Cheryl Little, a lawyer and executive director of the Florida Immigrant Advocacy Center, said that deportees are often mislabeled when they arrive in Haiti because authorities often look at their arrest records, which show charges but not convictions.

Many Haitians see the deportees as Americans, with their Haitian citizenship a mere technicality. By some estimates, the average deportee left Haiti before age 8 and was returned at least 20 years later. Many speak little Haitian Creole and have minimal familial, cultural, or emotional connection to the country. These differences make adapting more difficult, and worse: they make deportees quickly identifiable.

Harry Desiré, 36, called the recent inflammatory rhetoric about deportees not only misleading but also "very, very dangerous."
Desiré was deported to Haiti 12 years ago, after serving five years in New York State prisons for armed robbery. He said he once felt deportation was worse than staying in a US prison because deportees are so often targeted as scapegoats.

Desiré, who said he avoided detention when he arrived in Haiti by giving a police officer two pairs of sneakers, helped found Alternative Chance, a criminal deportee advocacy organization, in 1996. He and other deportee advocates warn of a major problem with Haiti's detention of the deportees: In the absence of friends and relatives, a deportee who might not have pursued a life of crime may have to turn to others in jail for help, thereby putting him on a criminal path.

Desiré says it's hard for deportees to grow out of their negative image.

"Everybody, once they know you're a deportee, it's like you're automatically a criminal," he said. "So you could be innocent, going to church, but if you have a neighbor that doesn't like you, he can call the cops and tell lies, and the cops will believe him. . . . You really have to believe in yourself to survive."

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