Hearing Brief

Last week on Feb 4th I was able to attend a breifing about Haiti and what the U.S. should be doing about this situation. It was very intersting to hear what has been happening lately concerning those who were not injured during the quake but have lost almost everthing. I learned that over 1 million people have been displaced and that 55,000 Haitians have approved family relations in the U.S. but are not being allowed to enter the states to live with those family members. Many who have been working on gaining U.S. citizenship before the earthquake, have been given a Temporarty Protection Status (TPS), however, this has not been extended to their families. Others who have been waiting to be able to migrate their families here for a months and years, now have to even longer because the U.S. has stopped all migration of Haitians to the U.S. At the briefing, there were many policies discussed that the U.S. should impliment that would not require legislative action. A few of these being extending humanitarian parole to legal temporary visa holders and releasing Haitians with a TPS from detention. There has also been talk about using GTMO as a place to hold Haitians until an answer can be established. By doing this, the U.S. needs to create a lottery system similar to the '95 lottery for Cubans. This would limit the amount of unsafe Haitian attemps to cross the U.S. borders. The main purpose of this hearing was to draw more focus on those who have survived the earthquake and familes that have been displaced. Those who spoke highighted preventing the seperation of children from their families and preventing child traffiking.
About the logistics of the hearing, everyone who entered the room was given a packet of information with bios of each presenter, talking points, vocabualary, and recent articles relating to this issue. The packet was very beneficial thoughout the entire hearing when it came to understanding acroynms and what the laws that are currents in place state. I also noticed a girl sitting in the front row before the panel holding papers with big numbers written on them; 10, 5, and 3. I realized she was holding them up so that the speaker knew how much time they had left to talk before the next speaker would give their presentation. The whole hearing was fun flawlessly and almost perfectly to the time that they said it would. It was very interesting to sit in on this briefing and I look forward to following these events more closely in the news.
-Joanna