Mariel Boatlift: The tide turns

From WLRN News, this is Detention by Design. I'm Danny Rivera. I'm standing in front of one of my very favorite pieces of public art in Miami. It's called the Liberty Column. And what you see is there's a coral rock and extending upwards from the coral rock and what looks like bronze. There's two hands that look like someone who's drowning and who's reaching for the heavens. And behind it there's a column of marble and that is the Liberty Column. And let me read you the plaque that sits here. It says the Liberty Column. Since 1959 thousands of Cubans have perished anonymously while fleeing tyranny in small boats or makeshift rafts. Although their names like those of martyred refugees of other nations are written solely on the pages of the sea. These were not for you. No, no. A Columbia immigrant named Edmundo Medina comes up to me in the middle of speaking into a microphone. It hurts me to see how many Cubans have left on rafts to find freedom. And it hurts me to see how many of them have drowned. Miami is a beautiful city that welcomes refugees from everywhere. May the people of Cuba stay strong and I hope one day they get their freedom back. That people of Cuba and that some day they will be able to live through freedom as they were before. Not only Cubans but also the Haitians. And also in the front row. And not just the Cubans, also the Haitians and all the Central Americans who have died crossing borders. By the time 1980 came around, Cuba had been living under a communist dictatorship for more than two decades. Freedom of expression and freedom of the press were essentially ended. Only one political party was allowed. And the government even shut down socialist newspapers that didn't buy the communist party line. Independent labor unions were taken over by the government. Workers lost the right to strike. And a US trade embargo battered huge parts of the Cuban economy. The country was barely hanging on with support from the Soviet Union. On April 1st, 1980, a Cuban named Hector San Yustis drove a stolen bus through the gates of the Peruvian Embassy in Havana, in an attempt to file for political asylum. There were five other Cubans with him. Cuban guards of the embassy opened fire. And one was killed in the crossfire. After the Peruvian Embassy refused to return the Cubans to the government of Fidel Castro to face charges. Castro pulled all of the police guards that were protecting the embassy under international law. The very next day, an estimated 10,000 Cubans stormed the Peruvian Embassy in an attempt to get political asylum in Peru. Within a few days of this incident, the communist government of Fidel Castro had a crisis on its hands. People were clamoring to leave the country, fleeing a system of government that Castro claimed was making life better for Cubans. In reality, the economy was a mess. Food and medicine were hard to find, and there was widespread political repression. This incident opened up a new chapter in US history. A new chapter that would play a major role in the creation of the modern US immigration system. Within a few weeks of that first incident at the Peruvian Embassy, Castro declared that anyone who wanted to leave the country could leave. They could be picked up by boat at the port of Mariel, just west of Havana. Cubans living in Miami, who mostly fled in the early years of the Cuban Revolution that brought Castro to power in 1959, they got the message. And virtually overnight, a massive convoy of boats headed to the port of Mariel to pick up family members and friends and take them back to Florida. This became known as the Mariel boat lift. Within a week, thousands of Cubans were arriving to Florida every single day. And this started to make headlines across the whole country. Good evening. Politicians from several states tonight are sharply criticizing President Carter's handling of the Cuban refugee problem. The governor of Texas, Bill Clemens, says the president has literally opened the floodgates. President Carter was taken completely by surprise. On top of the thousands of Cubans who were arriving by boat, more Haitians were landing in Florida by boat, too. By late May, the government of Dade County, which includes the city of Miami, estimates 30,000 Haitians had arrived over the previous few years, and about 30,000 Cubans in just a few weeks. Coast Guard is now communicating with all boats who are in route to Cuba and those in Mariel, Harba, in Cuba. And so, President Carter gave this speech on May 14, 1980. To urge them to return to the United States without accepting additional passengers. No new trips to Cuba by these unauthorized boats should be started. Those who comply with this request or command will have nothing to fear from the law. But we will ensure that the law is obeyed. Persons who violate this requirement and who violate US immigration custom laws by traveling to Cuba to pick up additional passengers will be subject to civil fines and a criminal prosecution. Furthermore, boats used to bring people unlawful to this country will be seized. Most of the Cuban refugees who arrive in the US during this time are immediately processed and