The new immigration detention system is born

From WLRN News, this is Detentioned by Design. I'm Danny Rivera. With the Cuban exodus to Florida known as the "Mario Bolt Lift" now drawn to a close, Republican Ronald Reagan was sworn in as President in January of 1981. That year, the number of Cubans coming by sea goes way down. But the number of Haitians begins to skyrocket. Haitians fleeing the Duvalier dictatorship and the paramilitary violence of the Tontoan Makuts. And in May of 1981, the Reagan administration takes away the ability of detainees to post bond in order to get out. So fundraising to get refugees out of custody is no longer an option. The detention of refugees becomes permanent. It's at this point that the federal chrome facility on the edge of the Everglades becomes not a temporary detention site, like how it was first used for Cubans, but as a place to hold Haitian refugees for long periods of time. And this is not with some kind of agreement with local governments and local jails, or sending them off to repurposed military bases. For really the first time outside the US-Mexico border, in 1981, the federal government starts using its own facilities to detain people seeking asylum. This is when the detention system morphs from being a kind of ad hoc system of short-term detention into a system of long-term indefinite detention. Haitians were virtually the only ones feeling the brunt of this new policy. This sets the stage for Haitian Americans to come into direct conflict with the federal government. And it directly impacts the immigration system we have today. The detragey became in so many forms. I built John C. Monza Fier, who came by boat in 1973, actually got a job working at chrome at this time in the early 80s. He helped the detainees with translations and worked as a paralegal, helping them get access to legal representation. And Zafir remembers that a lot of the boats that ended up coming sank, and a lot of Haitians ended up dying trying to get to Florida. I remember one of the Nailies who used to come to our meeting and they was a big accident. The bodies all over. And then we were collected by Nailies bodies like this. And our tradition when somebody died opened the coffin to see. And that nearly when they opened she was like that was her mother on the coffin. One day I was in Cove and while I was waking in immigration coast guard called to say, "Do you find another boat with nine people? That means sometimes you have three boat coming at the same different places." And you never take a break. In the film "Bitter Cain," filmmaker Kim Ives interview Zahation who was on a boat that sank, but who survived. The interview takes place in the chrome avenue facility, where the man was later held in detention. The first one came and hit the boat and knocked us all around. Then the second one hit the boat on the side so that we were halfway underwater. Those that didn't know how to swim were approaching onto one another and screaming as loud as they could. Then people began jumping out of the boat one by one. This song by Mano Charlamagne, who later became the mayor of Porto Prince, talks about the misery driving Haitians from home and how many die fleeing on rickety boats. The film here shows several drowned Haitians washed up on the sand of Hollandele Beach in Broward County. "We are going down and we are going to cry. Those of us who were still alive. We cried because we saw our sisters dead, our mothers dead, our fathers, our brothers, our children dead. Even those who had lost no relatives on the boat began crying because during the voyage, we had all become as one. After all that suffering, we finally thought it would be free. Instead, they have thrown us in prison." "We just got beaten up in prison." The accounts of the chrome facility are pretty harrowing at this point. It was originally set up as a temporary camp with tents and shacks, where people only spent a few days at most. But as a detention of Haitians dragged on for months and months, major humanitarian concerns come to the forefront. Because not only is chrome unprepared for long-term detention, it's completely overcrowded. The site was built to hold up to 600 people. But at times, it held more than 1,600 people. And just like how the federal government started shipping Cubans across the country just a year earlier, the Reagan administration decides to do the same with Haitians. Only this time is not only to military bases, but the federal prison facilities in West Virginia, Kentucky, Missouri, Pennsylvania, Texas, and New York State. And just a random historical fact here, but the person overseeing this massive transfer of Haitians was Rudolph Giuliani. Yes, that Rudy Giuliani. The future mayor of New York City, Confidant and Attorney for President Trump, that Giuliani. At the time, he was the associate attorney general of the US under Reagan. The US Navy even rushes to build a new detention center at the military base in Fort Allen, Puerto Rico. That could hold up to 2,000 people at a time. And a camp there was quickly expanded to hold 5,000 people. The construction of the main building was slapped together shockingly fast, in only 15 days. And remember, all of this is brand new, that the federal government would not only hold people seeking asylum in detention, and not only hold them in its own federal facilities, but that the federal government is actually building infrastructure specifically for this purpose. Here's journalist Kim Ives, who saw it first hand. Chrome began as a provisional camp. It was just something temporary because they thought, I mean, it's a little like the coronavirus thing today. They thought there's a temporary thing. This is something that's going to be weather for years, generations maybe. And they thought that this was just kind of a fluke