Posted on 01/09/2006 7:01:45 PM PST by HighWheeler
MIAMI -- Fifteen Cubans who fled their homeland and landed on an abandoned bridge in the Florida Keys were returned to Cuba Monday after U.S. officials concluded that the piling did not constitute dry land, authorities said.
Under the U.S. government's "wet-foot, dry-foot" policy, Cubans who reach dry land in the United States are usually allowed to remain in the country, while those caught at sea are sent back.
Earlier Monday, officials said the Cubans were aboard a U.S. Coast Guard cutter, as they awaited a final decision as to their status.
The historic Old Seven Mile Bridge, which runs side by side with a newer bridge, is missing several chunks, and the Cubans had the misfortune of reaching pilings from a section that no longer touches land.
The federal government said that means the group never actually reached U.S. territory and could be sent home.
"The `bridge' is kind of a misnomer," said Coast Guard Lt. Commander Chris O'Neil, spokesman for the department's Southeast region. He said officials in Washington determined the Cubans should be considered "feet wet," because they were not able to walk to land from where they landed.
Veteran immigration attorney Ira Kurzban, who is not involved in the case, called the Coast Guard's decision ridiculous.
"The wet-foot, dry-foot policy has no foundation in law," he said. Kurzban said the policy is inconsistent with U.S. and international law, noting that the federal government's jurisdiction extends beyond dry land to waters as far out as 100 miles.
"International law says that refugees should be granted a hearing before they are forcibly returned," he said.
An attorney representing relatives of the Cubans had filed an emergency request Monday to prevent them from being sent back. William Sanchez asked the government to review the question of whether the bridge constitutes dry land.
The Cubans, including, a 2-year-old boy and a 13-year-old boy, left Matanzas Province in Cuba late on the night of Jan. 2 aboard a small, homemade boat. They were rescued by the Coast Guard from the base of the bridge just south of Marathon Key.
Mercedes Hernandez Guerrero said her niece Elizabeth Hernandez, who came on the boat with her husband Junior Blanco and their 2-year-old son John Michael, called her on a cell phone Wednesday morning from the abandoned bridge.
"She said 'Aunt, we are on a piling, and the boat is sinking," Hernandez recalled. "I said stay there. The currents are strong. I thought I was giving them good advice."
Hernandez said she quickly called her family in Cuba to tell them but became worried as the days passed and she heard nothing more from her niece.
The group was returned along with 52 other Cubans whose vessels had been picked up off the Florida coast.
At least a dozen Cuban-Americans protested the decision Monday outside the Coast Guard headquarters in Miami Beach. Ramon Saul Sanchez, head of the Democracy Movement, a Cuban-American advocacy group, said he began a hunger strike on Saturday to protest the federal government's treatment of the group.
"They are trying to go as far as they can ... to take away the immigrants' rights," he said.
Sanchez said he was particularly concerned about the Coast Guard's failure to allow those picked up at sea to contact their families while they are being held on the agency's boats.
"Families can wait days without information," he said. "People on both sides of the ocean think their family members have died."
"Apart from being illegal, it's a disgrace and a great insensitivity to a community that for three days has been asking that they not be repatriated," Sanchez said.
He said his hunger strike will not end until President Bush agrees to hear from leaders of the Cuban exile community about what he called "the arbitrary manner in which the wet-foot, dry-foot policy is being implemented."
Imagine that! The land of the Statue of Liberty, sending people back to a Communist country that they escaped from seeking liberty.
Looks to me like we have a policy of letting Mexicans in, but not Cubans.
Believe the bent one started this.
We should all go out and protest Clinton and Reno's vile decision to send these people back to imprisonment and torture.
Oh, wait, that's right, Bush is President. Maybe it's time he took control of the Executive branch and changed this policy.
You might want to read this!
I've spoken of the shining city all my political life, but I don't know if I ever quite communicated what I saw when I said it. But in my mind it was a tall proud city built on rocks stronger than oceans, wind-swept, God-blessed, and teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace, a city with free ports that hummed with commerce and creativity, and if there had to be city walls, the walls had doors and the doors were open to anyone with the will and the heart to get here. That's how I saw it, and see it still.
And how stand the city on this winter night? More prosperous, more secure, and happier than it was eight years ago. But more than that; after two hundred years, two centuries, she still stands strong and true on the granite ridge, and her glow has held steady no matter what storm. And she's still a beacon, still a magnet for all who must have freedom, for all the pilgrims from all the lost places who are hurtling through the darkness, toward home.
- Ronald Regean
Shame on our Federal Government.
Cubans vote for Republicans....
"Cubans vote for Republicans...."
of course they do.......they heard the Dem liberal schpiel when Castro was a newby to politics, and have had the totalitarian Democrat lifestyle for nearly 50 years now.
This is crap . 4,000 people a day come in from Mexico and we turn around 15 Cubans who didnt get to the beach.
Shameful to send these people back....
how about we keep the 52 cubans and send back 52,000 mexicans
That kid reached dry land and they still sent him back.
This is really awierd story, but they could have been terrorists, I suppose. I guess we could have arrested them. Why are things so darn complicated. Sheesh, we are in a war, people. Calm down.
Under the U.S. government's "wet-foot, dry-foot" policy, Cubans who reach dry land in the United States are usually allowed to remain in the country, while those caught at sea are sent back.
----WTH is going on? It is getting really lame.
The ones we return should go to Parris Island for a few weeks and be sent back with full military equipment.
I don't know why we didn't overthrow Castro during the (last) Russian revolution.
But are these Cuban refugees willing to do jobs Americans won't? /sarcasm off
I think Cuban refugees should import American soil, put in 4" by 10" inch wooden boxes and strap the boxes to their feet.
But that' just my opinion.
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