Land of the Detained

Another Thursday night at the Hudson County Correctional Center in northern New Jersey and everyone knows the routine. It starts with the line of people--overwhelmingly black and Hispanic--snaking out of the jail's front doors all waiting for an hour to clear the one metal detector. Then there's the half hour stuffed into a drab waiting room, before visitors are brought in shifts to an adjacent series of booths where inmates and loved ones laugh and cry over a phone for 30 minutes--separated by a thick glass partition clouded with years' worth of dust and parting kisses.

It's here that Wolff Marsan sits, tall and quiet at 30, with dark skin, a tightly trimmed goatee and tired black eyes. Unlike the other inmates, nobody close to him has come visiting tonight. They're all either back in Port Au Prince, Haiti where he was born, or Cambridge, Mass. the city to which he moved when he was a boy. Yet he's here, retelling a story he's told countless times to friends, lawyers, even himself.

"I can't believe I'm still locked up, son." Marsan says in a soft tumble of Haitian patois and standard hip-hop speak, his voice muffled by the half-broken phone and the clamor of wives, girlfriends, sisters, mothers and children. "Twenty-eight months and I'm still in this place. And now they're trying to send me back."

"Back" for Marsan is Haiti, his home before age 13, when he and his sister and father came to Cambridge. It was in Cambridge that Marsan made a mistake that has cost him dearly for the rest of his life.

In 1996, at the age of 21, Marsan was arrested for selling about $20 worth of cocaine to a plainclothes detective. Marsan plead guilty and received probation. "I just got caught up in a bad situation," he says about the bust.

A year later, Marsan was arrested after a late night brawl. He was charged with possession of a knife he says wasn't his. Though Marsan was acquitted, U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) began deportation proceedings against him based on his 1996 drug conviction. The INS could do this under new federal regulations passed in 1996 that allowed the agency to deal harshly with immigrants with criminal records. Marsan, a green card holder, was sent back to Haiti and ordered never to return.

"They had me on this plane with all these other Haitians they were sending back," he says. "I couldn't believe it. I was crying."

In Haiti, Marsan was thrown in the notorious National Penitentiary in Port Au Prince for six months and forced to live in a cramped cell with 25 other men and a single toilet. He says he was regularly beaten and given "the sun treatment," where guards would tie him to chair and use a mirror to reflect the mid-day tropical sun's searing rays on his shaved head.

"The prison in Haiti makes where I am now seem sweet, and this is tough too so imagine what that was like," he says with a rueful grin.

After six months in jail, Marsan finally thought he'd caught a break. A politically connected cousin aligned with then Haitian president Jean Aristide bribed prison authorities to let Marsan out. But the good fortune was short lived. These were dangerous times and upon his release, Marsan was caught in the middle of the bloody battle for political power which had enveloped the country.

As the violence careened out of control, Aristide fled into exile and Marsan's cousin took off for Florida. Even worse, a rival political faction singled out Marsan's family as being disloyal--his mother still lived in Haiti--and began threatening them. One night, the Marsan home was peppered with gunfire. Fearing for his life, Marsan fled Port Au Prince and sneaked across the border into the Dominican Republic. From there, in January of 2003, Marsan hopped a flight for Montreal.

Marsan had hoped to finally start a new life. But his flight stopped in Newark, New Jersey for a brief layover and Marsan was detained by INS officers for illegally re-entering the U.S.