wave, but they didn't realize that this was going to now be the beginning, really, of a whole architecture of stopping, housing, imprisoning, monitoring and discouraging immigrants. And the Haitians were really the first ones. I mean, it was heartbreaking, totally heartbreaking, to see these men and women we visited, the women's prison, which was I guess in Alderson, West Virginia, filled with women who'd left their families, separated from their children, who gave very moving stories. We only got a few of them in the film. You know, I mean, we have hours of footage of just totally tear jerking stories. And then the men too, where we're extremely sad in Bettercane, for instance, we went to Otisville, a lot of the shots of sort of, there's scenes from Otisville in upstate New York, which is one very, very cold place. So you can imagine Haitians coming from a Caribbean nation and being stuck in Otisville with snow joke. So I used to read about the US. I knew I have a dream of what I was thinking by heart when I was going to school in Haiti. I knew tons of songs in English, you know. So what I gave here, I blended right in. Today, Marlene Bastien is the executive director of the non-profit family action network movement in Miami. We met Bastien in earlier episodes. She was able to get a visa to come to the US from Haiti in late 1981. She came by plane. After her parents pressed her to leave, since she was becoming known as an anti-government activist under the baby doctorate. So I waived here and then two days later, my dad introduced me to the late father, Géloge Enjouche, who was the executive director of H.C. The Haitian Refugee Centre. This is my daughter. She's very smart for her to work. So two days after after I arrived and then it appeared that it was the meeting time. So I stayed in the meeting and that's how I entered the struggle. Immediately Bastien becomes an activist in the Haitian American community. And she focuses essentially all of her attention on fighting the US government and getting the Haitians out of detention in Chrome. It was like night and day because in Haiti, we had to head under the bed to read the progressive book. And here I was, it's like almost every day there was a demonstration on the street on 54th Street where the Haitian refugee center was located. And it's like I was in my plate. I could not believe it. I was energized. I was furious. I was hungry for justice. And even on Sunday, I would be, I would be going to Chrome. Steve Forster, my immediate supervisor at the time, he would knock on my door right there on 68th Street off of Biscuit and 68th Street in my duplex I was living in. We have to go. I was ready. I was ready to fight for justice. I was ready, ready, ready, because I could not be. It's like, it's like this is this is the place for me. Bastien receives training to become a paralegal. And she helps the detainees at Chrome get access to attorneys. She helps them with translations and she runs legal documents between the detention center and the different courts that were hearing asylum cases. And Bastien says the situation at Chrome was desperate. I became very popular very fast. And then when you go there, you see a lot of refugees. They would be hanging to the fence, you know. I live. I live. I live. I live. Biscuit my land. So they could see us coming out of the bus of the van because we were we have we were going there every day of the week. There was so many people to see so many people to see. Bastien says the people in the camp were super grateful for her help. But for all the ideals she learned about when she was in Haiti, about Martin Luther King, Jr. and the civil rights movement about equality across races. Bastien says her eyes were telling her a different story. All of the people held behind fences at this overpopulated camp at Chrome were Haitian and black. And in the meantime, lighter skin Cuban refugees were outside, living their lives in Miami. I was disappointed because this is supposed to be the biggest democracy in the world. We are called the champion of human rights. That's what I studied in Haiti. That's that's the ideals that I fell in love with as a youngster in Haiti. And then he like came and I was facing this overt discrimination. You know, this double treatment, double standard in treatment. I was horrified. I was horrified by the breath of the racism. That I saw at that time. I was really horrified. Bastien remembers that there was widespread discrimination against Haitians, even within the African-American community. I remember when I first came, my cousins, I lived with my cousin in Little Haiti. And then he would go to night school. He worked in construction during the day. And then some people would be throwing eggs at him at them. You know, and he came home one day with, and sometimes from our black borders and sisters, because they didn't know better, because they were hearing and reading about the old and negative comments. And falsehoods about this black masses of refugees coming to, you know, take your job away. The Haitian community was angry too. A lot of that was directed at the fact that the federal government was actively helping the baby doc regime in Haiti by sending security aid and financial assistance. And a lot of Haitians looked at this as a double betrayal. The US propped up a right-wing dictatorship. And then when people fled that dictatorship, the US refused to treat them like refugees. Instead, it had a policy of locking them up in detention centers and federal prisons, with the intention of ultimately deporting them back to the dictatorship. In 1981, the Haitian community in Miami is openly battling the US government on several fronts. Father Gerard Jean-Jouist, the director of the Haitian Refugee Center, joined street protests that took aim at the Reagan