In the early 1980’s, the Miami-based Haitian Refugee Center filed a class action lawsuit seeking the release of 2,100 refugees fleeing persecution in Haiti, who had been captured at sea by the U.S. military and imprisoned in horrendous conditions at U.S. "detention centers." The case came to trial in April 1982. Arguing the Reagan administration’s position in federal court as well as in the media against releasing the refugees was the Associate Attorney General of the United States at the time, Rudolph Giuliani.

Many of the refugees had been tortured under Duvalier and were fleecing for their lives. But Giuliani argued that they be sent back – "repatriated," he termed it – a squeaky clean word, assiduously scrubbed so that no blood leaks. Just two weeks earlier, Giuliani noted, he had personally met face-to-face with Baby Doc Duvalier to check out the situation. The dictator had "personally assured" him, he said, that political repression "simply does not exist" and that Haitians returned by the United States were not being persecuted. Giuliani cited Duvalier’s personal assurance as proof that "political repression is not the major reason for leaving Haiti." (New York Times, April 3, 1982)

Eight years earlier James Simms, head of the Haiti desk at the Department of State, had cited this same script word-for-word to justify U.S. policy at that time. Giuliani had memorized his lines well.

According to attorney Arthur Helton, the Director of Immigrant Programs at the Open Society Institute in New York, Giuliani was ""he key implementer and an ardent defender of the policy to return the refugees to Haiti." As Helton explains, "It is extremely unusual for such a high-ranking official as Giuliani, who was the top Justice Department official with a special brief on immigration issues at that time, to personally argue such a case before the 11^th Circuit Court."

Giuliani dismissed those reports and ignored the lawsuit. In court, in the media, and in testimony before Congress Giuliani insisted that there was no persecution in Haiti and all was fine and proper there.

Giuliani also failed to apprise the Department of Justice of his friend Duvalier’s pimping of Haitian slaves to sugar magnates in the Dominican Republic – a slave trade that Giuliani’s beloved "interdiction" policy – another squeaky clean word – had the effect of enforcing, because it prevented slaves from escaping by sea.

After all, Duvalier had "personally assured" him that nothing was going on. Clearly, Giuliani latched onto the Haitian dictator’s "personal assurance" to paper over the atrocities of the policy he was already espousing, just as he is doing today.

As Giuliani later philosophized, "Freedom is not a concept in which people can do anything they want, be anything they can be. Freedom is about authority. Freedom is about the willingness of every single human being to cede to lawful authority a great deal of discretion about what you do." (New York Times, March 17, 1994). In Haiti, Duvalier was that authority upon whom Giuliani had stamped his seal of approval. For Haitians to flee and to fight for their freedom – then as well as now- was an act that flew in the face of the authority Giuliani believed in and was paid to uphold.

The Haitians, with a strong sense of history, likened their plight to that of the Jews fleeing Nazi Germany in the late 1930s. But Giuliani would have none of that. In September 1982 and on many occasions thereafter, Giuliani trudged back to federal court to fight against Federal District Judge Eugene Spellman’s order releasing 1,800 Haitian refugees. Even after losing that round in court, Giuliani continued his fanatical fight to send the refugees back, many to their deaths, just as in 1939 the U.S. Government had turned back the SS St. Louis, with 930 Jewish refugees aboard, who were fleeing Nazi Germany and attempting to enter the United States.

Giuliani’s attitude against immigrants from Haiti was very much on display last year during the NYPD’s torture of Haitian immigrant Abner Louima. It was again on display in the Mayor’s sarcastic dismissal of Amnesty International’s recent report concerning rampant police brutality in New York City, particularly against immigrants and people of color, as well as poor and working class whites. And now, again, we see the Mayor’s vicious and authoritarian disposition towards our communities in his defense of the police who murdered Amadou Diallo, an immigrant from Guinea.

What is the one thing Giuliani says he learned from the Diallo murder? If NY police were allowed to use hollow-point bullets, poor Amadou would have died immediately and rendered unnecessary the remaining 39 gunshots.