U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and a gaming giant are trading nasty accusations over foreign crews on a cruise-to-nowhere from Miami.
Resorts World Bimini has gone to federal court to resume operating the night cruises after CBP halted them, arguing that for several decades CBP has issued numerous rulings under the Passenger Vessel Services Act (PVSA) allowing non-coastwise vessels to run the cruises so long as they enter international waters. Crews for the most part were neither U.S. citizens nor permanent residents, the company said in court filings.
The 1886 law, the passenger vessel version of the Jones Act, bans foreign-flag vessels from carrying passengers between U.S. ports.
CBP has a “case of institutional amnesia,” according to Resorts World, part of Malaysia-based Genting Group, which operates casinos and resorts worldwide and is developing a resort in the Bahamas. Relying on CBP’s assurances and prior rulings, it began cruises on the foreign-flagged BiminiSuperFast in mid-September. But in October, CBP said it couldn’t operate because of the Immigration and Nationality Act, a law Resorts World said CBP never cited before.
The cruises stopped in late November, and the company said the losses are “incalculable,” and it needs the cruises to meet its financial commitments, which include a 10-year lease at the Port of Miami.
The agency said Resorts World wants the court to allow it to violate federal immigration law so the company can try “to make more money by illegally paying lower wages to non-U.S. citizens on cruises-to-nowhere.”
CBP said it has consistently ruled that such cruises must be operated by crewmembers entitled to work in the U.S., and any damage the company claims “is due solely to their own bad business decisions and apparent ignorance of federal law.”
CBP also said in filings that Genting originally planned daily cruises between Miami and Bimini, which are running. But it was having trouble getting approval for a dock in Bimini to eliminate the need for tenders, which can’t operate in rough seas, CBP said. Resorts World then raised the possibility of a cruise-to-nowhere from Fort Lauderdale, Fla., and CBP told them crews with D-1 visas were not allowed.
The “irreparable harm” Resorts World faces “is not the result of ‘bad business decisions,’ ‘ignorance of federal law,’ or any of the other shrill accusations that permeate CBP’s opposition,” the company said. Rather, it will suffer “because it relied — to its detriment — on CBP’s longstanding interpretation” of PVSA, which makes an exception for Puerto Rico, Canadian vessels and cruises-to-nowhere.
U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, in Washington, D.C., was considering the case in January.
— D.K. DuPont
