Haitian Refugees, ACT UP New York, and the Transnational Dimensions of Local Organizing for AIDS Housing
By Maggie Schreiner
In 1991, the New York City-based AIDS activists of ACT UP were following the disturbing news of the detention of three hundred HIV-positive Haitian refugees at the US military facility in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, under the United States’ ban on HIV-positive migrants. Having satisfied US authorities during initial screenings that they had a “credible fear” of persecution if they returned home, the refugees could not, according to US policy, be returned to Haiti. But because their HIV-positive status disqualified them from entering the United States, the refugees found themselves in legal limbo. Guantánamo Bay, as a location that US authorities defined as of the United States but not in it, served as a legally ambiguous zone of carceral quarantine.[1]
The HIV ban technically included a loophole for refugees, but US authorities were ignoring this loophole. It would take extensive organizing at the local, national, and transnational level to win the release of the HIV-positive Haitian refugees. In New York City, members of the ACT UP Housing Committee drew on years of advocacy for homeless HIV-positive New Yorkers to play a significant role in resettling and housing Haitians as they were released from Guantánamo.[2] Knowledge acquired from years of direct action, policy negotiations, and provision of housing for people with AIDS was used to demand an expansion to the welfare state to secure housing for Haitian refugees in New York City. However, the city’s municipal government responded with a limited program designed to limit eligibility and retain the narrow boundaries of the welfare state and the right to housing.
An ACT UP New York demonstration to free Haitian refugees from Guantánamo Bay in 1992. ACT UP New York records, Box 89, Folder 3, New York Public Library.
ACT UP Housing Committee
ACT UP’s advocacy for Haitian refugees followed several years of direct actions, phone zaps, and policy development focused on the growing crisis of homelessness. AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) was founded at New York City’s Lesbian and Gay Center in March 1987. The following year, ACT UP New York members formed the Housing Committee to bring attention to the catastrophic increase in homeless people with AIDS in New York City.[3] In 1988, the year that the ACT UP New York Housing Committee was founded, there were an estimated 5,000 homeless people with AIDS in New York — and forty-four beds of supportive housing — in a city with a quarter million vacant apartments.[4]
Members of the Housing Committee understood that taking on homelessness would require more than small-scale local activism; they would need to target the largest political and fiscal actors and address their campaigns to a national audience. The Housing Committee’s first action was a Thanksgiving Day protest at Trump Tower, chosen as a target as the “symbol of real estate gigantic-ness in Manhattan.”[5] Trump had received the first-ever tax abatement for a commercial developer, which ACT UP Housing Committee members argued should have been directed towards preventing homelessness among people with AIDS. The action was one of ACT UP’s largest; people handed out empty “Happy Trumpsgiving” paper plates in the food court while others threw “blood money” from the escalator banks into the extravagant lobby.[6] The Housing Committee then turned their focus to the Department of Housing Preservation and Development to pressure the city to use its stock of vacant, city-owned housing for homeless people with AIDS. Housing Committee member Charles King reflected on the June 1989 action in an interview with the ACT UP Oral History Project:
“I like to give us credit. We didn’t have Peter Staley’s access to giant condoms for Jesse Helms’ house, but we did drive around the Lower East Side one Sunday night and pick up abandoned furniture… We drove to 100 Gold Street, where HPD was headquartered, and we… had a big demonstration… Basically, the idea was, ‘We have the furniture. Where’s the apartments?’ kind of thing. So, we actually tried to deliver the furniture, got it all jammed up in the revolving doors, and then we had to safeguard our assets, so we handcuffed ourselves to our furniture trapped in the revolving doors. That’s actually, to this day, one of my favorite arrests. There I was, sitting handcuffed to a toilet.”[7]
The action resulted in HPD committing 650 apartments and single rooms to homeless people with AIDS, though this was far from sufficient for the exploding population of homeless people with AIDS in New York City.[8] The slow and inadequate government response to AIDS-related homelessness pushed the Housing Committee from activism towards housing provision. In 1990, ACT UP founded the non-profit service agency Housing Works, which focused on serving homeless people with HIV and AIDS. ACT UP and Housing Works continued to collaborate, sharing an approach that embraced finding local solutions to big political problems, which was soon to include housing Haitian migrants as they were released from Guantánamo.[9]
Housing HIV-Positive Haitian Refugees
The issue of the HIV-positive Haitians detained at Guantánamo Bay was first brought to ACT UP New York by member Esther Kaplan, who heard about it from a friend studying at the Yale Law School’s Human Rights Clinic.[10] ACT UP New York initially mobilized to support a court challenge to the refugees’ detention brought by the Center for Constitutional Rights, the Yale Human Rights Clinic, and others, picketing and packing the court during an initial hearing in September 1992.[11] The next month, ACT UP New York activists protested US policy toward Haitians at the US Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) detention center on Varick Street in Lower Manhattan, where two critically ill Haitian refugees, Rigaud Milenette and Siliese Success, had been transferred. Success’s infant son Ricardo had been sent to Walter Reed Military hospital after contracting pneumonia, where the three month-old died. Despite the fact that an immigration judge had determined that Milenette and Success qualified as political refugees, they were indefinitely detained at Varick Street due to the HIV ban.[12]
Flyer for demonstration at the Varick Street INS detention center in 1992. ACT UP New York records, Box 89, Folder 3, New York Public Library.
