Torturer Toto Tells Terrorist Tale of Immigration Woe

By Bill West

There was some justice given out the other day in Federal civil court in New York. Unfortunately, it received only a little notice in the media. It deserved a lot more attention. The case involved a civil lawsuit brought against Emmanuel “Toto” Constant, a Haitian who is under a deportation order but who continues to live in the US. Constant is the former head of something called the Front for the Advancement and Progress of Haiti, or “FRAPH.” FRAPH, unlike its benign sounding name, was an organization composed of thugs, murderers, torturers and assassins that worked in league with the various paramilitary dictators who ran Haiti during the early 1990s.

The lawsuit, brought on behalf of several victim plaintiffs by the Center for Justice and Accountability and the Center for Constitutional Rights in 2004, resulted in a Court finding of culpability by Constant being issued on October 24. Constant, in this Federal civil case, has been established to be the human rights violator the US Government, at least the immigration law enforcement authorities within the US government, have contended he is for many years. In fact, his deportation order is in large part based upon those same findings.

Therein lies the ironic “rub” of Constant’s case and how it relates to the Government’s counter-terrorism efforts. After "fleeing" to the US, Constant came to the attention of the former US Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) in the 1990s as a potential human rights persecutor target. Constant, living in the Maryland/DC area at the time, was arrested on deportation charges, detained and ultimately ordered deported even though he fought the charges. Through a series of legal actions, including his own lawsuit against the US Government seeking to prevent his deportation wherein he claimed he had been a CIA operative, he was ultimately released from custody under an order of supervision by immigration authorities. The reality was, the State Department feared Constant’s return to Haiti would be a major destabilizing effect there and, in spite of the protest of INS authorities, it was decided to allow Constant to remain in the US indefinitely. Foreign policy concerns outweighed justice in this case.

Fast forward to the present. The US Government now is pursuing the removal (deportation) of a number of convicted terrorist-linked aliens. These include Palestinian Fawaz Damra, former Imam of the largest mosque in Cleveland, and Palestinian Sami Al-Arian, former professor at the University of South Florida. Both have been linked to the Palestinian Islamic Jihad terrorist organization. Both are “stateless” Palestinians. The issue of where to deport such persons becomes highly problematic for the Government, particularly in view of the highly tense situation in the Middle East and the areas under the “control” of the Palestinian Authority and Hamas. Will Palestinian terror-linked deportees also become nearly impossible to remove because of foreign policy issues?

And what of similarly situated Somali deportees? We have already witnessed a number of such cases within the past two years. The Supreme Court has ruled we can remove deportees to countries that do not have viable governments, but physically and safely doing so often makes that impossible, at least under current process. And if Somalia continues on the path, as it appears to be, of radical “Islamification,”these issues become even more difficult. And how does the Government manage with terrorist deportees to Iraq, Iran, Syria and Afghanistan?

What this means is that our Government will be forced to keep such terror-linked deportees detained within the United States, justifying their continued detention in periodic legal review hearings before the courts, or face releasing such persons from custody under some form of community control. Can the United States physically remove such deportees anyway? Of course it can. It is a matter of how much resolve and how much pressure and, perhaps, how much force the Government decides to use in effecting such removals. Curiously, returning to the tortured case of torturer Toto, one might wonder if the State Department’s theory of keeping him out of Haiti helping keep order there now makes anyone at State think twice about that decision, given the current debacle that is Haiti combined with the October 24th Court ruling in New York. America should not harbor foreign terrorists, torturers and human rights violators, period.

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