Fort Allen: Migration, Empire, and Anticolonialism in the Caribbean

This paper engages with anticolonialism through the lens of Fort Allen, a U.S. military base in Puerto Rico that was temporarily repurposed as a detention facility for Haitian asylum seekers from 1981 to 1982. Dismissively labeled “boat people,” some of the tens of thousands of Haitians arriving at the time on overcrowded boats in southern Florida were forcibly transported from Florida to Puerto Rico. Targeting only asylum seekers from Haiti—where the first successful Black self-emancipation and independence movement in the region took place—this deliberate relocation to a remote colonial space symbolizes the intersection of anti-Black racism and the coloniality of migration. Drawing on a range of primary sources, including government documents, legal records, and personal narratives from the refugees themselves, I examine this short-lived experiment in offshoring refugee detention within the broader context of struggles against U.S. and European colonialism in the Caribbean. While often framed as a humanitarian response to a “refugee crisis,” the U.S. detention of Haitians at Fort Allen reveals enduring colonial dynamics that relegated racialized refugees to spaces of containment and exclusion. Deemed unworthy of asylum despite fleeing a violent political regime—one that the U.S. itself supported, in a continuation of its imperialist policies—most Haitians ultimately returned to the U.S., thanks to the solidarity of Puerto Rican lawyers, volunteers, and activists. Together, they mobilized anticolonial thought and practice to challenge U.S. migration and detention policies, linking local struggles for self-determination with broader transnational anticolonial movements, for which the Haitian Revolution provided the radical blueprint. Fort Allen thus serves as a critical site for understanding the intersection of migration, empire, and anticolonialism in the late 20th-century Caribbean.