released. Some of the Cubans are kept in jails or detention centers for months or even years on end. But the vast majority were quickly released. This immediately sets up a contrast between the treatment of Cubans and the treatment of Haitians who are still facing long periods of detention when they got here. And that is something that will change the immigration system drastically in the US. I promise you, we'll get into all of that. My name is Rafael Tejero. I was born in Havana, Cuba in 1952. Tejero was 28 years old when all of this happened. And he was doing pretty all right for himself, working as a director at a local TV station in Havana. But with Cuban society splitting between those who wanted to stay on the anti-American communist island and those who wanted to go to America, Tejero was confronted one day at work. They told me, you know Rafael, some people here have lived. They wanted to go with the Yankees, with the imperialism and all that, who will be us. Yankees, they called them the Americans. And we need to know if you are really going to fall into the temptation of the country. If for whatever reason they come to pick you up. And I say, yes, I was raised by my mother because my father died when I was six. And if she wants to leave, I can leave her. You know I have to go with her. Tejero says the moment he spoke those words came the retribution. Cuba, like Haiti, was a one-party country. If you went against the revolutionary government, you were put on a blacklist. And in Cuba, everyday people were expected to defend the revolution. Meaning, his answer that he'll leave Cuba if his mom wants to go, set a lot of people against him, including his own bosses at the TV station. I mean, they say the worst things. I mean, they insult me. And then they made me go out to the street and I fall for a building by the escalator. I couldn't take the elevator. And when I was outside, they gave me a big, big act to the reputio. An act of the reputio translates to an act of repudiation. The practice was widespread and broadly documented in the early 80s. Basically, it meant neighbors and all sorts of other people gathering to insult someone for being a counter-revolutionary and against the left-wing government. The insults often came with physical attacks and threats of harm. And it was encouraged by the government. They followed me onto my house, which was about a mile and a half from my workplace. And they got a big meeting in front of my house. And they threw a knife at me. and hang on constant. The people hung an effigy of Uncle Sam, signifying the United States of America. I mean, it wasn't worth it. I thought I was going to die. Really? Because they were pushing me and, you know, "tuckle me throughout the street, and nobody would be able to do anything to help me." That was a great moment. That was a turning point. That was, I said, "Well, I mean, no, this is not what they say it is." Tejero went to a hotel to remove himself from the situation, and his mom stayed back at home. They tried to turn through the door, and I got in my chair, and she said, "Well, whoever'd go through that door, I got caught around with the chair, and I went to a hotel with my ex-wife, and I spent like 25 days inside that hotel. It was intense. It was intense. The cleaning lady made went to the room, and they told it, "You never go out to the pool, and we are new to what we want to spend all the time here." I mean, I'd say no laughing, but it was. I mean, I was taken." While Tejero was in the hotel, he was trying to figure out a way to leave the country. He called friends, and friends of friends in Miami, to see if anyone could arrange to send a boat for him in his family. In the meantime, the huge exodus of Cubans was starting to take a very human toll. It was partly because a lot of boats heading from Florida to Cuba and back were not meant for the high seas. 14-year-old Ivis Gerrero Hernandez appeared dazed as she told reporters how the 36-foot boat she was jammed onto sank 40 miles north of Maniel Bay. Her mother, father, grandmother, and two sisters were among the 14 refugees drowned. The exact number of Cubans who drowned during the burial boat lift is unknown, but there are many documented cases of boats going down. They said they called for help and saw a Cuban patrol boat pass them by. The most notorious narrative about this wave of migration from Cuba was that among the new arrivals in Florida were criminals that Castro released from Cuban jails. And Castro also cleared out some of the country's psychiatric wards and loaded the patients onto the ships during the burial boat lift. But out of tens of thousands of people, by that June, only 655 arrivals had either severe mental health issues or were convicted of serious crimes according to the US government. So the percentage was actually very small, but popular opinion became that all these Marielitos were dangerous criminals. The word Marielito, someone who came on the boat lift, became a slur even inside of Miami's Cuban community. When the boats started landing, Dade County set up a processing center at the county fairgrounds next to Florida International University. Tens of thousands of Cubans