U.S. citizen finally returns to Rockland after years in Haiti
Born in Rockland County and raised in Haiti, U.S. citizen, now 34, is finally able to return to this country
Since his deportation in 2021, Pierrilus has been working to get back home to Spring Valley, the New York village where he’d lived since he was 5.Pierrilus is stateless. He was born in Saint Martin, a French territory, but wasn’t made a citizen because his parents weren’t French nationals. He also doesn’t have Haitian citizenship.Will Pierrilus finally be able to come home to Spring Valley? “As somebody of faith, I believe the right thing is going to happen,” he said during a phone call from somewhere in Haiti.
Paul Pierrilus has moved about a half dozen times in the three-plus years since he was deported to Haiti, even though he’s not a Haitian citizen and had never been there before his forced removal.
“Some neighborhoods are worse than others. Gangs literally taking over neighborhoods,” Pierrilus said via a Zoom call from an undisclosed location. “I try to avoid the danger.”
Pierrilus said he knows it’s time to move on when the nightly gunfire gets closer.
Kidnappings are “not something that’s rare,” he said.
“A huge target’s on my back,” said Pierrilus, who has witnessed violence and kidnappings. “They can tell you’re Americanized. I stick out like a sore thumb.”
Since his deportation in 2021, Pierrilus has been working to get back home to Spring Valley, the New York village where he’d lived since he was 5 and worked as a financial planner. He’s had support from human rights organizations like Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights, the National Immigrant Justice Center and the Haitian Bridge Alliance, as well as from his family and his home church, the French Speaking Baptist Church of Spring Valley.
Former U.S. Rep. Mondaire Jones, a Democrat, has pled Pierrilus’ case in and out of office, including during a recent interview with lohud. A spokesman for U.S. Rep. Mike Lawler said in 2023 that the Republican had not received a request from RFK Human Rights for assistance, but would be willing to help. Jones is challenging Lawler in the November election for the 17th District seat.
There have been developments in Pierrilus’ case: Gov. Kathy Hochul in May granted him a pardon for a 2003 conviction of criminal sale of a controlled substance in the third degree. It’s a charge Pierrilus said he pleaded guilty to in his early 20s. He’s now 43. Pierrilus describes the incident as a one-time mistake for which he took responsibility and served his time.
Hochul’s pardon ‒ the product of a detailed investigation by her team ‒ basically provides relief from the criminal record that is cited as the reason for his deportation.
The pardon could help open a pathway for Pierrilus to receive humanitarian parole because his current situation is so precarious, said Sarah Decker, staff attorney at Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights. Pierrilus does not qualify for other special immigration programs that pertain to Haiti.
“He’s a person deported from the United States of America, forced to live in hiding,” stuck in a country that’s not his own, with limited family and network ties, and easily identifiable as American, making him a target for kidnapping and worse, Decker said.
Neither Pierrilus, nor the agencies championing his cause, are anywhere near giving up.
“As somebody of faith,” Pierrilus said during a Sept. 19 interview, “I believe the right thing is going to happen.”
Stateless and stuck
Pierrilus is literally a man without a country.
He was born in Saint Martin, a French territory in the Leeward Islands. He wasn’t automatically a citizen because his parents weren’t French nationals, but were citizens of Haiti at the time. He also didn’t automatically inherit Haitian citizenship through his parents.
He moved with his family to the U.S. when he was 5. They settled in Spring Valley, which has the second-largest Haitian population, per capita, in the country. When his parents eventually earned U.S. citizenship, Paul didn’t. But his family had been confused by a complex system and Paul didn’t realize he had no status in the U.S. until he filed the standard FAFSA form when ready to attend SUNY Rockland Community College.
Pierrilus, though, didn’t have status in any nation.
Being stateless is an unusual situation, but one that didn’t really impact Pierrilus for years.
Even when he neared deportation, Pierrilus had repeatedly received documentation from both the French consulate and the Haitian government that confirmed he was not a national of either country. He also visited both consulates, at the behest of U.S. immigration officials, who asked for updated documents. Both countries’ paperwork confirmed he was not a citizen of either.
Even on the plane bound for Haiti, he tried showing documents that confirmed his stateless status.
Pierrilus was in the system for years with no issues
After Pierrilus’ 2003 guilty plea, he spent six months at Lakeview Shock Incarceration Facility in Chautauqua County, a minimum security “boot camp” that excludes violent or repeat offenders and focuses on treatment and skill-building.
“I did what I did,” Pierrilus said. “I did my time.”
After his release, Pierrilus was under a federal “Order of Supervision,” which is often assigned to non-citizens who have violated U.S. immigration law, or have committed certain criminal acts, even fairly minor ones. OSUP status allows immigration officials to keep track of an individual, who is supposed to check in at certain intervals.
For the next 15 years, Pierrilus said he followed every rule, jumped through every hoop, make every check-in at the offices in downtown Manhattan, waiting hours. He likened the process to going to the DMV. You line up, then you sit. Then you wait. And wait.
“I don’t think somebody making a mistake one time in their life,” Pierrilus said, justifies what happened next.
‘I’m not from Haiti’
Paul Pierrilus’ deportation saga began on Jan. 11, 2021.
But even before that, he had an inkling something was happening. “I got a phone call. I was told I could go a local police station” for his OSUP check-in. He also kept getting a random call from someone with a blocked number. “It felt like something wasn’t right,” he said.
