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INS Coverage
U.S. passport.
At that point he had been in
Haiti two months and already it
was too late. By the time the INS
admitted its mistake and flew
him back to Miami in May,
Sylvain had full-blown AIDS. He
went into cardiac arrest in the
ambulance taking him from the
plane to Miami’s public hospital.
He died not long after.
Now, more than three years
since his death, the INS hasn’t
yet explained why this tragedy
happened. INS documents responding
to a Freedom of Information
Act request by Colon arrived
all blacked out, except for
occasional prepositions. And the
public has no assurance wrongful
deportation won’t happen
again.
But then, that’s not unusual
for immigration matters in south
Florida. Though the public has a
right to know why the INS sets a
certain policy, how abuses happen,
who was responsible, and
what has been done to prevent
more misconduct, that information
often must be dragged out
of the agency by the press, immigration
advocates, the courts,
even hunger strikers. Post-September
11, we’re experiencing
and witnessing similar battles
for access and transparency writ
large.
Of course, none of this secrecy
has helped shape an effective
instrument of the nation’s
complex and contradictory immigration
policies. Power without public
scrutiny has instead bred lack of
accountability, incompetence and
abuse. The INS suffers from an inbred
culture that shields malicious employees
and incompetent managers—so
much so that internal investigations
drag for years and results aren’t publicly
made known.
The INS’s Krome facility, a longtroubled
detention center on the edge
of the Everglades, is illustrative. In 1992,
a number of INS staffers complained
that Joe Kennedy, then Krome’s chief
detention officer, had used a stun gun
A fence at a detention center. Photo courtesy of The Miami Herald.
against a male deportee in the groin
area. Witnesses said that the act set off
a melee in which three officers ended
up injured. A subordinate also said that
Kennedy had tested the weapon on
him. Yet stun guns aren’t issued or
authorized for use by INS detention
officers.
But none of this was investigated
until five years later and then only
because the episode became public.
Herald reporter Andres Viglucci had
heard about the stun gun before from
INS officers who knew him from his
numerous stories about misconduct at
Krome. Eventually, INS
sources contacted him,
willing to go on the record
after the shenanigans quietly
came out during an
INS employee’s unrelated
grievance complaint.
Viglucci’s meticulously
reported story quoted one
of the witnesses as saying,
“Who was I going to report
it to? My entire chain
of command was involved.”
At that time, the
witness had verbally complained
about the stun gun
to Kennedy’s bosses, he
said. The witness was reassigned
soon afterward, and
when his contract for temporary
work ended, it
wasn’t renewed. The detainee
hit with the stun
gun, and the detainees
who saw it, weren’t around
to complain, either. They
had been deported after
the incident. Only after the
incidents were exposed in
the press did the INS begin
an investigation, removing
Kennedy from his
post for the duration.
That’s not to say that all
INS employees are corrupt
or incompetent. In covering
immigration issues
since 1997, I’ve met a number
of INS professionals
who balance the law, common
sense, and compassion.
Many have called me
and other reporters who cover immigration
to give us tips or simply vent.
They have a tough job enforcing unpopular
Congressional mandates. It’s
too bad that their good work is undermined
by INS staffers and managers
who abuse their power and tolerate
intolerable abuse.
South Florida knows those INS dysfunctions
better than most places. Census
2000 figures show that Miami-Dade
County has the highest concentration
of foreign-born residents of the nation’s
major metropolitan areas: 51 percent
out of 2.2 million people. And as those
16 Nieman Reports / Winter 2002