A group of Haitians apprehended in the April 7 sweep of Spanish Wells and Harbour Island will be filing legal action against government for their detention during “arbitrary and illegal raids”, lawyer and president of the Grand Bahama Human Rights Association, Fred Smith told The Tribune yesterday.
Mr Smith accused government of becoming a “vigilante, a hang ’em high at noon organization”.
“The practice of wholesale terrorist raids on communities and picking up legal and illegal people is completely against the rule of law, undemocratic and obscenely illegal for the government to be doing,” the lawyer claimed.
On April 7 the Department of Immigration apprehended as many as 394 Haitian nationals in a sweep which covered three Family Islands. Of that number it was determined that 140 persons were illegally apprehended.
Immigration Minister Shane Gibson, however, defended the decision of the department to detain the group of Haitians in question until their permits and permanent resident certificates were verified.
He said that the reason that this was necessary was because of the number of fraudulent documents that officials have found in the public domain.
A week before the raids a Haitian national in Miami was convicted of having hundreds of fraudulent Bahamian work permits. Mr Gibson said at the time, that if the Miami incident had not happened the massive roundup would not have taken place in the way in which it did.
Nevertheless, Mr Smith said that he and the Grand Bahama Human Rights Association have met over the weekend in Spanish Wells, Freeport and Harbour Island with many people who were arrested in these raids and are looking at bringing action against the government to enjoin it from conducting what the organization describes as “illegal activities”.
“What we have found was that most of the people we have interviewed are absolutely terrified of bringing an action against the government. They feel that they will be victimised and although, say a husband has a permanent residency certificate, he may have a wife or children or family member that is here on an annual residency certificate and so they feel exposed and they feel that any attempt to assert their rights will lead to abuse against their loved one,” Mr Smith said.
Nevertheless, there have been a few persons who were willing to launch proceedings which Mr Smith hopes will stand out at a precedent.
“We are not in the late 1930s in Nazi Germany, the Haitians are not to be treated as the Jews of the Bahamas to have to be victimised and hunted down and removed from the population,” the lawyer said.
An immigrant population, he pointed out, is very necessary for the growth of the Bahamian people and the foreign investors did not need a cheap and capable and committed labour and someone to do jobs that Bahamians don’t want to do, then the Haitians would not be here,” Mr Smith said.
The public, he said, cannot keep using Haitians as scapegoats for all of the incompetents and ineptness of the country’s governments.
“The government has whipped up so much anti-Haitian furor that right now there is a fever in the county against anything Haitian and we have to be careful not to stigmatize these people. The government has become a vigilante, hang ’em at high noon organization, and I call on the government to respect law,” Mr Smith said.
By RUPERT MISSICK Jr, Chief Reporter – The Tribune
