Haitians

In an attempt to ensure the flow of remittances to devastated Haiti, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano announced Friday that the Obama administration would temporarily grant legal status to the tens of thousands of Haitian immigrants who were living in the United States illegally before this week's earthquake. But Napolitano emphasized that Haitians living in the island nation would not be eligible for temporary protected status, and would be repatriated if they attempted to enter the country, an implicit acknowledgment of the fear, thus far unrealized, that the earthquake could trigger a mass migration of Haitians to U.S. shores.

USC safety T.J. McDonald remembers the scrapbook. He saw it at quarterback Matt Barkley's home, a collection of photographs from the Barkley family's trip to Nigeria a few years ago, a journey that included humanitarian work. "I told him I would be interested in going on the next trip when they did something like that," McDonald said Tuesday. McDonald will get his wish next month. Barkley, McDonald and 13 other Trojans are scheduled to travel to Haiti, which continues to rebuild from the devastating 2010 earthquake.

In January, President Obama pledged not to forsake or forget Haiti during what promised to be a long and painful recovery from the worst earthquake to hit the island nation in 200 years. To that end, the administration immediately sent military assistance and millions of dollars in emergency aid. But it has yet to take another crucial step: expediting the immigration to the United States of the 55,000 Haitians who already have been approved for visas by the Department of Homeland Security.

Two years after a deadly earthquake knocked Haiti to its knees, signs of progress can be hard to come by. More than half a million homeless still live in squalid camps rife with violence. The cholera epidemic that ravaged the country after the disaster continues to kill. And despite the best efforts of the newly elected government, only half the rubble choking the once-teeming streets of Port-au-Prince has been cleared. Yet amid the mind-numbing devastation, Patrice Dumont finds hope in the simple act of a young boy kicking a ball.

The day after an earthquake plunged Haiti into ruin and despair, the Obama administration suspended the deportation of Haitian illegal immigrants. This was sensible as well as compassionate, as Haiti obviously is in no position to repatriate 100,000 returning migrants. But halting deportations is not enough, so we applaud the administration's decision Friday to grant temporary protected status to Haitians. Doing so will permit them to stay and work in the U.S. for a limited period of 12 to 18 months.

The unfinished wooden boat rocks gently in the backwater of Cap-Haitien Bay, lulling 17-year-old Douna Marcellus and two dozen others to sleep as tight balls of mosquitoes hover overhead. Cicadas serenade them from the reeds on one bank and, on the other, black pigs root through smoldering trash. Like the others in the boat, Douna is a refugee from Port-au-Prince and the unspeakable horrors of the earthquake and its aftermath. Her parents and sister were crushed in their home, just seconds after Douna walked out the front door to run an errand for her mother.

In a sweltering annex behind the General Hospital, inner demons stalk in plain view. In one cramped room, a 58-year-old woman rocks rhythmically on a folding chair and recites Psalms one after another, her mouth curled up in a faraway smile. In another, a young man describes how his heart takes off without warning, thumping like a runaway train the way it did that terrible afternoon. Not all the hurts from Haiti's earthquake can be seen. The Jan. 12 temblor, which the government estimates killed 300,000 people, also exacted a toll on the psyche of survivors.

As a result of the chaos and death caused by the earthquake in Haiti, U.S. immigration officials have decided to temporarily suspend the deportation of Haitians, the Department of Homeland Security said Wednesday. The decision to suspend flights carrying deportees back to Haiti has ramifications for thousands of Haitian illegal immigrants in the United States, officials said. "Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Assistant Secretary John Morton today halted all removals to Haiti for the time being in response to the devastation caused by yesterday's earthquake," DHS spokesman Matt Chandler said.

President Obama promised swift delivery of rescue assistance and humanitarian aid to the island nation of Haiti this morning in the wake of a devastating earthquake there that has left hundreds dead and many more missing. Haitians will have the "full support" of the U.S. as they work to rescue those trapped and to gather food, water and medicine in the crucial early hours of the recovery, the president said. "This is a time when we are reminded of the common humanity we all share," Obama told reporters in the White House Diplomatic Reception Room.

President Clinton is expected to sign an order lifting strict deportation rules covering thousands of Haitians who fled the military regime that was later ousted by an American-led peacekeeping force. A senior administration official said 15,000 to 20,000 Haitians would be covered by the president's action. The new law requires an immigrant to have lived in the United States for 10 years and to show good moral character.