ACT UP’s Housing Committee was brought into the campaign as the legal strategy for the detained migrants shifted. In late 1992 and early 1993, Center for Constitutional Rights attorneys representing Haitians at Guantánamo began negotiating freedom for individuals on a case-by-case basis, initially prioritizing pregnant or medically fragile people. Attorney Michael Ratner recalled “Our goal with this lobbying was not to close the camp per se, but to win release for individuals imprisoned at Guantánamo, even if it meant slipping them into the United States one at a time… We perceived each release as more than a purely humanitarian goal. We believed that if there were fewer Haitians in the camp, it would be politically easier for the government to close it.”[13]
But how to support the refugees whose cases were successful? Attorneys from the Center for Constitutional Rights approached ACT UP as small numbers of people started being released from Guantánamo under interim orders; the lawyers didn’t know how to arrange for supportive housing. A group in New Jersey had housed the first few people who had been freed, but as a plane carrying an HIV-positive Haitian child and his grandmother approached Newark Airport, the organization backed out of the arrangement. Unless alternate housing could be found immediately, the two would be returned to Guantánamo. Through Housing Works, the ACT UP Housing Committee found housing for the child and his grandmother.[14]
ACT UP New York’s assignment was time sensitive: the government would contact the attorneys and ACT UP New York at 2pm on Friday afternoons with the number of people expected on that Sunday’s medevac flight; supervised AIDS housing had to be confirmed by 5pm that day for the government to move forward with the planned releases. Housing Works provided housing for the first several months of this arrangement, but then came the time when, as Housing Committee member Betty Williams recalled, “Housing Works would not take another person. They’d had it… And Bro and I took a really deep breath and we lied. We lied to the Justice Department. We lied to the military and said, yes, we had housing.”[15] Williams and Bro Broberg scrambled to find temporary accommodation at a hotel through the Coalition for the Homeless, which they paid for with informal donations.
Williams and Broberg also accompanied Haitian refugees to the Division of AIDS Services (DAS), a unit of the Human Resources Administration that provided housing assistance and income support for HIV-positive people. A DAS administrator expressed surprise that there wasn’t a specific program for refugees being released from Guantánamo, because “we always had one for the Cubans, the Marielitos.”[16] With this information, Williams and Broberg contacted Tom Duane, an HIV-positive gay tenant activist turned New York City Councilor, who immediately arranged for a meeting with DAS to plan a resettlement program. Williams recalled:
It was like the dream meeting. Every single person that all of us had always wanted to get together in one room... It was hard, in a way, seeing this meeting happen for Guantánamo people that we couldn’t make happen for other people, the people we’d been working with for so long. But I feel the reason that worked was because we offered people a chance to be a good guy, a limited chance… It was not going to open the floodgates to some huge new category of people all screaming for housing; it was a limited group of people.[17]
The New York City government declared its willingness to resettle all the Haitians from Guantánamo. Three leading HIV-positive city officials facilitated the program: Dennis Deleon (head of the New York City Commission on Human Rights), Ron Johnson (the NYC AIDS czar), and City Councilor Tom Duane. New York City’s openness to accepting Haitian refugees provided important leverage with the federal government, who could no longer claim that the Haitian refugees were unwanted in the United States.[18] After a June 1993 court ruling ordered the release of all Haitian migrants detained at Guantánamo, New York City’s program ultimately resettled a hundred people, or about one third of the HIV-positive people who had been detained at Guantánamo.