started to get sheltered there. On the second day of that center being opened, Marit Steerheim remembers paying it a visit. He was a Dade County manager at the time, and he played a central role in figuring out how the local government would respond to the situation. I went in there and I started looking at these people. I know a lot of people who are just perfectly normal and, you know, elderly mothers and fathers. It's middle aged, whatever. But some of the faces were hard, hard faces, if you know what I'm saying, the way they looked, their eyes, so forth and so on. And I asked the person that I had in charge, I said, "Where are the feds? Where are the federal people here to handle this info?" This is an international event. No one was there. So I directed that I wanted an ID. I wanted a police ID, fingerprints and photographs of everyone there that was coming in and processed, get names, age, some personal data. And so some kind of a record of who's coming into this country. You know, you had 125,000 people on those boats coming up, landing all up and down the shore. And I'd get calls. What are we going to do with these people? The feds weren't here. I mean, it was chaotic. After Jimmy Carter gave that tough speech, the federal government did confiscate some boats that were being used by Cuban Americans to go to Cuba and pick up friends and family. Aerial photos taken in Q.S. show a few dozen boats that were seized. Cuban Americans took to the streets in Miami, demanding to get their boats back. We were the best. We were the best. We were the best. We were the best. But a lot of boats still made their way to Cuba to bring friends and family back to the U.S. Many of them ended up sinking and an unknown number of people drowned. What had started as a political crisis of the boats had turned into a humanitarian crisis. And President Carter responded by authorizing the Coast Guard to help the boats get to Florida instead of cracking down. Steerheim was not happy about how President Carter handled the situation. I know that President Carter has done a lot of things for humanity, very caring person. But it's difficult for me to forgive him for the ineptitude and his failure to really understand and negotiate the terms of the Mariel refugee effort. Here you had the Cuban American population who obviously out of love wanted to go down and pick up their mothers and fathers, uncles, aunts, brothers, relatives from a dictatorship. And they had a flotilla of boats, some taking great risks to go down there through the streets to pick these people up. And Carter, President Carter, knee jerked a little bit. There was initially he didn't approve it. And anyway, then when he decided that, "Okay, I will go along with it," there were no negotiations. Exactly what kind of negotiations President Carter might have entered into with respect to the Mariel boat lift is not really clear. In April of 1980, Fidel Castro essentially makes a unilateral decision. We're going to open up the port of Mariel, and anyone who wants to take these people away, come and get them. The US government did not factor into the equation at all. As a result, well, there was a lot of compassion and love and good things that happened. There's also a lot of bad things because the criminals started playing their trade and our crime steps went up through the charts. Right in the middle of what came to be known as a Mariel boat crisis, a Florida jury refused to convict police officers who had killed a black motorcyclist named Arthur McDuffield. After that, there was an uprising in one of Miami's black neighborhoods, Liberty City. At least 18 people were killed, and there was hundreds of millions of dollars in property damage. In a report, the majority white-date county government pointed to the huge influx of Cuban and Haitian refugees as one of the factors for the uprising. They claimed the new refugees created more economic competition for Miami's black community that was already here, and that the county needed to do a better job supporting them. The report also acknowledged long-standing distrust of police and black neighborhoods, even before Miami police killed Arthur McDuffield. All of this was the beginning of a decade that would mark some of the darkest days in South Florida. Miami became the murder capital of the nation in the 80s, fueled by the cocaine trade from South America that also used boats and planes to bring cocaine into Florida. Tourism is our number one industry still is, and who would want to come? You were not safe walking the streets at night. No question about it. I mean, it was Time Magazine and Front Page, Paradise Lost by Miami. How many people read, you know, Red Time Magazine? The Chicago Tribune had a picture of Florida, they made a gun out of it. of its founder, whose immigration story included detention at age 14, but also the warm embrace of the Miami community. In Cuba, Rafael Tejero was still hiding out in a hotel with his wife. After he was branded a counter-revolutionary when he said he would leave for the US. After weeks without leaving, Tejero and his wife decided it was time to finally set foot outside to see if things were getting