Live
Audio Only
Tens of thousands of people who did not register in the Regularization Plan for Foreigners in the Dominican Republic could face a deportation processes, while many others have simply decided to return their country, which in 99 percent of cases is Haiti.
The International Organization for Migration released a report Tuesday in which its field teams interviewed 1,133 individuals, corresponding to 349 households, who had crossed the border under varying conditions.
RELATED: Haitian-American Author: Deportations 'State-Sponsored Open Season
According to the international agency, 665 people (almost 59 percent), said they had chosen to return to Haiti, while 408 people (36 percent) said that they had been deported by different entities, including the military, police, immigration officials and civilians.
Saint Soi (R), 35, says he has lived in Dominican Republic, since he was seven. He registered in the regularization plan, but didn’t have the means to obtain all the requested documents. Without papers, he couldn’t send his children to school in the Dominican Republic and could face deportation.
In 2013, the Dominican President Danilo Medina announced a new special naturalization process for undocumented "foreigners" and their children born in the Dominican Republic, the law caused a lot of controversy since it could strip Dominican citizenship from nearly 200,000 children born over the last 84 years to Haitian immigrants.
According to official sources, only 290,000 of the estimated 450,000 people eligible filed the appropriate paperwork with the government.
Local press has reported that fear among Haitian descendants is widespread, as they try to find out about their fate under the new citizenship rules that may force many who have lived in the Dominican Republic for years to leave, generating one of the worst migration crisis in the Caribbean country's history.
Meanwhile, the Haitian government has asked the IOM and the international community to support its efforts in identifying, registering, and assisting the returnees, who may include people at risk of statelessness.
In the past weeks, the nine crossing points at the countries’ shared border have recorded an increasing activity, officials says.
Meanwhile, the Organization of American States (OAS) has sent mediators to meet with authorities and civil society and private sector representatives in Haiti.
Since the law was announced two years ago, some 41,200 Haitians voluntarily returned to their country and nearly 17,000 have been deported. Human rights activists say this law just shows the Dominican Republic's long history of discrimination against Haitians.
Newsletter