administration. The Haitians are saying, now, "Dan, we do value they have enough. They want to get out of the United States. They want to live free and enjoy the democratic principle at home. Why does the US administration have to suffer the criminal do value? That's the question I have to give." Bastian joined the street protests when she wasn't doing paralegal work. So one of the Cheval, USA, USA, stop supporting Givalier, USA, USA, stop supporting Givalier, see I, I, I, I, I, stop supporting Givalier. So that was the fight. The US really was supporting the Divalier dictatorship. Unclassified CIA files from the early 1980s show that Babydoc had a "dependence" on Washington. For its part, the CIA feared that if the Babydoc regime fell, another government that was less friendly to the US would take control of Haiti. This is what we know now after CIA files have been declassified. But at the time, it was mostly Haitians on the island and recently arrived refugees reading between the lines. In any case, the critics who argued that the US was propping up the dictatorship were vindicated in September of 1981. That's when the Reagan administration reached a deal with Babydoc. The US Coast Guard would start patrolling off the coast of Haiti and work with the Divalier regime to return the migrants back to his government. Nothing like this had ever happened before. US Coast Guard ships detained Haitians, send them back to Haiti and sink their boats. Or they go on the boat and they give them quote asylum interviews for 10 minutes on the boat or whatever it was, determined that they were ineligible and send them back. According to Attorney Ira Kursban and a slew of other immigration historians, this idea of intercepting boats that are technically in international waters and holding these asylum hearings on the high seas opened up a new chapter of immigration enforcement. Because the US border was essentially extended into No Man's land into the high seas. It's something that we still see today with Coast Guard cutters doing immigration enforcement and remote areas of the Caribbean and the Pacific Ocean. We have pre-clearance stations in Ireland and Canada and the Bahamas, which means if you want to come to the US, you're actually inspected by an immigration, US immigration officer in those countries. So that was the first effort to kind of push the borders back because if we stop someone there, they have no right to go to court and so forth, right? The second major way of doing that was interdiction. In other words, we saw people coming by boat. How do we prevent them from asserting rights in the US? Well, one of the ways we do it is by night letting them get here. Many Haitians who were first health and detention are deported back to the country during these years. And as Kursban got the federal government to admit in a lawsuit, some of them were illegally deported because the federal government did not let them have proper legal representation in their asylum hearings. So what they did is they scheduled mass hearings. That is, they would schedule 300 hearings, bring judges in, schedule them in different locations. And if you had a lawyer who was representing more than one person, it was virtually impossible to adequately represent them. Funding for detention by design was made possible by the Shepherd Broad Foundation in honor of its founder whose immigration story included detention at age 14, but also the warm embrace of the Miami community. President Reagan actually did not make many comments about immigration during the first term of his presidency, but his attorney general William French Smith did. Smith became the face of the administration for talking about what it was doing to stop the flow of immigrants coming in from the Caribbean. He had his attorney general William French Smith make a big announcement at the time, had a press conference saying, we are going to stop this. We're not like Jimmy Carter, we're not like the Democrats. We're going to stop people from coming to the US. So we're going to interdict them in the water. Whoever they are, we are going to expedite their removal if they get here. Right. And we're going to incarcerate them. In this clip from late 1981, attorney general Smith is being interviewed by William F. Buckley, who some consider to be the intellectual father of modern conservatism. Publicism. particularly conscious of just the vast numbers of people who are crossing our borders. We have laws that apply to immigration, and yet at the same time we are not in any way effectively enforcing those laws, which is a very uncomfortable thing for a great nation such as ours to be involved in. We have effectively lost control of our borders. And I think particularly with the Mario Bolivian 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. Attorney General Smith was asked about the Reagan administration's controversial deal with Babydok to intercept migrants at sea and return them to the dictatorship. The situation really, as far as this interdiction by sea, is no different from what happens on the Mexican border every day. If I find it interesting that merely because it's water instead of land, somehow the whole system is given a different flavor. That's because you drown and water, we don't drown on the head. Have you been out of one of those deserts? Well, that's the most important thing. When you tell somebody to turn around in a desert, you are at least risking his survival, at least it might be. In South Florida, public outrage at the continued detention of Haitians at Chrome and other facilities reaches a fever pitch during the 1981 holiday season. Dozens of Haitian detainees at Chrome go on hunger strike, demanding to be released. With 18 miles away, the Haitian population in Miami mobilizes, holding rallies and meetings. And