By: Mary Mostert, Analyst, Original Source (www.originalsources.com)
March 31, 2000
Yesterday Al Gore said that "U.S. Immigration laws may not be broad enough" to deal with the Elian Gonzalez case and he "endorsed legislation that would give the boy, his father and several other family members permanent resident status in the United States."
Actually, what Gore is recommending is passage of an ex post facto law to legalize a kidnapping. An Ex Post Facto Law is a law passed after an offense is committed or a situation has developed which addresses the "offense" or situation or crime, an provides a penalty for it. Such a law is in direct violation of the U.S. Constitution (Art. 1, Sec. 9) which forbids ex post facto laws.
The ex post facto legislation contemplated is co-sponsored by Democratic Senator Bob Graham of Florida and Republican Bob Smith of New Hampshire. Gore said, "From the very beginning, I have said that the Elian Gonzalez case is at heart a custody matter. It is a matter that should be decided by courts that have the experience and expertise to resolve custody cases -- with due process, and based on Elian's best interests.
Had anyone in the Clinton Administration actually been interested in Elian’s best interests the child would have been put on an airplane and flown back to Cuba to his father and obviously adoring grandmothers back in November. This is, as both CNN and NY Times pointed out, really not about what’s best for Elian. It’s about who gets the 800,000 Cuban American votes in Florida.
"Mr. Gore's statement, the most definitive he has made in the case, is certain to appeal to Florida's 800,000 Cuban-Americans, who could swing the electorate in November in the nation's fourth-largest state," the NY Times observed.
"With 25 electoral votes, Florida is a critical November battleground and Gore has vowed to contest the state despite its generally Republican leanings, and the support Bush gets from his brother, Florida Gov. Jeb Bush," CNN concluded.
And, to try to get the votes of that Cuban Community and the Cuban-born Mayor of Miami who has promised to defy the U.S. government, which has extended its deadline for compliance with the federal court's judgment three times - each time pandering to those holding Elian. No one in America has the legal, or moral, right to decide Elian's fate or to continue to hold him here against the wishes of his father. If the father were proved to be unfit, the next in line would be his grandparents - not a great uncle with an arrest record.
Even if the US Congress defies the US Constitution and passes an Ex Post Facto law to take Elian away from his father, eventually the U.S. Supreme Court would have to declare the law unconstitutional. Everyone involved knows there simply at present IS no law which allows the federal government OR any state government, not even a government like Florida’s which appears to be run mostly by and for an immigrant population, to seize a six year old and hold him because they don’t like the politics of the country he was born in.
Under current law, as Gregory Craig , the attorney for Elian’s father has said, "The only person who speaks for Elian is his father. Juan Miguel Gonzalez is ready at a moment's notice to come to the United States – with other members of his family – to be reunited with his son. He needs only to be told that, when he comes here, he will be given custody of his son. … Juan Miguel Gonzalez loves his son. No one on the face of this planet cares more about the well-being and welfare of Elian Gonzalez than does his father. The circumstances that now surround Elian's life in Miami – including the decision to allow camera crews into Elian's bedroom, the decision to permit a network news program to film a two-day interview with Elian without the father's permission, and the decision just last night to parade Elian in front of demonstrators in the streets of Miami – make clear that Elian's best interests lie with his father. Can anyone doubt that the time is long overdue for this boy to be reunited with his father?"
Well, as a matter of fact, apparently Al Gore, Bill Clinton, the U.S. Attorney General, Janet Reno, the Mayor of Miami and a number of supposedly conservative Republicans in the US Congress don’t actually want Elian reunited with his father. If they did, it would have been done months ago before they encouraged and inflamed the Cuban voters of Florida into thinking that government sponsored kidnapping was a new American right.
Almost three months ago I wrote on this subject that "If Elian were an American Child, We'd Be Bombing Havana to Get him Back to his Father." Four months now have gone by and this little child STILL has not had the opportunity to be comforted by his father. He was immediately placed in the home of a paternal great-uncle who has four drunk-driving arrests on his record, while the INS made a big show of forcing the father in Cuba to "prove" his paternity before letting Elian go back.