The Obama administration this week extended what's known as "temporary protected status" for Haitians living in the United States. The decision means an estimated 58,000 undocumented Haitians can remain here for an additional 18 months while their homeland struggles to rebuild from a deadly 2010 earthquake. Temporary protected status was designed to provide a haven for foreigners in the United States who are unable to return safely to their home countries because of an armed conflict, an environmental disaster or some other extraordinary but temporary situation.

Dumped in a squalid holding cell and then shunned by a society he doesn't know, Patrick Escarment struggles to learn Creole and build a life in earthquake-devastated Haiti. His arrival here this year was not voluntary. Escarment was in the first group of Haitians with criminal records to be deported from the United States to Haiti after a one-year moratorium. After the Jan. 12, 2010, earthquake that destroyed most of this capital and killed more than 300,000 people, the Obama administration suspended deportations.

She can climb stairs and hike blocks to a bus stop. The beat-up wheelchair is gone. Sounlove Zamor, who lost both legs below the knee in Haiti's earthquake, is walking again. The young woman, who had been caught in a collapsed house, was fitted with prosthetic legs in Israel after benefactors read about her in The Times. Now she's back in Haiti and walking on new legs, as called for in the script. But in Haiti, endings are seldom TV tidy. For Zamor, now 20, home has meant heartache.

Halya Lagunesse thought she knew despair. Nearly seven years ago, the soldiers who had killed her husband gang-raped the Haitian woman and her daughter Joann, who was 17 at the time. But that pain pales in comparison to the torment of learning last March that her 5-year-old granddaughter had been raped. The attacker gave the child about 50 cents to go and buy rice. On her way back, he intercepted her and dragged her into a cemetery. "How did that happen? How did that happen?"

Jean-Claude Duvalier's unexpected return to Haiti after 25 years has awakened the ghosts of his repressive rule. In the days since the former dictator known as Baby Doc landed here Jan. 16, Haitians have been debating his rule and reliving long-ago memories of death and survival. Suddenly, the brutal Duvalier era ? including the reign of his father, Francois, or "Papa Doc" ? has cast a pall over this land as if exhumed from a weed-covered grave. Alix Fils-Aime is one of the survivors who have been recounting Duvalier-era experiences around dinner tables, in the news media and in the courts.

Former dictator Jean-Claude Duvalier broke his silence Friday, five days after arriving unexpectedly in his Caribbean birthplace, expressing condolences for the victims of last year's earthquake and a wish to participate in the struggle for the country's reconstruction. The aging and frail former "president for life," known as "Baby Doc," read softly from a prepared statement. He glanced periodically at the crowd of journalists packed into the entryway of the luxurious guesthouse he now inhabits in the hills of Port-au-Prince.

The Coast Guard on Monday picked up 15 shipwrecked Haitians from barren Flamingo Cay in the Bahamas and brought them to Florida for medical treatment, officials said. "Some were pregnant women, some had ulcers and some had bad cuts," said Coast Guard spokesman Joe Gibson. The Haitians were believed to have been trying to enter the United States illegally when they became stranded.

His victims remember Baby Doc Duvalier. The long periods in hiding, friends who simply vanished, activists who went into the Fort Dimanche prison never to emerge, or to emerge as broken human beings. In Duvalier's 15 years in power and during the regime of his father before him, as many as 30,000 Haitian civilians are believed to have been killed, countless others tortured, and hundreds of thousands forced into exile, human rights groups say. And the younger Duvalier is suspected of stealing up to $300 million from the Western Hemisphere's poorest nation.

Haiti Noir Edited by Edwidge Danticat Akashic Books: 309 pp., $24.95 hardcover, $15.95 paper If criminality is universal, crime is local. That's what the successful noir anthology series by Akashic Books has shown: Starting with "Brooklyn Noir" in 2004, the small independent has published dozens of city-focused noir collections ? from Los Angeles to Istanbul ? celebrating crime, criminals and the people who write about them so well. The latest comes with a literary pedigree: "Haiti Noir" is edited by Edwidge Danticat, a much-lauded young Haitian American writer who has received a National Book Critics Circle Award and a MacArthur "genius grant" fellowship.