Haitians in New York start to come down to help out. The fight starts to take on a new tone. Civil rights leaders come down to Miami, and the congressional black caucus in Washington starts to make noise about the situation at Chrome. The Catholic Church gets heavily involved and pleads to the Reagan administration to release the Haitians from federal detention. Today, Thomas Wensky is the archbishop of Miami. In the 1970s, he spent time in Haiti learning Creole. When he came back, he broke new ground as a priest, offering mass and Creole for the growing community across South Florida. And in 1981, he would go to Chrome several times a week to offer spiritual support for the Haitian refugees. In this clip, a TV reporter with WTVJ talks to Wensky. He said some of the refugees at Chrome asked for the last rights because they said they may die during the hunger strike. A few of the men in the camp are determined to resolve that they will fast until they are released or until they die. Wensky agrees with Cardinal McCarthy's telegram to President Reagan calling for the release of the detainees into the custody of Haitians in the community. His thoughts were somewhat bitter about the INS detention policy. Last night, another boatload of Haitians arrived at Hall over pier about 16 and all. They were taken to the Chrome Avenue camp and most likely will be in the minds of those in the churches of Little Haiti. Robock Gilmourne, Channel 4 News. Days after Christmas, hundreds of people in Miami's growing Haitian community stormed the gates of the Chrome Avenue facility, throwing bottles and stones at officers and chanting that they wanted freedom for their brothers and sisters. That you're hearing now is taped from that incident. In a heavy accent, a protester screams, "Ronald Reagan, you're supporting Duvalga." More than 100 Haitians escaped from detention in the uprising, but most were caught shortly after. These later, civil rights leader Jesse Jackson gives a speech to the refugees at Chrome and starts to organize protests across the nation to support them. Shortly after, he meets with Pope John Paul II to talk about the treatment of Haitian refugees in the United States. There was growing frustration among black communities about the different treatment Haitians were getting compared to refugees who were fleeing communism across the world. In 1975, more than 100,000 Vietnamese and Cambodian refugees were brought to the US by the military. As a Vietnam War was ending, and the Camille Rouge, the brutal communist regime, took power in Cambodia. Six years later, the federal government accepted flights with thousands of refugees from Poland, Hungary, and Romania, releasing them without detention, since they were fleeing communist persecution in Europe. And of course, there were all the Cuban refugees who came on the burial boat lift in 1980, most of whom were almost immediately released. It's at this time that despite widespread discrimination against Haitians, even inside the black community, African Americans really start to see themselves in Haitian refugees. Archbishop Thomas Wensky in a recent interview. Because the African American community saw that the Cubans were getting kind of a favored immigration status, and the Haitians were not. The African American community interpreted that as being that being because of their race or the color of their skin. The Cubans are saying, "No, we're a real political refugees," and the Haitians are only economic refugees. No matter, in fact, both groups, the Cubans and the Haitians, who were coming from countries that had bad economies, Cuba is a poor country. I was Haiti is a poor country, but both are poor countries. And both have lousy governments. One had a government from the right, the other one had a government from the left, but the reason why the economies of both countries don't work was because of its four governance. There was a right-wing government or left-wing government that poor governments sank the economies of both countries, and so both groups of people were coming here basically for the same reasons. All of this was happening in the context of the Cold War between the US and the Soviet Union. When the US propped up military dictatorships like those in Chile, Brazil, Uruguay, and Argentina, and the Marcos dictatorship in the Philippines. Because those governments align themselves with the US against communism. Seems that the rationale or the mindset in the United States is that anybody who's fleeing a left-wing government or a communist government or a socialist, socialist government is a refugee. Gypsy Metallus is the executive director of Haitian Neighborhood Center, Sant Lop, and she says this kind of cold political calculation forced the federal government to look away from inconvenient realities when they sprung up at home inside the US. And in fact, anyone else who's fleeing terrible conditions is not to be considered a refugee. It's to be considered an economic refugee. To create this dichotomy is really a false dichotomy. It's a false choice. You can't have a political refugee without an economic refugee. It's the conditions are the same. The circumstances that create the refugee, we acquire that the political climate feeds or supports the economic climate. So to separate them is a fool, Zaren. As a bell-johnsy month that fear saw it after fleeing Haiti by boat. Our presence is in embarrassment for the American foreign policy, either democrat or republican. The American government miswared the message with what? To Miami. The message with what Haiti is mismanaged is a corrupted government and new foreign policy ought to stop supporting those people to have a better Haiti. You don't also come to Miami, change your foreign policy. A series of lawsuits is filed against the federal government in the