better. We just went to the movies, to a theater to watch a movie, you know, like if we were, I mean, looking all around to see that nobody sees us. And at that time, in the theaters, when they put a movie, they put an auticiero. A propaganda newscast that the government showed before films. And I remember being sitting there and using to fill out. "You know what? We don't need them. We don't want them." Tejero is referencing this really famous speech that Fidel Castro gave in May of 1980, in which Castro said about anyone who doesn't have revolutionary blood in his words, we don't want them and we don't need them. This part of the speech was famously used as an intro to the film's car face. "There you go. Say, "We're talking about us." "That's for me." After leaving the hotel, Tejero went back home and kept trying to find someone who could get him out of the country. After weeks and weeks of trying, he finally got in touch with someone who knew someone in Miami who could arrange to send a boat. Basically, it was a human smuggling operation. And he had to take out an informal loan and pay the man back when he arrived in Miami. But before he could leave for the port of Mariel, Tejero had the check in with Cuban authorities. He went to an office with his wife and his mother and not everything went as planned. They call us the three of us and they say, "They told us that my mother could come, me could come but my wife has to stay." But why? Because she started a career and she had to pay for it. I couldn't say a word. I mean, it was like my walk just came down because I couldn't do that for her. You know? To say, "Okay, sorry." So I didn't answer. So she was the one that said, "Yes, they're going. They're going." Cuban officials refused to let his wife leave the island. They said that since she got a college education in the country, she would have to stay in order to repay the debt. That was the official reason. But it also reflects the complete disdain the Castro government showed for so-called counter-revolutionaries. Basically, if you want to leave, we're going to make it hurt. At the time, he was able to leave for the Puerto Mariel. It was already August of 1980. The massive flow of Cubans to Florida was slowing down. Over 100,000 Cubans had already left the country. And now Tahero was about to leave with his mother, but without his wife. I remember saying goodbye to her like in the movies through the window crying and she walked in and running behind the bars. It was, I could write a novel. After a few days spent at a mosquito-infested camp at Mariel, Tahero's boat arrived from Miami. The boat's name was all alone. And I was so angry that I remember that I said in the back of the boat with my back. When I turned my back to the island of Cuba, I didn't even want to see that place. It was romantic. It was a rain, it got some dogs. And since President Carter reversed his hard-line stance against boats picking people up in Cuba, the U.S. Coast Guard escorted his boat to the U.S. And these people in the Coast Guard were happy and smiling. "Hi, welcome to America!" I mean, it was very touching, very emotional. They were really good. I never forget that. The only feeling that I didn't have was fear. I mean, I didn't matter the boat's time. Because I just think of some heavy weight from me living that island and living all that fear that would happen to us in this state. So I was sure that I sooner or later I would take care of my life and I would do that. When Tahero arrives in Key West, he's quickly processed and put on a bus up to Miami. Then we came and we went to the Chrome Avenue facility. The Chrome Avenue facility. This facility on the very edge of the Everglades and Dade County plays an outsized role in the creation of the U.S. immigration system as we know it. Specifically, when it comes to the federal government, detaining immigrants who are trying to plead for political asylum. Brianna Noful is the immigration detention researcher with the College of William and Mary. We met in part two of this series. I really cannot emphasize how important it is. All the stuff that is kind of like the popular narratives about detention, that talk about history, they all start with Chrome. Chrome was a missile testing site. It's essentially in the Florida Everglades. This is where the federal government kept missiles ready to launch at Cuba during the Cuban missile crisis in 1962. There's a single small road that leads down to it. And so in 1980, when the U.S. government is facing this tremendous number of asylum seekers that's coming, they are looking for what they envision as temporary housing, temporary processing solutions. So places they can hold asylum seekers while they look for, if they're Cuban, while they look for a family that they can release them to while they investigate criminal backgrounds. They often use the language of a holding site. So after initially lagging in response to the burial boat lift, the Carter administration finally puts boots on the ground in Florida. The majority of the Cubans who come through the temporary camp set up at Chrome are released to family members or to charity groups that sponsor them within