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Half a million legally stateless Haitians in the Dominican Republic could be deported to Haiti this week, including those who were born there, after a court ruled two years ago that Haitian migrants and their descendants on the Dominican side of the two-nation island could be stripped of their citizenship.
Acclaimed Haitian-American novelist, Edwidge Danticat, has lashed out at mass deportations of Haitians in the Dominican Republic as “state-sponsored open season.”
Danticat, whose latest novel is called Claire of the Sea Light, told Democracy Now! that the legislation made Haitians vulnerable to both deportation and to violent attacks.
RELATED: Haitian Migrants Face Mass Deportations from the Dominican Republic
“This law not only now gives the Dominican government the power to deport mass amounts of people, but also creates an environment, a civil environment, that’s really hard for people, because, you know, others might feel now that we’ve had an increase of violence against Haitians and Dominicans of Haitian descent, because it seems like a state-sponsored open season on people who are considered Haitians by the way they look, primarily, or by their Haitian-sounding name,” she said.
Danticat’s comments come amid international outrage and increased scrutiny at the Caribbean nation’s deportations tactics and laws that would have detrimental effects on Haitian migrants and their descendants, some who have been in the republic as far back as 1929.
Earlier this week on Monday, Haitians and Dominicans teamed up to protest outside of the Dominican consulate in New York, holding signs with slogans such as “Say No to Racist Violence” and “Ethnic Cleansing.”
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Check this video I made of yesterday's protest in the Dominican consulate in NY https://t.co/mTFAoQnIW0 #YoTambienSoyHaiti #EsoNoSeHaceRD
— Bruja Quisqueyana (@radicallatina)
June 16, 2015
While the deadline for applying for work permits was Wednesday, only 300 of the 250,000 Dominican Haitians applying for them have received them and many fear that mass deportations of hundreds of thousand of de-nationalized people could shortly begin.
"I have nothing in Haiti," Jaquenol Martinez, a worker has been waiting to submit his application for over a year, told New York Times.
because immigrants everywhere need to be given amnesty #YoTambienSoyHaiti #ITooAmHaiti
— Bruja Quisqueyana (@radicallatina)
June 17, 2015
In 2013, when the law was passed, Danticat wrote a letter to the New York Times alongside other acclaimed authors Mark Kurlansky, Junot Diaz and Julia Alvarez, warning how the law could lead to genocide.
“One of the important lessons of the Holocaust is that the first step to genocide is to strip people of their right to citizenship,” they wrote.
