Editor's Note: This version has been edited from the original print version.
Wesley Louis Jean stepped from a plane this past New Year’s Eve and placed his feet squarely on American soil, then fell into the arms of his wife and children and gave thanks for surviving a nightmare that had lasted nearly eight years.
“There was many tears,” said Jean, 43, a soft-spoken native of Haiti who makes eye contact only hesitantly. “It has been a nightmare.”
Jean’s nightmare began in January 2003, when legal blunders sidetracked his search for a green card to establish permanent residence in the United States. It culminated with a case of mistaken identity, his incarceration, imprisonment and deportation to Haiti.
A supervisor on the gaming floor at Foxwoods Resort Casino, Jean was unaware of any problems when on Jan. 30, 2003, agents with the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement asked to speak with him during his coffee break. Jean was compliant and said he wanted to cooperate in any way possible.
“I had no idea what was going to happen,” he said.
Without warning, Jean was handcuffed, placed in the back of a vehicle and taken to the Hartford Correctional Center. Unable to make a phone call or contact his family, Jean spent the next six months there before being transferred to an institution in Louisiana, and then to Haiti in August 2003.
Jean grew up under the regimes of the Duvalier family. First, Francois “Papa Doc” Duvalier, and then his son Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier. During the decades of their rule, ending in 1986 with the exile of Baby Doc, Haitians became accustomed to official corruption, kidnappings and political murder that took the lives of tens of thousands, and destroyed the lives of even more.
Fake passport
In 1988, at 20, Jean felt that to stay in Haiti would bring him only heartache. He began his plan to come to the United States, and in so doing made the biggest mistake of his life. Jean came up with a plan to use someone else’s passport.
“It was a dumb thing, but I was desperate to leave Haiti,” he said, from his in-laws’ Gales Ferry home.
His wife, Holly, held his hand as he told the story.
“He was just trying to get a better life,” she said. “Like lots of other people who came to this country.”
Arriving in Florida, Jean immediately admitted his use of the fake passport and asked for political asylum.
After three months in jail, Jean was released while his claim for asylum was investigated. He migrated north and made his home in Norwich, where his mother was living. A lawyer was hired to help with his immigration, he got a job, and he met the woman who became his first wife. They had two children.
By 1994, Jean was working at Foxwoods and had a promising future. In June of that year, he received notice that the Connecticut Immigration Court had denied his appeal for asylum. Within a month, he filed an appeal. As they waded through the legal aspects of immigration, his wife filed a I-130 form — a petition for an alien relative — which was approved in 1996.
The constant stress of the immigration process took its toll, however, and by 2000, with no end in sight, the two agreed to divorce.
The divorce disrupted the immigration process. Although the I-130 status had been granted, neither Jean nor Jody knew to file a form I-485, an adjustment form for their divorced status.
Let down by lawyer
Attorney Rita Provatas, Jean’s legal representative now, said more problematic was the fact that Jean’s first attorney had not continued to process his application. Jean thought his immigration was proceeding smoothly, when in fact, the process of deportation already had begun.
“Wesley was shocked and bewildered,” Provatas said in his court documents. “He thought his paperwork was well in progress.”
After his divorce, Jean met Holly Davidson, and things began to look good. He was earning $22 per hour at the casino, and in December 2002, he and Holly put a deposit down on a Norwich home and began thinking of marriage.
All that would end with the visit by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents a month later.
Back in Haiti
In fall 2003, Jean found himself back in Port-au-Prince, the city from which he had escaped 15 years before. It was little different.
“I felt in danger most of the time,” Jean said. “There were no jobs. No way to earn a living, and everyone was still very poor.”
Still, for someone without a criminal record, and who was willing to work, there were jobs here and there, and Jean took what he could find while he worked through the legal system.
Back in Norwich, Holly and her family began the process of bringing Jean back to Connecticut. Holly worked a low-paying job, spent hundreds of dollars, and then more hundreds, on forms and visas. She saved and borrowed and flew to Haiti, where the two were married on Oct. 4, 2004. Provatas kept the legal proceedings fresh and filed paperwork as needed.
After more than a year in Haiti, Jean was ready for his visa, but the U.S. Consulate in Port-au-Prince refused to issue it.
“No one told me why it was refused,” Jean said. “I was just told that I could not get one.”
The process was repeated in 2006 and in 2007.
Wrongly accused
In 2008, Holly asked for help from the office of U.S. Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman, I-Conn. Lieberman’s office contacted Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and looked at the records against Jean. They found a note in Jean’s file concerning an unsubstantiated claim of smuggling.
“After several years, it was determined that they had wrongly accused this Wesley Jean,” Provatas said.
A letter to Lieberman from Peter Edge, acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, called the mistake unfortunate.
“Research into law enforcement records … revealed that there were two Wesley Jeans in the system and that both of their records had been combined into one case file,” Edge wrote, adding that having been made aware of the error, his agency would work diligently to correct the problem.
But corrections in a large bureaucracy take time. Nearly 18 months went by before Jean got word he could come home.
Claudia English, of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Boston Field Division, refused to comment on how the files were commingled, or why it took more than a year to fix the problem.
On Jan. 12, 2010, Jean stood outside in the afternoon sun and looked at the house where he lived in Port-au-Prince. He remembered thinking of his mother, who had died, of Holly and of his children. He had been gone for more than seven years, and his children were no longer babies.
“I felt they were slipping away from me,” he said. “Perhaps, I thought, I would never see them again.”
Earthquake
And then the Earth began to move. It was an earthquake, and Jean watched his house crumble into dust.
“People were screaming, dying,” he said. “It was horrible.”
“We didn’t know what happened to him,” Holly said. “There was no way to communicate. He could have been dead because of a mistake in some paperwork.”
Like a million others in Haiti, Jean was reduced to living in a tent. Unlike many, however, Jean did what he knew best. He worked. Jean worked with the United Nations as an interpreter, and helped many people as the crisis unfolded. He had fled Haiti because of the terrible conditions, and now he found himself in conditions far worse than he could have imagined.
As 2010 progressed into spring, and then summer, Jean kept himself busy with his relief work.
“I could help people,” he said. “Doing nothing was not an option.”
Back in Connecticut, Holly continued to work with Provatas.
“We worked, but you couldn’t get anyone to work with you,” Holly said. “ICE took their time fixing the problem, but wouldn’t explain anything to us.”
By November, they thought he would be home for Thanksgiving, but that passed. They hoped for Christmas, but a last-minute glitch stopped him. Finally, on New Year’s Eve, Jean stepped aboard a plane and, without looking back, left Haiti for the second time in his life.
Back in Connecticut
Today, Jean and Holly are trying to put their lives back together. Jean has a job back at the casino, but at a lower level.
“It took me a few years to work up to where I was when they took me,” he said, referring to Immigration and Customs Enforcement. “I must now work back up again. That’s OK. I will do it.”
Still, Jean lives with a fear he cannot seem to shake. Each morning, he wonders if someone will be waiting to put him in a car and take him to a prison.
“It’s something I live with,” he said. “I am always afraid.”
Provatas has told him that cannot happen now because he has a green card, but Jean is unsure.
“I didn’t believe you could be taken away,” he said. “But I was wrong.”
For the present, they are together, but their life is on hold. Jean is trying to get to know his children with Holly.
“I am their father, and I need to be there for them,” he said.
They are living with Holly’s parents, and between legal bills and the debt accrued trying to bring him back, they will be struggling for some time.
“I still think this is the best place to live,” Jean said. “I love it here, and I will stay here and build a good life.”
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