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INS Coverage<br />
foreign-born populations<br />
have grown, so have the<br />
proportions of people who<br />
are naturalized citizens in<br />
Miami and Fort Lauderdale<br />
metro areas—most notably<br />
to some 23 percent of the<br />
population in Miami-Dade<br />
alone.<br />
With so many immigrants,<br />
the INS comes under<br />
intense questioning by<br />
the public. Immigration<br />
advocates and others with<br />
complaints about the INS<br />
are not shy about contacting<br />
the press, either. There<br />
are more stories than reporters<br />
could hope to<br />
cover. We write what seems<br />
endless articles and editorials.<br />
Any improvement,<br />
however, is difficult to<br />
gauge because old problems,<br />
like problematic INS<br />
employees, don’t go away.<br />
Remember Kromegate<br />
in 1995? That’s when Miami<br />
INS staffers prepared a<br />
cover-up for a congressional<br />
tour. Days before its<br />
arrival, Krome was so overcrowded<br />
that 55 women were sleeping<br />
on cots in the clinic lobby. After the INS<br />
transferred or released more than 100<br />
detainees, lawmakers saw significantly<br />
improved conditions that distorted reality.<br />
The scam was discovered when<br />
45 offended INS employees blew the<br />
whistle in a letter faxed to Congress<br />
and later released to the press.<br />
By 1996, federal investigators had<br />
concluded that local INS officials deliberately<br />
set out to hoodwink the congressional<br />
delegation. The evidence<br />
included an e-mail from Constance<br />
Weiss, then Krome chief, which said<br />
that detainees had been “stashed out<br />
of sight for cosmetic purposes.”<br />
Of the five INS executives recommended<br />
for the stiffest discipline afterward,<br />
four remain with the agency today<br />
in high-level jobs. Most, including<br />
Weiss, were cleared by the U.S. Merit<br />
Systems Protection Board. Weiss<br />
downplayed the e-mail as a “flippant”<br />
remark and maintained that she “didn’t<br />
Jesiclaire Clairmont, left, 45, and daughter Lina Prophete, 21, are being<br />
detained while her son was given asylum (her sons are pictured on page<br />
15). On the blackboard is the Langston Hughes poem “Dreams.” Photo<br />
by Carl Juste/The Miami Herald.<br />
do anything wrong.” After having her<br />
demotion rescinded, she returned to<br />
the Miami District as one of the headquarters<br />
executives overseeing Krome.<br />
The truism told to me by a former<br />
Krome officer is fitting: “Screw up, move<br />
up.” Indeed, Krome keeps coming<br />
under federal investigation. The last<br />
one began in 2000, after about a dozen<br />
women detainees, many reluctantly and<br />
fearing retribution, came forward to<br />
accuse some 15 officers of sexual abuse.<br />
They told of being fondled, seduced<br />
with promises of release—even raped.<br />
Two years later, several of the women<br />
who testified before a grand jury have<br />
been deported. To “protect” them from<br />
abuse, all women detainees were transferred<br />
to a maximum-security county<br />
jail where conditions are far harsher<br />
than for the male detainees left at<br />
Krome. Initially, the INS even barred<br />
the press from interviewing women<br />
there face to face. A Herald attorney<br />
had to send a letter threatening to take<br />
the INS to court before a<br />
Herald reporter and I were<br />
allowed to get in to interview<br />
three detainees who<br />
wanted to talk with us.<br />
Thanks to Florida’s firstrate<br />
public access laws, it<br />
would have been illegal to<br />
keep us out of the county<br />
facility.<br />
Yet the federal probe<br />
has netted only two INS<br />
guards who both pled to<br />
misdemeanor consensual<br />
sex charges, and the investigation<br />
into sexual misconduct<br />
now appears<br />
stalled. Most disturbing is<br />
how eerily the women detainees’<br />
allegations paralleled<br />
those that sparked a<br />
federal investigation 10<br />
years earlier—one that<br />
ended without prosecutions<br />
or public findings.<br />
The message: Detainees<br />
who talk get punished,<br />
while abusive officers can<br />
coerce an inmate into having<br />
sex and face a slap on<br />
the wrist. Who’s going to<br />
find out, anyway?<br />
No wonder questions about policy,<br />
its implementation, and misconduct<br />
keep cropping up. With post-September<br />
11 security taking top priority, what<br />
little scrutiny was aimed at the INS’s<br />
treatment of ordinary, nonterrorist immigrants<br />
is even weaker now. Today<br />
the burning local concern is a policy<br />
that the INS denied for three months,<br />
before the truth came out in court:<br />
Haitians who routinely used to be released<br />
to pursue credible asylum claims<br />
are now being detained until they are<br />
granted legal status or deported. Local<br />
advocates had to sue to find out why.<br />
The INS testified that it is detaining the<br />
asylum seekers to deter other Haitians<br />
from taking to the sea to get to Florida.<br />
But why would anyone want to keep a<br />
deterrent policy a secret?<br />
More than 200 such Haitians have<br />
been locked up since December last<br />
year when the Coast Guard rescued an<br />
overloaded boat in danger of capsizing.<br />
Some of them already have been<br />
<strong>Nieman</strong> Reports / Winter 2002 17