugee status in the United States.

Most of the refugees were housed in a tent city on the re-purposed airstrip that would later be used to house the complex used for the Guantanamo military commissions.^[1] The refugees who represented discipline or security problems were held on the site that would later become Camp XRay, the initial site of the Guantanamo Bay detention camp.

In 2007 the United States Coast Guard reported they estimated they intercepted" 600 refugees at sea every month, and estimated that another 50 reach U.S. soil weekly."^[6] The DoD budgeted $16.5 million USD to build a new detention center for refugees.

Small numbers of refugees occasionally slip into the camp to this day.^[7] In 2007 the camp was holding approximately 30 refugees at a time.^[6]

In January 2010 United States Air Force reservists were deployed to help victims of a massive earthquake in Haiti, and some of those reservists worked to prepare the Guantanamo base to receive more Haitian refugees.^[8]

See also

• Cuban refugees at the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base

References

1. Karen J. Greenberg (March 2009). The Least Worst Place: Guantanamo's First 100 Days. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-537188-8. Retrieved 2009-03-18.
2. Jacqueline Charles (2014-08-13). "Remembering Guantánamo through the lives of the Haitians held there". Miami Herald. Archived from the original on 2014-08-13. Before it became a maximum-security prison camp for terror suspects, Guantánamo housed thousands of Haitian refugees fleeing the violence and military junta that had overthrown their president.
3. Patrick Gavigan (1997-10-01). "Migration emergencies and human rights in Haiti". Organization of American States. Archived from the original on 2012-11-01. Retrieved 2012-11-01. The surprise coup in September 1991 opened the refugee floodgates. Within six months of the coup the US Coast Guard had intercepted more than 38,000 Haitians at sea; 10,747 were eventually allowed to pursue asylum claims in the US following screening by immigration officials on board ships or at the US naval base at Guantánamo Bay. An estimated 10% of the population of Port-au-Prince and Haiti's other large cities fled into the mountains, generating an internally displaced population of perhaps 300,000. A further 30,000 crossed into the Dominican Republic.
4. Azadeh Dastyari. "Refugees on Guantanamo Bay. A Blue Print for Australia's 'Pacific Solution'?". Archived from the original on 2012-11-01. Guantanamo Bay was used as a processing centre for asylum seekers and a camp for HIV positive refugees in the 1990s. The detention of refugees and asylum seekers in the U.S. naval station strongly influenced Australia’s policy of processing asylum seekers on Nauru and Papua New Guinea’s Manus Island. Australia’s so called ‘Pacific Solution ’ has more in common with the U.S. policy of detaining ‘enemy combatants’ in Guantanamo Bay than initially meets the eye.
5. "Guantanamo Bay [GTMO] "GITMO"". Global Security. 2011-05-07. Archived from the original on 2012-11-01.
6. Sarah Stanard (2007-10-01). "Guantanamo facility will assist refugees in distress" (PDF). The Wire (JTF-GTMO). p. 4. Archived (PDF) from the original on 2009-08-22. Retrieved 2012-11-01.
7. "10 Cuban dissidents at US Guantanamo base: blogger". Agence France Presse. 2012-02-06. Retrieved 2012-02-07. The 10 including dissident journalists Olienny Valladares Capote and Adolfo Pablo Borraza Chaple, have been at the US base on Cuba's southeastern tip, for three months and started a hunger strike February 3, blogger Yohandry wrote. mirror
8. Angela Brees (2010-01-27). "190th trains in Cuba; deploys to Haiti". Guantanamo: United States Air Force. Archived from the original on 2014-08-14. Retrieved 2014-08-13. Senior Airman Michael Strobel clears land for the placement of tents in anticipation of Haitian refugees at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

External links

• Media related to Haitian refugees in the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base at Wikimedia Commons
• Barbara Crossett (1992-05-29). "U.S. to Close Refugee Camp At Guantanamo to Haitians". Washington DC: New York Times. Archived from the original on 2010-11-27. Retrieved 2014-08-13. Lawyers representing Haitian refugees asked a Federal judge in New York to block the new policy of returning all Haitians stopped at sea. Judge Sterling Johnson Jr., of the United States District Court in Brooklyn, will hear arguments on Friday. Judge Johnson, a Bush appointee, has previously ruled in favor of the refugees at Guantanamo in a continuing suit demanding their right to counsel.
• Lindsey Gruson (1991-12-25). "Haitian Refugees in Cuba Will Get Gifts a Day Late". Washington DC: New York Times. Archived from the original on 2014-08-14. Retrieved 2014-08-13. Three weeks ago, Guantanamo was visited by a group headed by Mr. Sutton, the Rev. Jesse Jackson and Representative Charles B. Rangel, the Harlem Democrat who has been a leading advocate of efforts to obtain asylum for the 7,000 Haitians being held in a tent city at the base. The Haitians were plucked from boats by Coast Guard cutters after fleeing their homeland, which has been torn by violence in the wake of a September coup that overthrew the elected Government of the Rev. Jean-Bertrand Aristide.
• John H. Cushman Jr. (1994-07-22). "U.S. Force and Haitian Refugees: A Nervous Wait". USS Inchon: New York Times. Archived from the original on 2014-08-14. Retrieved 2014-08-13. More than 8,000 Americans at sea, and about twice that many Haitians in the camp, are waiting for something to happen, preferably something that will let them go home. If nothing else, their very presence continues to exert pressure on the United States to intervene in Haiti if a political settlement cannot be found.