So why resume -- and quadruple -- the deportations? The US ambassador to Haiti, Janet Sanderson, told the Globe in December that there was a backlog of 450 Haitians in US jails who had served their time and could not be released onto American soil. She asserted that Haiti was a more stable place than it was a year ago.

The United States provided a $1 million grant for the International Organization for Migration and the Haitian government to provide services to deportees, including setting up a type of halfway-house program, to help them adjust to life in Haiti.
Despite such assistance, deportees are stigmatized as dangerous criminals. Although all of those convicted of a crime served their time in the United States, Haitian authorities continue to throw deportees deemed dangerous into prison and all others into police station holding cells upon arrival.

Government officials call the detentions a kind of "security quarantine" and say it is important for public safety. Some say this even while acknowledging that it violates the country's law against double jeopardy, and even as US officials urge the Haitian government to stop jailing deportees.

By the end of 2006, kidnapping and other violence in the already strife-ridden capital were soaring. In separate incidents in November and December, a senator and a former finance minister were kidnapped, a school bus was hijacked and the children on board abducted, and a 6-year-old boy and 20-year-old woman were kidnapped and killed. When the government came under attack from opposition political leaders and citizen protesters for failing to stop the terror, it had a new target for blame.

Prime Minister Jacques-Edouard Alexis told Parliament that he opposed the increase in deportations because, he said, deportees from the United States are significant contributors to Haiti's crime problem. And he announced that deportees were suspected in the high-profile murder of the 20-year-old student.

Foreign Minister Jean Raynald Clérismé, echoed Alexis's words. "These notorious criminals, were they not trained in the US?" he rhetorically asked Parliament.

But some Haitians condemn the anti deportee rhetoric, calling it baseless and harmful.

"We've been asking the Haitian government for the statistics" to back up allegations that the deportees are contributing to rising crime, said Pierre Esperance, who heads the National Human Rights Defense Network, based in Port-au-Prince. "No one has the statistics. . . . The Haitian government has created a drama out of the issue of deportees."

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