Endless Retribution
Phillips, Maxine
Dissent Spring 2010:Dissent, rev.qxd 3/4/2010 11:08 AM Page 116 THE LAST PAGE Richard Nixon showed that there really are second (and third) acts in American life, but Congress didn’t get...
...Then, as swiftly and inexplicably as he had been taken, Jean was bundled into a van, driven from Pennsylvania, and deposited coatless and penniless in the January cold in front of the Manhattan detention center He borrowed a cell phone from a passerby to call his wife...
...On December 30, 2009, at a routine checkin at the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) office, Jean was led away in handcuffs and shunted to a private prison in Pennsylvania, ready for deportation and certain imprisonment in Haiti...
...and become the father of U.S.citizen children...
...ICE didn’t budge...
...The biblical resonance with Paul and Silas or the slaughter of the innocents haunted us...
...The United States not only has the highest incarceration rate in the world, it has one of the highest recidivism rates...
...Prison saved my life,” says Montrevil, who believes he would have died in the drug trade had he not gone to jail...
...Then he headed north to the church, ready for a second act that may or may not be possible...
...In May of 2008 the governor of New York pardoned a hiphop artist who had served six years for attempted murder and was in danger of deportation to the United Kingdom...
...Unfortunately, the law gives the court no discretion to consider whether the person is a threat or benefit to society...
...I met Jean one Sunday when he sought help from my church, which belongs to the New Sanctuary Movement, a loose federation of faith communities that champion individual cases to bring the larger issues of immigration reform to an increasingly fearful public...
...MAXINE PHILLIPS 116 DISSENT SPRING 2010...
...A Haitian citizen who came to the United States legally at age seventeen, Montrevil had a green card when he was arrested on drug charges in 1988 at age nineteen...
...I could be a widow today,” Janay Montrevil told a vigil group a few days after the earthquake, and “I feel sorry that people [had] to die in order for him to be able to have a chance to leave [detention...
...Jean’s lawyer filed a habeas corpus motion that he expected to take three months...
...But a law passed after he went to prison requires that noncitizens convicted of felonies be returned to their country of origin after completing their sentence...
...Some prisoners escaped, others didn’t...
...Why shouldn’t the slate be wiped clean...
...We had to vote on taking on his cause, and as one member muttered, a large black man with a felony conviction was sure no Rosa Parks...
...But the lessons of high school civics classes had stayed with us...
...He’d “paid his debt to society...
...He’s been fighting the extradition for fifteen years, during which time he has run one business, sold it, and started another...
...The jail in which Jean would have been held in PortauPrince split open...
...Then came the earthquake...
...married an American citizen...
...We wrote letters, signed online petitions, organized rallies, blocked the street leading into the Manhattan detention center, visited politicians...
...Dissent Spring 2010:Dissent, rev.qxd 3/4/2010 11:08 AM Page 116 THE LAST PAGE Richard Nixon showed that there really are second (and third) acts in American life, but Congress didn’t get the memo, and so Jean Montrevil may be denied his own American Dream...
...He served eleven years of a thirtythreeyear sentence and was released early for good behavior...
...Why, indeed...
...And automatic deportation of exfelons who are legal residents gives the lie to one of America’s most enduring myths, that of the fresh start, the new frontier, the reinvention of self...
...But the jailers didn’t free Haitians held in detention centers around the country...
...Well, we can’t let everyone in,” one of my friends said...
...I thought of convicted felons like Michael Milken, Chuck Colson, Martha Stewart...
...There have to be some lines...
...How rich, white, or well connected do you have to be for redemption to trump retribution...
...Deportations to Haiti ceased...
...Either they don’t teach it in school anymore or there’s a collective amnesia when it comes to people who arrived later than our own forebears...
...Jean beat the odds, but the system wouldn’t let him go...
Vol. 57 • March 2010 • No. 2
