No other group of persons has been thus classified and incarcerated. Indeed. the United States terminated its detention policy as long ago as 1954 when it closed the Ellis Island facility. Not only has the Government singled out Haitians for such harsh treatment. it has dragged its feet in processing the asylum claims of those detained. Hence. many legitimate Haitian refugees have now been detained for more than a year. The Government has offered no reasonable explanation for this disparate treatment. It cannot deny that the Indochinese who came to this country in large numbers in the late 1970s were not imprisoned on the basis of their national origin. The number of people involved cannot justify the disparate treatment. since for the years 1979 through 1981 some 358.000 Indochinese were admitted to this country without being automatically jailed. I fully intend to watch very closely the Immigration Reform and Control Act now pending in the Judiciary Committee and if it does no more to provide relief to the Haitians than this bill. I will oppose it also.*
Keywords matched
Immigration asylum claims refugees