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July 24, 2007
"Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free."
The insanity of the “wet-foot, dry-foot” policy towards Cuban immigrants is on full display in this front-page article ($) in the WSJ:
Cuban Migrants Confront Harsher U.S. Tactics at Sea
KEY WEST, Fla. -- Agustin Uralde could barely hear his wife above the roar of the smuggler's speedboat last summer as it tried to outrun two U.S. Coast Guard vessels and a helicopter, bearing down with sirens wailing. Huddled around the couple were 27 other wet and frightened Cubans. "She said, 'Pray for me, my love, because I am praying for you,'" Mr. Uralde recalls.
Moments later, a Coast Guard gunner shot two copper slugs into one of the boat's engines, forcing it into a hard left turn before it groaned to a stop. Mr. Uralde says the abrupt motion threw his wife headfirst into the side of the boat. By the time the Coast Guard had brought her ashore for treatment two hours later, following a long debate over whether she was really badly hurt, Anay Machado Gonzalez, 24 years old, was dead. She was the third Cuban migrant in just over a year to die of traumatic head injuries after a high-speed ocean chase.
For nearly 13 years, Coast Guard and Border Protection agents have been chasing human smugglers around Florida. In 1994, President Clinton changed U.S. policy to allow only Cubans who physically made it to U.S. soil to stay in the country, while those caught at sea were returned to their Communist island. Before that the Coast Guard simply plucked Cuban migrants off homemade rafts and brought them to Miami as refugees.
Posted by Peter Mork at July 24, 2007 9:56 AM
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