a few days. Technically they're released on parole while they go through the immigration process. It means that most of the new Cuban arrivals can quickly get access to welfare benefits to help them get on their feet. And it also gives them the ability to legally find a job. That's what happened to Rafael Tejero, who spent only a single day in the camp. And this was in sharp contrast to how the federal government had been treating most Haitians for years. Haitians who were still arriving to Florida by boat. I mean, we weren't caught and released. We were different. I mean, don't be good, we're better or nothing, but they get with that status. And then in a week, I already was working as a boss boy in a nightclub here. From being a TV director, Cuba for a boss boy here in my house. This different reality for Cuban and Haitian refugees starts to become especially pronounced during the Marriol boat lift. And it was a focus of a one hour radio special produced in 1980 by the Haitian media group Radio Haiti in terror. In the next clip, we're going to hear Radio Haiti journalist Michel Montas talking with Richard Goulaghi, who is a deputy district director for the Immigration and Naturalization Service under President Carter. What's the percentage of Haitians coming in and asking for political asylum? This is probably where the thinking stems from concerning the difference in the handling. The Cuban, when they arrive at Key West, to a man, ask their story is, I am leaving Cuba because of the political situation, because if I return, I would be, you know, which is a claim to political asylum. The Haitian inevitably, on the first contact with us, when he steps off the boat, he says, I'm looking for a job coming here to work. I want to support my family, which we have this humanitarian feeling for these people, but this does not meet the definition of political asylum. Therefore, we do not accept it at that point as a political asylum claim. However, once the person gets into the community and he meets with these, the other Haitians that are here and the attorneys involved, he learns very quickly. You must say these magic words and at that time then he comes back and says, "Give me the paper of political self." By the end of the year, Babydok and the Tonton Makuts would launch a crackdown on Haitian opposition, sending journalists at Radio Haiti and Terror, including Michelle Montas, who we just heard from, into prison, and then into exile. We're going to dive way more into this disparity in the US government's treatment of Cuban and Haitian refugees in the next episode. For the Cubans who were detained, the experience in these federal sites was not a good one. Because of the public perception and the media frenzy about that small number of Cubans who were freed from prisons and concerns about public safety, some of them were held longer than expected for background checks. And there were also so many Cubans who didn't have family in Miami who could easily and quickly help them get resettled. This created a backlog. The federal government was overwhelmed by the sheer number of people coming in. And so what the Carter administration does, is it decides to ship tens of thousands of Cubans across the country to repurposed military bases in other states, just to temporarily hold them as they get processed. And it's worth pausing to note exactly who was sent to these military bases. A study from the University of Miami found that black and darker skined Cubans made up about 10% of the people who were quickly processed and released. But they made up about half of the Cubans sent to these military bases to be detained. There's four big sites, one in the Florida panhandle, one in Arkansas, one in Pennsylvania, one in Wisconsin, that the Cubans are moved to. And it's an incredibly frustrating experience because it feels like jail. They're heavily police sites. They're constantly told they're not in jail. But when you don't know when you're going to be released, that is kind of a hard pitch. And the immigration service learns a lot from that experience about what it's like to kind of have custody over this number of people. It's kind of an experiment for the federal government and for the immigration service in how to hold tens of thousands of people. This experiment and holding tens of thousands of people trying to plead for asylum in these federal facilities fundamentally changes how the federal government thinks of the immigration system itself. Through the 1970s, the federal government is interested in building immigration detention centers. And it's something that comes up in Congress. It's burdensome for them to have to negotiate with all these different cities and counties and to keep calling up wardens to see who has jail space. That's not their ideal vision of how this works. They would like to have a facility in South Florida. They could just send everyone to done deal. But when these things come up in Congress, there's constantly pushback. Like, Congress people are like, no one is going to want federal immigration detention centers. Like, where the heck are we going to put these? No one's going to want them in their backyard. The