early 1980s, pushing the US to end these new immigration detention policies that were just beginning to crystallize. For some time it seemed that the only group bearing the burden of this new reality was Haitians. I recurse, Ben spearheaded several lawsuits at the time. And one of those cases, Lewis versus Nelson, really cuts to the heart of the issue of how immigration's attention was playing out. Kursban argued that the federal government was discriminating against Haitians. As our statistician said on the witness stand, the chances of only Haitians being detained and everybody else being released was the equivalent of flipping a coin and having it come out heads one billion times in a row. And so what really happened is they announced this policy saying we're tough on immigration, but only applied to Haitians. In a 1980 court decision, in a case about deportations, a federal court in Miami can that the federal government had a "transparentally discriminatory program" designed to deport Haitian nationals and no one else. And on the heels of that case, in a separate decision in 1982, focused on immigration detention, a federal court concludes that yes, almost every person in immigration detention was Haitian. But at the same time, the court finds that this does not amount to the legal definition of discrimination. But the court does find, though, was that there was, quote, "a statistically significant relationship between being detained and being Haitian." The decision reads, "The only conclusion that can be drawn from this evidence is that Haitians are being impacted by the detention policy to a greater degree than aliens of any other nationality at the present time." So it was not technically discrimination. Haitians were being impacted far more than any other group. And how does a Reagan administration respond? They took the position that they weren't discriminating solely against Haitians, and from now on, they would just apply it across the board. In response to a federal court, acknowledging that the immigration detention policy is disproportionately applied to Haitians, the Reagan administration makes a strange move. Instead of treating Haitians like everyone else, it would now treat everyone else like Haitians. And from there on, the policy would be that virtually anyone who comes to the US seeking political asylum would first likely sit in immigration detention. Brianna Noful studies the history of immigration detention at the College of William and Mary. The court doesn't say it's illegal to detain asylum seekers. It doesn't say you've got to fundamentally rethink your philosophy on immigration detention. It pretty much just says you've got to write down the rules. And so in a way, it just moves immigration detention from being this almost semi-spontaneous executive policy to just being one more solid legal grounding. And what you see over the next years, the sense that Mila publishes this really great map in 1983, where somehow they figure out the nationalities of everyone being held in Chrome. And it really has diversified classical liberal progress, right? Like a diverse community of people who's being detained now. But most notably, like Salvadorans and Nicaraguan are being detained, but also people from China and India. And Haitians are still far in a way, the largest group at Chrome. But yeah, it's interesting. Like in a sense, like to avoid accusations of discrimination against Haitians. And obviously, these come with a lot of political baggage because this is the first group of the first notably, like, a significant group of black asylum seekers. And a lot of black community groups are worried, a commercial black caucus is paying a lot of attention to this. So kind of on a way to almost make the optics less damning. They start detaining different groups of people alongside Haitians. The Reagan administrations across the board policy of incarcerating asylum seekers led to the creation of a national detention center network that has a widespread impact on a lot of things we still hear about and talk about today. Today, immigration detention centers can be found in almost every corner of the country, a system that's grown under both Republican and Democratic leadership. Today, there are more than 130 facilities across the country that make up this federal network, with many of them privately owned and operated. Dozens of other facilities like Jail's hold immigrants and detention to, and this national network started under the Reagan administration. They say we're going to put it in rural community. We're going to put it in a community that is really desperate for the money, desperate for the jobs where hosting an immigration detention center is not going to run into like the NIMBs. It's going to be eagerly welcomed and anticipated. And we're going to put it in a community where there's not a lot of lower immigration lawyers than central Louisiana. So if your goal is to remove people as quickly as possible, putting them in these rural spaces seems like a pretty good deal. A lot of these communities in the 90s that really heavily pivot into immigration detention day, when there's a threat of an immigration bill that will minimize detention or that will take detainees away, town leaders are very easily able to say, you know, this is going to impact your taxes if we lose these federal detainees. It kind of makes immigration, which is a federal issue and it's a national issue. It makes it feel very personal and like it has material impacts on lives of people in these communities that are not like Miami, that are typically kind of off the beaten path of where we think of immigrants going or being. Starting in 2009, the federal government required at least 30,000 beds at immigration detention facilities to be available every single day. And in 2019, for