The Dominican Republic will soon reach the one-year mark in its effort to deport as many as 10,000 unauthorized Haitian immigrants per week—which would amount to more than half a million people a year. In unveiling the drive last October, President Luis Abinader’s office described the numerical target as an effort “to reduce the excessive migrant populations detected in Dominican communities” amid continued instability in Haiti, with which the Dominican Republic shares the island of Hispaniola. Approximately 246,000 Haitians have been deported since then, according to the International Organization for Migration (IOM); the Dominican government claims many are also leaving voluntarily, including 115,000 in just the first eight months of this year. Haitian officials have condemned the deportation campaign and likened it to ethnic cleansing, while activists and aid workers in the Dominican Republic have alleged multiple rights abuses, including lack of due process. Among the deported: unaccompanied children and new mothers taken from a hospital. The campaign is the latest targeting of people of Haitian descent in the Dominican Republic, as the Migration Information Source has examined. In the 1930s, as many as 30,000 Haitians were killed during the so-called Parsley Massacre, when soldiers forced people to say the Spanish word for parsley (“perejil”) to determine their origin; the tactic was also reportedly used in the current deportation drive. More recently, the Dominican Republic’s constitutional court in 2013 ended birthright citizenship for those of Haitian ancestry and did so retroactively, effectively stripping the citizenship from about 210,000 Dominicans of Haitian descent. The country has also built a wall along much of the 244-mile (390-kilometer) border between the nations, and deported hundreds of thousands of people in recent years. The Dominican Republic is home to about 500,000 Haitians and has been directly affected by Haiti’s collapse, which dates to 2021 when President Jovenel Moïse’s assassination created a power vacuum. Gangs have stepped into the void, and as of July controlled about 90 percent of Port-au-Prince. A UN-backed police mission led by Kenya has struggled to restore order. Dominican leaders have said they are struggling to respond to a crisis which has been ignored by the international community. Indeed, there has been little international support for people trying to flee Haiti. The Trump administration has moved to end Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for Haitians in the United States, which would allow more than 348,000 Haitians to be deported back to the country (the termination has been paused by a federal court amid ongoing litigation). Meanwhile, half of the residents in Haiti face food insecurity, and children account for as many as half of all armed group members. With little hope on the horizon, the country’s suffering is sure to continue. All the best, Julian Hattem
Editor, Migration Information Source
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