Jean-Baptiste was charged, tried, and convicted after he had become a U.S. citizen for a crime allegedly committed while his application for citizenship was pending. The Miami court ruled that his conviction reveals that he was not in fact of “good moral character” during the period of time his application was pending, as the law requires. The court ruled “Jean-Baptiste must be denaturalized for illegally procuring his citizenship in the face of commission during the statutory period of acts sufficient to negate and belie a showing of good moral character.”

His attorney, Andre Pierre, argued that the standard of “good moral character” is poorly defined, and that the law does not say that committing a crime prior to naturalization is grounds for revocation of citizenship. The appeals court ruled that immigration regulations give the U.S. Attorney General discretion to define “good moral character,” and that conviction for a drug-related crime falls within those bounds. Pierre told the press he plans to appeal the case to the Supreme Court.

The case sets a precedent for extending the reach of the 1996 Illegal Immigration and Immigrant Responsibility Act, which expanded the offenses for which a non-citizen may be deported.

“Well before 9/11, starting back in the 1990s, the government was intensifying its efforts to deport non-U.S. criminal offenders,” Stephen Legomsky, a professor of immigration law at Washington University in St. Louis, said in an interview on the Jean-Baptiste case with Voice of America radio. “After 9/11 that drive picked up…. I have to think that with all their other priorities the government would not have brought this case unless their goal was to test out the strategy for future prosecutions.”  
 
Police frame-up
Contrary to the Voice of America radio service headline, “Court strips cocaine smuggler of US citizenship,” Jean-Baptiste was not charged with drug smuggling, but with “conspiracy” to possess crack cocaine with intent to distribute.

His conviction was based solely on the uncorroborated testimony of a Miami undercover cop at the trial in 1996. The cop visited Jean-Baptiste’s Royal Caribbean restaurant in Miami’s Little Haiti in March of 1995—four months after he applied for citizenship—and asked him to sell her drugs. She claims he facilitated her purchase by directing her to a drug dealer across the street. However, the tape recorder she was wearing failed to record Jean-Baptiste, who denies the charges. He was released from prison last year after serving seven years of his eight-year sentence.

Now 57 years old, Jean-Baptiste came to the United States in 1980 and became a citizen in April of 1996. Six months later he was arrested and tried on the drug charge, and then convicted in January of 1997. The court ruling says the law requires that Jean-Baptiste be stripped of his citizenship and be deported.

Haitians in Miami have suffered systematic abuse at the hands of the immigration authorities. Daniel Joseph, 20, was deported to Haiti last November after spending more than two years at the notorious Krome Detention Center while his asylum request was pending, making him one of the longest-held immigrants there. The same month 81-year-old Joseph Dantica, the uncle of noted author Edwidge Danticat, died at Krome after authorities denied him his medicine, the Associated Press reported. He had been arrested at Miami International Airport upon his arrival from Haiti with a visa and a petition for asylum, and died in custody five days later.

Marleine Bastien, director of Haitian Women of Miami, told the Militant that a demonstration for immigrant rights will be held January 28 in front of the immigration police building.  
 
 
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