example, the number of immigrants held across the country averaged more than 50,000 people per day. All of this started with Cubans and Haitians in Florida in the 1970s and 1980s. But it is specially started with the Haitians. Journalists Kim Ives. You know, Haiti has always been, I feel, I say this often when I speak, some sort of not only trailblazing country, the first slave and last slave revolution, the first independent nation of Latin America, but it's also been a laboratory. It's where when the U.S. Marines invaded in 1915, they experimented with aerial bombing, with strategic hamlets, with all kinds of anti-Garilla warfare that later came into play in Vietnam. It was all tried and tested in Haiti first. And to meet some extent, the same is true with the refugee wave of the 70s and 80s. This was the first test, the first, this where the blueprints came into being. President Reagan took the beginning of what was happening under President Carter and turned those blueprints into a national immigration detention policy and a detention center network. This earns him particular eye from a lot of immigration activists. But on another front, Reagan took actions that helped immigrants. We got a sense of his nuanced position on immigration during his election campaign back in 1980. Like he was asked about immigration policy at a primary debate between himself and future Republican president, George H. W. Bush. He's talking mostly about Mexico here, but also a bit about Cuban migration. I think the time has come that the United States and our neighbors, particularly our neighbor to the South, should have a better understanding and a better relationship than we've ever had. And I think that we haven't been sensitive enough to our size and our power. They have a problem of 40 to 50 percent unemployment. Now this cannot continue without the possibility of rising with regard to that other country that we talked about, of Cuba and what it is stirring up, of the possibility of trouble below the border and we could have a very hostile and strange neighbor on our border. Rather than making them, or talking about putting up a fence, why don't we work out some recognition of our mutual problems, make it possible for them to come here legally with a work permit, and then while they're working and earning here, they pay taxes here. And when they go on to go back, they can go back and they can cross and open the border both ways by understanding their problems. This is the only safety valve right now they have with that unemployment that probably keeps the lid from blowing off down there. Even though President Reagan didn't speak publicly about immigration too often in his first term, behind the scenes in his administration called for Congress to pass an immigration reform bill. But only after winning reelection that Reagan actually get Congress to do it. The House of Representatives was controlled by Democrats and the Senate was controlled by Republicans. And the compromise bill they agreed to pass in 1986 was one that would give Amnesty to nearly three million people who did not have full legal status in the U.S., including many who were initially placed in detention when they first arrived. These are President Reagan's remarks as he signed that bill into law on November 6, 1986. This bill, the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 that I'll sign in a few minutes, is the most comprehensive reform of our immigration laws since 1952. It's the product of one of the longest and most difficult legislative undertakings in the last three congresses. Further, it's an excellent example of a truly successful bipartisan effort. The administration and the allies of immigration reform on both sides of the capital and both sides of the aisle worked together to accomplish these critically important reforms to control illegal immigration. In 1981, this administration asked the Congress to pass a comprehensive legislative package, including employer sanctions, other measures to increase enforcement of these immigration laws and legalization. The act provides these three essential components. Distance has not discouraged illegal immigration to the United States from all around the globe. The problem of illegal immigration should not, therefore, be seen as a problem between the United States and its neighbors. Our objective is only to establish a reasonable, fair, orderly and secure system of immigration into this country and not to discriminate in any way against particular nations or people. Future generations of Americans will be thankful for our efforts to humanely regain control of our borders and thereby preserve the value of one of the most sacred possessions of our people, American citizenship. So now I'll get on with the signing and make this into law. Hope nothing happens to me between here and there. This new law put tens of thousands of Haitians in Florida and elsewhere who were stuck in immigration limbo on the path to full citizenship. It would be the most significant immigration bill to be signed into law in an entire generation. Earlier that same year, 1986, a popular uprising in Haiti led to the fall of the Jean-Claude Babydoc Duvalier dictatorship and his family dynasty. Babydoc fled the country to France aboard a U.S. Air Force plane provided by the Reagan Administration. Next time, on the final episode of Detention by Design, we fast forward today and look at where the policy of immigration detention stands in the 2020s. It's all about money. Archival clips in this episode come from WTVJ, the Public Broadcasting Service or PPS, and the Reagan National Library. Detention by Design is a production of WLRN news. It's edited by Alicia Zokerman. We also had editing help from Tracy Eggbus 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 Rivera. [Music]