Title 42 and Human Rights Abuses of Haitian Migrants at the Texas Border

Mary T. Bassett, MD, MPH, is director of the François-Xavier Bagnoud (FXB) Center for Health and Human Rights and FXB Professor of the Practice of Health and Human Rights in the department of Social and Behavioral Sciences at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

With more than 30 years of experience devoted to promoting health equity and social justice, both in the United States and abroad, Dr. Bassett’s career has spanned academia, government, and not-for-profit work. From 2014 through summer 2018, she served as commissioner of the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, where she made racial justice a priority and worked to address the structural racism at the root of the city’s persistent gaps in health between white New Yorkers and communities of color. Dr. Bassett also led the Department’s response to Ebola, Legionnaires’ disease and other disease outbreaks.

Early in her career, she served on the medical faculty at the University of Zimbabwe for 17 years, during which time she developed a range of AIDS prevention interventions. Building on this experience, she went on to serve as associate director of health equity at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Southern Africa Office, overseeing its Africa AIDS portfolio. After returning to the United States, she served on the faculty of Columbia University, including as associate professor of clinical epidemiology in its Mailman School of Public Health.

In 2002, Dr. Bassett was appointed deputy commissioner of Health Promotion and Disease Prevention at the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene. In this role, she led the division responsible for New York City’s pioneering tobacco control interventions and food policy, including the nation’s first calorie posting requirements and trans fat restrictions. Her signature program was the launch of District Public Health Offices in several neighborhoods long harmed by racial/ethnic and economic health inequities. These offices now lead targeted, multi-sectoral, multi-agency strategies to reduce excess burden of disease. From 2009 to 2014, Dr. Bassett served as program director for the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation’s African Health Initiative and Child Well-Being Prevention Program.

Dr. Bassett’s many awards and honors include the prestigious Frank A. Calderone Prize in Public Health, a Kenneth A. Forde Lifetime Achievement Award from Columbia University, a Victoria J. Mastrobuono Award for Women’s Health, and the National Organization for Women’s Champion of Public Health Award. She has also been elected a member of the National Academy of Medicine. For many years she served as an associate editor of the American Journal of Public Health. Her recent publications include articles in The Lancet and in the New England Journal of Medicine addressing structural racism and health inequities in the United States.

Dr. Bassett grew up in New York City. She received a BA in History and Science from Harvard University, an MD from Columbia University’s College of Physicians and Surgeons (serving her residency at Harlem Hospital), and an MPH from the University of Washington.

Michele Heisler, MD, MPA is the medical director at Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) and a professor of internal medicine and of public health at the University of Michigan.

Dr. Heisler’s research has applied rigorous health services research approaches to investigate and promote health equity and human rights among populations experiencing health disparities. She has pioneered methods, programs, and evaluation tools that improve health by promoting individual human rights and activating low-income individuals to effectively manage their health and health care. She has also applied cutting-edge research methods to investigate health impacts of human rights violations and advocate for remedies. She has authored more than 250 peer-reviewed studies in medical and public health journals and is an elected member of the Association of American Physicians.

Dr. Heisler received her MD degree from Harvard University and MPA degree from Princeton University’s School of Public and International Affairs. She completed residency training in internal medicine and health services research training as a Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholar at the University of Michigan. Before medical training, Dr. Heisler was in charge of human rights and poverty programs in Latin America and the Caribbean as a program officer at the Ford Foundation.

Guerline M. Jozef is a woman on the move with a passion to serve her community.

An activist, servant, mother, sister, niece, and wife, Ms. Jozef dedicates her life to bring awareness to issues that affect us all locally and globally such as immigration, socioeconomic and racial justice, domestic violence, child sexual abuse, and other human right abuses. Ms. Jozef is the creator of “Tales from the US-MEXICO borderlands and Beyond”, an Immigration information session that focuses on Black immigrants at the borderlands and beyond. She is also a co-creator of “Faith in Action and Immigration Justice Movement” in Southern California, a 4-part immigration program for impacted communities and allies.

