By Hogla Enecia Pérez and Frances Robles
Cage-like trucks fitted with iron bars that appear designed to carry livestock line up every morning at the border between Haiti and the Dominican Republic.
The vehicles at the Elias Piña border crossing are not loaded with cattle, but with Haitians being deported by Dominican immigration authorities. They include young men, pregnant women, unaccompanied children and some people who have never lived in Haiti.
Since October, more than 71,000 people have been deported to Haiti.
Rose-Mieline Florvil, 24, who lived in the Dominican Republic for less than a year, said immigration agents recently raided her house in Santiago, in the northern part of the country, one day before dawn and said something along the lines of “Black woman, come here.”
“I couldn’t run, because I’m pregnant,” she said.
The extraordinary wave of deportations — Dominican officials say the goal is 10,000 per week — reflects a stringent new immigration policy by a country with a complicated and racially charged history with Haiti.
The two nations share the island of Hispaniola, and the Dominican Republic, the far more prosperous of the two, has sounded increasingly loud alarms about shouldering the burden of what experts say is a failing state next door.
Dire problems in Haiti — surging gang violence, a health infrastructure in ruins and a government with no elected leaders and unable to reverse the country’s slide — have set off an exodus of people seeking security and livelihoods.
As a result, Haitian migrants are using an increasing share of Dominican government services, including public health, officials say.
Dominican authorities say they have had enough.
“The general feeling of the Dominican population is that we are providing social services greater than what the Dominican Republic is responsible for,” Foreign Minister Roberto Álvarez said in an interview, “and that the international community has left us alone to attend to Haitian needs.”
Since Haiti’s last president was assassinated more than three years ago, the country has been convulsed by gang violence that has left more than 12,000 people dead and forced nearly 800,000 from their homes. (Nearly 200 people were massacred over the weekend by a gang in one of Port-au-Prince’s poorest neighborhoods, according to the United Nations.)
Dominican officials say their country should not serve as an escape valve for a crisis the world has largely ignored. Riding a wave of nationalism, Dominican President Luis Abinader announced the stricter immigration policy in October.
Abinader said he had warned the United Nations that if the situation in Haiti did not improve, the Dominican Republic would take “special measures.”
In addition to the mass roundups, he said he would beef up controls on the border and deploy specialized units to crack down on the growing numbers of migrants and human traffickers, while respecting human rights.
“We don’t have to offer explanations to respect our immigration laws,” the president said.
But human rights organizations say the removals have been plagued with abuses and a lack of due process.
Eduardo Moxteya Pie, 29, who was born in the Dominican Republic to Haitian parents, said he had a police report showing that he had reported his national ID card, which proved Dominican citizenship, as lost.
Without the card, he was detained last month as he left his agricultural job and was taken to Haiti, where he lives in a shelter.
One 11-year-old boy at a migrant shelter in Haiti said he was caught during an early morning immigration raid on the house where he had been staying in a town near the border.
A 17-year-old said he had been shot in the leg by a Dominican immigration officer during a raid of his home.
While Dominican authorities have a right to control their border, human rights activists and deportees say immigration agents are sweeping Black people off the streets, regardless of their residency status.
Migrants have arrived in Haiti injured from beatings, and many others reported having been verbally harassed, said Laura d’Elsa, the protection coordinator for the United Nations’ International Organization for Migration, which helps run shelters along the border.
“Why are all these massive abuses taking place?” she asked. “It is extremely shocking to see, and the most extreme I have ever seen.”
Asked about accusations of mistreatment, the Dominican Republic’s Interior Ministry, which oversees immigration, requested questions in writing and then did not respond to them.
Álvarez said that of the babies delivered in public hospitals, the share born to Haitian mothers had increased to 40% in October from nearly 24% in 2019.
About 147,000 Haitian children are enrolled in school in the Dominican Republic, costing about $430 million a year, he said.
The country resents claims by critics that its immigration policy is “racist and xenophobic,” Álvarez said. “All the countries do it, and none are accused of that.”
Many experts stress that Haitians work in industries like construction and agriculture that buoy the Dominican economy.
But many Dominicans resent their presence.
“If the international community is not going to assume its responsibility, Dominicans are going to defend what’s ours, our space, our territory, our nation, our identity,” said Pelegrín Castillo, vice president of the Fuerza Nacional Progresista party, which has led the nationalist movement.
Eduardo A. Gamarra, an international relations professor at Florida International University who served as an adviser to a former Dominican president, said authorities there were right to feel that their international calls for help had gone unanswered.
“Anything really that happens in Haiti has a direct consequence on the Dominican Republic,” Gamarra said. “I don’t think that people really fully understand that.”
Comentários