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Since he already had an appointment at the ICE field office in Federal Plaza in New York City, Pierrilus decided just to stick to the normal routine. “I went early in the morning,” he recalled. People were being called in for their appointments, but he was left sitting, waiting. By the end of the day, “I was last person in the waiting room.”
Finally, Pierrilus was called into the office. The door was closed and locked. Then the officer said to him: “You’re no longer on supervision. You’re going home.”
What home, Pierrilus asked? “They said Haiti.”
Pierrilus recounted telling the officer, “I’m not from Haiti.”
The response: “Well that’s what your file says.”
He was taken to a side room with a cell.
At every step, Pierrilus showed documents from Haiti stating he was not a citizen and would not be accepted. He added that he now believes that Haiti has been used as a dumping ground by U.S. immigration officials, and people of color are the refuse. “There are people from Jamaica, sent to Haiti,” he said. “They have no ties, no nothing. It might sound crazy, but what they did is not a one-off situation.”
Pierrilus was given the option of being taken to JFK airport and self-deporting. He said no.
Pierrilus said he believes U.S. immigration officials knew the French government would reject his transfer to a French territory and figured that Haiti was unstable and could be persuaded to just accept another deportee.
On Jan. 19, in the dwindling hours of the Trump administration, Pierrilus was being walked to a plane on the tarmac, shackled and surrounded by agents. Then, with no explanation, he was then led back, away from the plane.
The Haitian ambassador lauded the move on Twitter, now X.
Pierrilus was sent to a holding center in Louisiana.
On Feb. 2, with the Biden administration now in office, the deportation again commenced. Was he surprised? Pierrilus, in a reflection that summed up his entire experience, responded: “What they’re supposed to do and what they will do, two separate things.”
Pierrilus remembers being placed, shackled, in a van by himself. He said it was stifling and smelly and he was there for hours.
He was placed on a plane with others, including families and babies, being sent to Haiti. Pierrilus again tried to show his travel documents. No one cared.
When he protested, he said, an immigration officer gestured to a straitjacket on the floor and told Pierrilus, “We can do this the hard way or the easy way.”
His experience in Haiti
Pierrilus was the last to get off the plane.
He recalled resisting disembarking. He demanded to see the travel documents that authorized him to be sent to Haiti.
Armed with his paperwork that showed he was not a Haitian national, Pierrilus said he was resistant and tried to get back on the plane. Surrounded by Haitian officers, he recalled, “I fall on my face.”
“They put a knee on my back, literally choking me. I can’t breathe,” Pierrilus said. “This is my first experience of getting Haiti.”
He said a woman in the crowd yelled “no, no!” for him to stop resisting and calm down. “I have no wins in this situation,” he realized.
Everyone was loaded on a trolley. When they got to their destination, a guy on a motorcycle told Pierrilus that he knew his family and was there to help him. “I didn’t trust he really knew my family,” Pierrilus said. “I’m like questioning and skeptical of everything cuz I don’t know nobody and have been lied to so many times.”
His sister, Neomie, was on the phone assuring him that the man was really a family acquaintance sent to help. With the acquaintance was the first place he stayed.
Soon, though, the neighborhood became unstable. He moved. And moved several times more.
Pierrilus said that as a financial planner, he’s always advised his clients to keep enough money in savings to get them through six months worth of expenses. He said he had a little more than that. But three years and eight months into his exile, his savings are depleted.
When Pierrilus arrived, he knew very limited Haitian Creole, and he does not speak French.
He relies on family and friends to get by. It would be unsafe to work, so he doesn’t spend much time outside his home. Besides, there are no jobs for him in Haiti.
He has faith he’ll find a way home
Pierrilus makes clear that Haiti remains dangerous and he’s constantly at risk.
Since he’s been there, a president was assassinated. Gang violence has spread. Cholera remains a threat. A current informal Kenya-led peacekeeping mission has moved into Haiti, but the United Nations, so far, has failed to establish a full peacekeeping mission.
With a pardon, does Pierrilus see hope that he will be able to return home? Does he believe the outcome of the 2024 presidential election would make a difference?
Pierrilus said it may be a “tougher fight with the Trump administration,” citing his deportation saga began during Trump’s first administration. But, he noted, he was still “targeted” and his deportation process continued two weeks after Biden took office.
He also takes into account ongoing racism against Haitians in the U.S. “The fearmongering, we see it,” said Pierrilus, referring to other residents of Haiti, mentioning the wild fabrication that Haitians are taking people’s pets in Ohio and eating them.
‘Déjà vu’: Haitian immigrants say long history of blame can’t curb their success in US
It’s ginned up for political purposes now, but history shows it is not new.
Pierrilus recalled marching across the Brooklyn Bridge with his father in 1990 when he was 10 years old to protest the exclusion of Haitians as blood donors in the U.S. under the claim they were a high risk for AIDS. The government reversed the policy.
“Right now what’s going in in Ohio … that kind of narrative. It’s the same thing,” he said. “Using Haitians for scapegoats.”
Meanwhile, Pierrilus waits, works with nonprofits and gains strength from knowing “I’ve got a lot of support everywhere, people praying for me.”
“As somebody of faith, I believe the right thing is going to happen,” Pierrilus said. “One side or the other side, I just hope they do the right thing.”
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Publish date : 2024-09-25 20:01:00
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