pop-jacks are going to be so terrible. Like, incarcerating immigrants is not going to be, it's not going to be acceptable to the American people. There's interests in the concept, certainly by the immigration service. But politicians don't think it's, they don't think it's feasible. They don't think it's going to be something they can kind of get away with or get the American people to buy into. The days of keeping lots of immigrants behind bars and detention centers, that had been over for decades at this point. But now in 1980, this is when the tide definitively turns. That is really what shifts with Mariel. Because suddenly they have this moment where all of the imagery is, you know, this idea of uncontrolled migration, boats and boats and boats of people that the US did not invite that are all claiming asylum that are changing the South Florida community. And that is the moment where they say, okay, now it's going to be politically socially viable to make an argument for detention centers. Now people across the country, not just in Miami, start to complain about the influx of Cuban refugees. More than 20,000 Cubans were sent to the military base Fort Chaffee in Arkansas. Richard Democratic President Bill Clinton was the governor of Arkansas at the time. And after some Cubans escape, he ends up activating the National Guard. This is from the archives at the Central Arkansas Library System. For the 200, the number is still unclear. A Cuban refugees left the premises in Fort Chaffee and it was over an hour and a half. Over an hour and a half before the MPs held up the gate where the Cubans left. And the only security for the area was provided by a small number, comparatively small number. Well, Arkansas State Police, people from Sheriff Conference Department and people from Team Follow-up Department who were outside of the City of Fort Smith now they're trying to provide security for the people of the area. I must say that we are all frustrated and disappointed and determined that the security problem that he says at the Fort will be solved and must be solved in the interest of people in this area. Days after Clinton says security at Fort Chaffee is going to be beefed up, some of the Cubans being detained at the military base lunch an uprising in an attempt to break out. Locals armed with shotguns stood guard around town threatening to shoot Cubans if they left the base. Across the country, resentment against the refugees was building. In South Florida, a Russian immigrant named Emmy Schaefer got about 70,000 signatures for a proposal that would ban the Dave County government from providing translation services and make English the official language of the county government. This was after Dave County officially became bilingual English and Spanish in 1973. And that English only question would now go before voters in the November 1980 election. To be clear, this was not the government pushing this. It was residents of Dave County that succeeded in putting it on the ballot. Here's Schaefer speaking with WTVJ about the purpose of that proposal. It's important to note here that unlike today, Cuban Americans really did not have much political power or even voting power in Miami at this time. That would change a lot in the years to come. But for the moment, the city and county governments were almost entirely white in their leadership. Again, here's Merritt Steerheim who is the Dave County manager at the time. And for the record, he strongly opposed the English only movement when it was going on the ballot. There was some resentment of people when they got on an elevator or they went to go to the cashier or whoever it was to not be able to communicate in English, which is our traditional language in the United States, frustrated them. It's a human reaction. We can be critical of it and so forth. In some cases, it should be critical if people get carried away, rude or what have you. But there was a pretty heavy feeling that, hey, you're an American now, you ought to speak English. Speak the native tongue. This is when white flight starts to happen in Miami. Tons of white families picking up and leaving. Signs went up around town, reading, "Will the last American to leave Miami please bring the flag?" Even though the prevailing narrative about the Cubans who came during the Marriott boat lift was that they were criminals, let loose from castorals, prisons and mental health facilities, in the end, the federal government identified more than 11,000 Cubans with criminal records. But determined that the large majority of them were convicted of political offenses or petty crimes like selling things on the black market. Offences that would not be considered felonies in the US. Rafael Tejero, who had arrived from Cuba on the Marriott boat lift in the summer of 1980 and was working as a bus boy, soon found a job in Spanish language TV in Miami. His wife was able to leave for Venezuela years later, and then eventually she made her way to Miami. They've been apart for about four years. Tejero says they tried to rekindle their relationship, but it just didn't work. with my wife. Floor came and we didn't agree with anything. Because I grew up here