| THEY DID THEIR TIME, NOW LET THEM GO |
| Written by Maria Elena Salinas |
| Tuesday, February 08 2005 |
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| In the 1983 movie "Scarface," Al Pacino plays a cocaine-crazed, machine-gun-toting Cuban-refugee criminal who chases the American Dream by using foul language and pumping his enemies full of bullets. Pacino's character, Tony Montana, fights his way from a Miami refugee camp to head a multimillion-dollar drug empire. But in the end, he falls in a hail of gunfire.
Two decades later, "Scarface" still has almost cult proportions. In fact, many young people who weren't even born or who were in diapers when the film was released consider it one of their all-time favorites. I agree that Pacino did an outstanding acting job, and the movie is one of the all-time great gangster flicks, but "Scarface" also did a great disservice to thousands of law-abiding Cuban refugees who came to the United States in the 1980 Mariel Boatlift.
Last month, the U.S. Supreme Court took a big step toward rectifying the negative image that has tarnished thousands of Cubans who came to this country during the boatlift. The court struck down one of the last measures used by the federal government to indefinitely detain illegal-immigrant felons who are still in prison even after serving their sentences. Almost a thousand Cuban refugees fall under that category. The 7-2 ruling, written by Justice Antonin Scalia, means the detainees must be given their freedom.
This year will mark the 25th anniversary of the Mariel Boatlift. The exodus from the Cuban port of Mariel brought 125,000 Cubans to the United States. The vast majority turned out to be honest, law-abiding citizens. I know many of them, and they are the embodiment of the ambitious, hardworking immigrant whose only hope is to make a better life in America. But the fact is, there were some criminals among the thousands who came.
For the past 25 years, the federal government has struggled to find a coherent policy to deal with Mariel's criminal refugees. The government of Fidel Castro, which loaded up the undesirables on boats carrying families and other legitimate refugees seeking freedom, refused to take the detainees back. By the mid-1980s, an estimated 7,000 Marielito criminals ended up in prisons across the United States after committing crimes. When the Reagan administration reached a deal with Cuba to have the detainees returned to the island, riots broke out at two federal detention centers. It seemed they'd rather be in jail than go back to their communist homeland.
The United States eventually set up a process to screen the detainees, and thousands were given their freedom. But to this date, about 1,000 remain in legal limbo. They have served their prison terms but are still in detention because Cuba will not accept them. In addition, the federal government retained the right to indefinitely detain any Mariel refugee who was not a U.S. citizen or legal resident if the person had ever committed a crime in the United States.
The Supreme Court rightly put an end to the government's contention that the refugees technically never entered the United States and were therefore "excludable." In other words, the government argued that in the eyes of the law, the detainees were not really here. It was an absurd argument that might have postponed having to release potentially dangerous people, but there must be a limit to how long someone can be held in detention. It cannot go on indefinitely.
You always wonder, when you put criminals back on the streets after they've served their time, if they have really reformed themselves and have stopped being a threat to society. But that's the way our legal system operates, and the Mariel felons who have served their sentences deserve a chance to return to society. Twenty-five years after they arrived on U.S. shores, it is time to put aside the Tony Montana stereotypes that have tarnished all Mariel refugees. |
