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U.S. Virgin Islands become new goal for migrants

By ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published April 4, 2007

NORMAN ISLAND, British Virgin Islands - Abandoned by a smuggler on a pebbly beach, 49 hungry and thirsty migrants hid out for days amid a tangle of trees and brush. Then a scouting party returned with devastating news: They weren't in America.

The illegal migrants - 47 Haitians and two Dominicans, including two babies - were hoping they had reached the U.S. Virgin Islands.

Instead, they were dumped on Norman Island, one of the British Virgin Islands - 3 miles of open water short of U.S. soil, with nothing to get them there and no population to blend into.

"We gave them food and water, and over the next four days more of them came out of the bush," said Tom Warner, who usually tends to yachters at Pirates Bight Bar and Restaurant, the only business on uninhabited Norman Island. "The 1-year-old was definitely thirsty. ... I gave him a container of water, and that baby just wouldn't let go of it."

Once a way-station for pirates, the British Virgin Islands are increasingly attractive to Caribbean smugglers carrying illegal migrants.

Cubans are the elite migrants because the U.S. "wet-foot, dry-foot" policy allows them, but not others, to avoid deportation if they can reach U.S. soil.

From October through January, 126 Cuban migrants used the new route to reach the U.S. Virgin Islands - more than double the number that landed during the same period a year ago, said Coast Guard Capt. James E. Tunstall.

On Saturday, authorities detained 28 Haitian migrants, including a baby, who were wandering in bushes after being dropped off on St. Croix in the U.S. Virgin Islands by a boat.

The new route swings deep into the eastern Caribbean and runs northwest along the Leeward Island chain before heading to the British Virgin Islands. The migrants, mostly from Cuba, Haiti and the Dominican Republic, generally fly to Dominica, then hook up with smugglers who take them on chartered sailboats to U.S. territory at night, according to Chief Inspector St. Clair Amory of the Royal Virgin Islands Police Force.

Authorities are having a hard time choking off the new route because the distance between the U.S. Virgin Islands and the British Virgin Islands is as little as a mile in places.

As for the marooned Haitian and Dominican migrants who landed in late February, immigration authorities flew them back home within days.

"It's really hard on us because we know what they're running from ... but we've got our jobs to do," said Constable Stepphen Gilbert, who patrols the territory's 59 square miles of sea and shore. "We cannot keep them. But it's really hard, man, especially with the children."

[Last modified April 4, 2007, 01:30:24]