and grew up between Cuba and Venezuela. We were both adults and that time is to be pretty hard to recondite. In the smuggler turn friend that helped get to Hadoop to Ireland was himself killed in the wave of gun violence that hit Miami in the 80s. 1980 was the year Miami became the murder capital of the United States coinciding with the huge influx of refugees. You want to see his mother leaving an apartment in New Haya Lía. And when he was in the parking lot, he would get shot and kill. Nobody knew. A disease is a call case. By the time the Maryl boat lifted in October 1980, an estimated 125,000 Cubans had arrived in South Florida by boat. And over the same seven month period, an estimated 25,000 Haitians also arrived by boat. At this point, at the tail end of 1980, the hostage crisis was taking place in Iran. And severe inflation was battering the US economy. President Jimmy Carter was running for reelection against Republican Ronald Reagan. Weeks before the presidential election, Carter spoke to a group of Democratic supporters at the Fountain Blue Hotel in Miami Beach. And we're going to listen to his comments at length here, because it really speaks to the mood of the moment in Miami and also the nation. And the kind of fine line Carter was trying to walk at the time. This is a political year. One of the most difficult human problems I've ever had to face as President has been. The refugees that have come here from Cuba and from Haiti this year, sometimes a few days at an uncontrollable stream. We didn't anticipate it. Our laws were not designed to accommodate three or four thousand refugees coming here per day. Our laws were designed for people to be screened in a foreign country. Carefully cataloged and brought here a few at the time. This didn't happen. All over the world, there are refugees searching for freedom. And whenever you think back on the history of our country, you'll recognize that our nation is a nation of immigrants. We're a nation of refugees. Our houses are great country. And one of the reasons is so great is that we're different from one another. We've come here from all over the world. And this doesn't make us weak. It makes us stronger. Your community, yes, in Miami has been through tough times. I don't deny that. In our regret that you've had to suffer, perhaps, move to anyone else in this nation because of a refugee who come here to flood. We've been very first of all been trying to stop the boats going too cute, but to pick up people to come here against our laws. But once those boats were loaded, as President, I had a choice to treat them as human beings with a precious life. But I see their lives lost at sea. And I did what was right. And I'm glad the Floridians did what was right too. And in this other part of Carter's speech, you can hear some of the resentment creeping in, even from his own democratic supporters. We're trying to find our refugees a place outside of Florida. We're going to best we could. A man repeatedly yells, send them to Georgia, and it trips up the president. Money caused in selling the hostages to refugees, given what paid by the federal government. We also will help in the future. Remember, this is in the middle of the Iran hostage crisis. Florida hostage of refugees coming here. But we will minimize in the future and use a legal authority that I have, including the Navy and the Coast Guard, to be sure that the rest of the refugees that come here are coming in accordance with United States law. They are going to be some problems in the future. And as those refugees that have already come here have to be resettled, we're doing everything we can to find them a good home. Some place in the country outside of Florida, where the unemployment level is relatively good. President Carter lost his reelection in a landslide for Republican Ronald Reagan. In Florida, Carter lost a Reagan by 17 percentage points after winning the state just four years earlier. The ballot measure that would make the Dade County government English only, also won in a landslide, with 59% of voters in support. That vote is seen by historians as an opening shot in a wave of anti-immigrant laws and ballot measures that were passed across the country in the decades to come. Next time on detention by design, Ronald Reagan becomes president. And he kick starts a new tactic for slowing immigration, keeping refugees in detention indefinitely. And we have effectively lost control of our borders. And I think particularly with the Mario Bolivt and situations like that, which have brought it to the forefront, the public now thinks, and very strongly, that something has to be done about this problem. Archival clips in this episode came from CBS News, WTVJ, Radio Hady and Terror, the Central Arkansas Library system. And the Carter National Library. Detention by design is a production of WLRN news. It's edited by Alicia Zokerman. We also had editing help from Tracy Eggbush and Tim Paget. Thanks to the rest of the WLRN newsroom. Fact checking by Amy Tardiff. Jacqueline Charles is our consultant, engineering and sound design by Marit Jacob. Detention by design is reported and produced by me. Danny River. [MUSIC PLAYING]