If the INS had some reason to doubt that Juan Miguel Gonzalez was the child’s father, and wasted weeks of time in December and January to force him to "prove" his paternity, what was INS thinking of when they placed Elian in the custody of uncle in Miami who was a member of the political group paying the legal fees to try to take the child away from his father? If Juan Miguel Gonzalez was not the child’s father, then Lazaro Gonzalez is not even RELATED to Elian. Why did the INS immediately put Elian into Lazaro’s hands when the man had a drunk-driving record and would be in the same household, apparently, with cousins who had a 13 year prison sentence hanging over them?
In the upside-down world in which we are now living, thanks to the Clinton Administration, a number of Republican political leaders and a supportive media, the American people have been strongly urged to believe that a woman who was living with a smuggler she was not married to while her ex and her child’s grandmothers were mostly raising her child is some kind of a heroine because she took the child on a dangerous trip at the insistence of the smuggler boyfriend who charged the thirteen passengers in the leaking boat $1000 a head for the 90 mile boat ride to Florida. If this was all about freedom and righteousness, why did that man drown with something like $13,000 in his pocket? For that kind of money, he could have repaired the boat at least.
Freedom? Elian is not free if he is denied his father's and his grandparents' love and the religious and secular education his father chooses for him. What a group of political activists in Miami think has nothing to do with the issue. It’s what the child’s father thinks that is critically important. In the January 5th analysis I wrote:
Today's Washington Post reports: "Anticipating a decision by the Immigration and Naturalization Service to send 6-year-old Elian Gonzalez home to Cuba, U.S. officials have asked the Cuban government to help arrange for the boy's father to travel to Miami to pick him up."American authorities hope the appearance of the father, Juan Miguel Gonzalez, and his clear desire to take custody of his son, will limit a legal and emotional backlash from Florida's large Cuban-American community, according to a U.S. official. Elian has become a cause célèbre among militant exiles opposed to Cuba's Communist government who have demanded that he be allowed to remain with relatives in this country."
…"While the Clinton administration initially appeared tempted to use the controversy to highlight its antipathy toward Castro's government, saying it proves how desperate Cubans are to flee, it quickly decided to distance itself from what it saw as a position of questionable legal merit. In recent weeks, senior administration officials have described the case as purely an INS matter.
"Elian's current status is that of an INS parolee who, under immigration law applicable only to Cubans, is eligible to apply for permanent U.S. residence in one year. But since he is underage, his legal representative would have to apply for him - or decline to make such an application.
With Gore’s announcement, of course, the Clinton Administration has cleverly been able to take both sides. Gore is clearly on the side of those attempting to take the child away from his father. Clinton is pretending to support the law of the land, while simultaneously clearly encouraging the Cuban Americans in Florida to take up his old tactics of civil disobedience to get what they want.
At this point those seeking to take control of Elian for their political purposes (to defy the helpless Cuban government under Fidel Castro), have lost every legal battle. There simply IS no law on the books in America which can even be twisted to legalize the kidnapping of a child by a political activist organization. The next step, naturally, is increased activism and civil disobedience. So now we are seeing articles about the "right" of the Florida government under Jeb Bush, to defy the US Marshals who may have to come in to implement the court decisions. Shades of George Wallace and his defiance of the National Guard coming into Alabama to enforce the Civil Rights laws!
We have a possible war brewing between Taiwan and China and a threatened outbreak of a new war over the Albanians wanting a portion of Montenegro to add to their "greater Albania" prize - Kosovo, and we are all totally engrossed in the Elian Gonzalez situation.
As I said in January, if this shoe was on the other foot, and Elian was an American child who had been taken from his father in Miami and taken to Cuba in a leaking boat by his mother’s smuggler boyfriend, we’d have been bombing Havana by now if Fidel Castro and his bureaucrats failed to send the child back home where he belonged.
It will be interesting to see what kind of delay the Clinton Administration can devise to keep Elian’s father from getting to the US and what kind of excuse everyone will use when, and if, he ever manages to get here, to continue allowing the child to be manipulated for political reasons.
To comment: mmostert@originalsources.com
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