The release of one hundred people from indefinite detention at Guantánamo was a limited but real political victory. However, Williams’ observations reveal a tension that was common in early AIDS activism: activists demanded an expansion of welfare benefits to address the scale of the crisis, but the state responded to activist pressure with modest expansions designed to limit eligibility and retain the narrow and punitive boundaries of the welfare state.[19] In providing housing for HIV-positive Haitian migrants as they were released from Guantánamo, New York City’s municipal government acknowledged only one hundred HIV-positive people in need of housing, although the city’s HIV-positive homeless population numbered in the thousands.
The detention of Haitian migrants at Guantánamo was the result of anti-Black racism, the criminalization of HIV, the growing use of immigration detention, and the failure of the state to provide for the basic needs of HIV-positive people, including the need for adequate housing. In Detain and Punish, historian Carl Lindskoog argues that “Once we recognize the number and range of individuals and organizations involved at various points in the campaign for Haitian refugees, it becomes clear that the Haitian solidarity movement of the 1980s and 1990s was one of the United States’ major civil and human rights campaigns of the late twentieth century.”[20] Members from the ACT UP New York Housing Committee played a critical role in this larger national and international campaign by arranging the required supportive housing for individuals as they were released. The Housing Committee’s experience advocating for HIV-positive homeless New Yorkers provided the local political framework, personal connections, and administrative experience to meet the housing needs of the Haitian refugees being released from Guantánamo.
Thank you to Libby Garland for comments and suggestions.
Maggie Schreiner is a PhD student in History at the CUNY Graduate Center, researching queer and trans organizing for affordable housing in NYC from the 1970s through the 2000s. Maggie is an adjunct faculty member in NYU’s Archives and Public History MA program, and the former Manager of Archives and Special Collections at Brooklyn Historical Society.
Endnotes
[1] Naomi Paik, Rightlessness: Testimony and Redress in U.S. Prison Camps since World War II (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2016), 88.
[2] Sarah Schulman, Let the Record Show: A Political History of ACT UP New York, 1987-1993 (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021), 432–43.
[3] Tamar W. Carroll, Mobilizing New York: AIDS, Antipoverty, and Feminist Activism (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2015), 147–49.
[4] ACT UP New York, “How’s Ed Doing?” (October 20, 1988), MssCol 10, AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power New York records, Box 29, Folder 24 Housing Committee 1989-1991, New York Public Library.
[5] Gedalia Braverman, Gedalia Braverman Oral History, Conducted by Sarah Schulman, 2003, ACT UP Oral History Project.
[6] Eric Sawyer, Eric Sawyer Oral History, Conducted by Sarah Schulman, 2004, Interview 049, ACT UP Oral History Project; Richard Jackman, Richard Jackman Oral History, Conducted by Sarah Schulman, 2014, Interview 172, ACT UP Oral History Project.
[7] Charles King, Charles King Oral History, Conducted by Sarah Schuman, 2010, Interview 107, ACT UP Oral History Project.
[8] ACT UP New York, “Phone Zap! We Need You To Call the Housing Authority” (December 1989), MssCol 10, AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power New York records, Box 29, Folder 24 Housing Committee 1989-1991, New York Public Library.
[9] Carroll, Mobilizing New York, 149.
[10] Esther Kaplan, Esther Kaplan Oral History, Conducted by Sarah Schulman, 2012, Interview 146, ACT UP Oral History Project.
[11] “Dear ACT UP” (November 30, 1992), MssCol 10, AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power New York records, Box 37, Folder 1 Committees, Haiti - Emergency Coalition for Haitian Refugees, 1992-1993, New York Public Library.
[12] Karma R. Chávez, The Borders of AIDS: Race, Quarantine, and Resistance (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2021), 132.
[13] Michael Ratner, “How We Closed the Guantanamo HIV Camp: The Intersection of Politics and Litigation,” Harvard Human Rights Journal 11 (1998): 205.
[14] Betty Williams, Betty Williams Oral History, Conducted by Sarah Schulman, 2008, Interview 99, ACT UP Oral History Project.
[15] Betty Williams.
[16] Betty Williams.
[17] Betty Williams.
[18] Michael Ratner, “How We Closed the Guantanamo HIV Camp: The Intersection of Politics and Litigation,” 214.
[19] Jonathan Bell, “Rethinking the ‘Straight State’: Welfare Politics, Health Care, and Public Policy in the Shadow of AIDS,” The Journal of American History 104, no. 4 (2018): 947–48.
[20] Carl Lindskoog, Detain and Punish: Haitian Refugees and the Rise of the World’s Largest Immigration Detention System (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2018), 5.