Word: krome
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AFTER MONTHS BEHIND BARBED WIRE AT KROME DEtention center outside Miami, some 160 Haitian refugees concluded that it was time for a desperate gesture. They announced a hunger strike to win their freedom, in an effort to protest what they see as an immigration double standard. The Haitians watched angrily as 48 Cubans who hijacked an airliner out of Havana earlier this month were released almost overnight. Hundreds of black Haitians -- who risked a 600-mile sea voyage in rickety boats to flee an often cruel military rule -- have been detained for months while their asylum claims are reviewed...
...held behind barbed wire, subsisting on meager rations; some have lived this way for ten years. Detention centers at Britain's Heathrow and Gatwick airports shelter some arrivals for as long as a year. In Miami up to 700 refugees, mostly Haitians, have at times been crammed into the Krome Avenue Detention Center, which was built to hold 525 people...
...Viktoua net! [Complete victory!] They are going to free you! They have to free you!" Marc Garcia, the Miami radio commentator known as Marcus to the 437 Haitians at Krome Avenue Processing Center who tune in his daily Creole-language broadcasts, was all but shouting the good news into his microphone last week. In Atlanta, a three-judge panel of the Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit had just refused to block a federal district court decision ordering the release "forthwith" of 1,800 Haitian immigrants who have been imprisoned for about a year in 14 U.S. detention camps...
...Hundreds of others complained of blinding headaches, stomach cramps and other ailments, which they attributed to uncertainty as to how long they would be held and concern for their impoverished families back home. The longer they waited for their status to be determined, the more desperate they became. At Krome, a forbidding enclosure surrounded by high watchtowers and double cyclone fences topped with barbed wire, one detainee explained why he had stopped eating the camp's food: "How can I eat when I've been here 13 months and I have eight children at home who are starving...
Some 1,000 Haitians are in Dade County's Krome Avenue North Detention Center, which is designed for no more than 530 people. The fortunate former detainees who have been released to sponsors are likely to be found in Little Haiti, the neighborhood north of 36th Street in Miami. "The Haitians take care of each other as well as they can," says Fernand Cayard, owner of a local supermarket. "No one is sleeping on the streets." Jean François, a 25-year-old Haitian, shares a three-bedroom wooden frame house with 19 fellow refugees. "Everyone sleeps in shifts," explains...