From [HERE] The Obama administration's immigration service, like its predecessor, is doing all it can to evade accountability.

After the US deported Wildrick Guerrier in late January, he was jailed by Haitian authorities, just as human rights groups had said he would be. Haiti regularly jails deportees who have criminal convictions in the US, for varying lengths of time. Guerrier was among a group of 27 Haitians "removed" from the US, the first group to be returned since the earthquake a year ago.

Beth Gibson is the assistant deputy director of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), which is the agency in the Department of Homeland Security responsible for carrying out these deportations or "removals". A few days after the Haitians were flown from Louisiana jails to Port-au-Prince, I asked Gibson what ICE could tell us about their treatment in Haiti. She declined to answer this, and other questions, despite repeated emails, even after indicating that answers were on the way.

In fact, all 27 deportees were jailed by Haitian authorities on their return, according to Rebecca Sharpless, director of the University of Miami Law School's Immigration Clinic (pdf). Deportation opponents had warned the US government about the potential consequences of deportees being confined to an overcrowded Haitian jail cell during a cholera epidemic. A little more than a week after his deportation, Guerrier was dead. "While in jail in Haiti, Guerrier suffered from cholera-like symptoms, including extreme vomiting and uncontrollable diarrhoea," according to the Florida Immigrant Advocacy Centre (FIAC). "He died shortly thereafter."

Guerrier had been serving an 18-month sentence for firearms possession when ICE took him into custody. He was 34 when he died, and had lived half his life in the United States. Contrary to popular perception, most of these deportees were lawful permanent residents, not "illegals". ICE has said that this year – even after the news of Guerrier's death – its goal is to deport 700 Haitian "criminal aliens", a term wielded to prevent the public from distinguishing murderers from traffic-law violators, and drug-users from people charged with crimes but never convicted.

Since ICE has said that these Haitians are being removed in the interest of "public safety", it makes sense to ask whether Haitians who do not pose any threat to public safety can assume they will not be deported before conditions in Haiti improve. ICE's Gibson would not answer that.

There are good reasons that these Haitians should not be deported at all; but if they're going to be, ICE has the authority to release them for now while imposing strict reporting requirements on them. Cubans, for example, who were subjected to indefinite detention before the supreme court ruled that ICE must release them until the US starts deportations to Cuba – some were incarcerated for decades before the ruling – now line up outside immigration offices to comply with reporting requirements.

So why does ICE refuse to allow the Haitians currently slated for deportation to remain in the US under strict monitoring conditions as it does with Cubans? Gibson declined to answer.

US immigration policy has discriminated against Haitians for a long time. In the 1980s and 1990s, Republican and Democratic administrations falsely claimed that Haitians sent back to paramilitary violence and dictatorship were not in danger. Now, asked whether ICE has any comment on the death of Guerrier, the ICE public affairs office has referred questions about what it terms "any alleged deaths that have occurred in Haiti" to the state department.

On 4 February, in response to an emergency petition from the Centre for Constitutional Rights and other groups, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights said that it "urges the United States to suspend the deportation of Haitians who are seriously ill or who have family ties in the United States."

Even before Guerrier died, human rights groups were asking ICE for a public statement clarifying the agency's policy on these removals at a time when Haiti is still struggling with devastated infrastructure, a cholera epidemic and political turmoil. ICE has been promising such a statement for weeks, so I asked Beth Gibson when ICE would provide it. She declined to answer.

No answers can help Wildrick Guerrier now, but it is not too late for the White House to change this inhumane policy before it kills others.