Ms. Jozef is the Co-Founder and Executive Director of the Haitian Bridge Alliance, Inc. (HBA) also known as “The BRIDGE”, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization that advocates for fair and humane immigration policies and provide migrants and immigrants with humanitarian, deportation defense, legal, social services, with a particular focus on black migrants from the Caribbean and Africa, the Haitian community, women & girls, LGBTQA+ individuals, and survivors of torture and other human rights abuses. The organization work to elevate the issues that Black migrants are facing to build more solidarity and collective movement toward policy change. Concerning families in detention, HBA often plays the role of first responders and works with various organizations and partners to provide culturally informed assistance including country conditions, translation and interpretation, communication with the families, and referrals to legal service providers.

Ms. Jozef is also the Co-Founder of the Black Immigrants Bail Fund, a national project of the Haitian Bridge Alliance (HBA) and African Bureau for Immigration and Social Affairs (ABISA) with support of other Black-led organizations in response to the High bond given to Black Immigrants from the Caribbean and Africa. BIBF provides free assistance and relief to black immigrants in pursuit of Liberation and Justice. Our commitment is to eradicate the mass incarceration of black immigrants and level the playing field of equity in due process, transforming one life at a time.

In 2012, Ms. Jozef started FYI (For Your Inspiration) Radio located in California with correspondents in Africa and South Korea to give a voice to the voiceless coast to coast and around the world. Her motto in life “Anpil Men Chay Pa Lou” – a proverb in Haitian Creole that translates to ‘many hands lighten the load.’

Joelle Julien is a child of Haitian migrants and Ph.D. candidate in socio-cultural Anthropology at University of California, Los Angeles. Her research interests and advocacy work lie at the intersection of racialization and migration. Her dissertation examines Haitian migrant experiences with racialized immigration policies in the Americas.

Sarah Kimball, MD is a board-certified internist and is an Assistant Professor at Boston University School of Medicine. Dr. Kimball has a expertise in immigration-informed medical care, where she has helped to research and build health systems that are responsive to the needs of im/migrant patients. She is currently the Director of the Immigrant & Refugee Health Center (IRHC) at Boston Medical Center, a comprehensive medical home that addresses the barriers that immigrants face to being holistically healthy. She is an associate editor at the Journal of Immigrant and Minority Health, with an expertise in Health Services Research.

Diego Piña Lopez currently works as the program director for Casa Alitas Shelter for asylum seekers, most of whom are Central American. He is also a third-year Ph.D. student at the Mel and Enid Zuckerman College of Public Health. He hopes to explore health disparities affecting asylum seekers in the United States.

The Casa Alitas Program serves migrant families who have left their home countries to escape violence and poverty. We provide hospitality and humanitarian aid, medical services, short-term shelter and help to reunite with family members in the U.S.

Dr. Marie Plaisime is an FXB Health and Human Rights Fellow and National Science Foundation (NSF) post-doctoral fellow. Her research investigates racial bias training in medical education and clinical practice, race-based medicine, algorithmic bias, and health policy. She applies critical quantitative, computational, & mixed methodologies to detect, examine, and quantify how structural racism in medicine jeopardizes healthcare delivery, access, and quality.

She completed her PhD in Medical Sociology at Howard University and is a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) Health Policy Research Scholar (HPRS). Her professional experiences include research at the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC), National Institutes of Health (NIH), and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). Marie received her MPH from the Drexel University Dornsife School of Public Health.

Noah Schramm (he/him) is the Project Coordinator for the Florence Project’s Border Action Team, which provides free legal services and critical information to migrants at the Arizona-Sonora border. Noah first joined the Florence Project in 2017 as a legal assistant for the organization’s detention and direct representation teams. He began his current role in February 2021 after obtaining his master’s degree from the London School of Economics and Political Science in International Migration and Public Policy. In addition to years of experience doing legal advocacy for asylum seekers at the US-Mexico border in both detained and humanitarian contexts, Noah has also worked as a community organizer and researcher.