An ominous deadline passed last Wednesday for more than 200,000 stateless people of Haitian descent living in the Dominican Republic. A May 2014 law passed in the Dominican Republic provided for the re-issuance of nationality documents for some Haitian individuals born in the Dominican Republic and gave others the possibility of eventual citizenship. However, only a small number of eligible residents have been able to meet the documentation requirements before the deadline.

On June 19 the United Nations High Commission of Refugees appealed to the Government of the Dominican Republic to make sure people who the agency said were arbitrarily deprived of their nationality as a result of a 2013 ruling of the Dominican Constitutional Court will not be deported. Their residency status and citizenship rights are now uncertain. “The Court’s ruling and the subsequent regularization plan which gave individuals born in the Dominican Republic until mid-June to regularize their status, impacts tens of thousands of people”, explained a spokesman for the UNHCR, Adrian Edwards. “Most of them were born in the Dominican Republic and are of Haitian descent,” he added.

Long-term residents of the Dominican Republic of Haitian descent may be expelled and pushed into Haiti, a place many have never lived. They are not considered citizens of that country, either. Although many refugees migrated to the Dominican Republic after the earthquake in Haiti in 2010, the majority of ethnically Haitian residents affected are migrants and others who have lived in the Dominican Republic for much longer. The UNHCR has offered its support to the Dominican authorities to identify and register individuals who wish to stay in that country.

Haitians and Dominicans, who share their island, have a violent past. In 1937, under orders from dictator Rafael Trujillo, Dominican security forces killed Haitians near its border in what is referred to as the Parsley Massacre.

The Washington Post reported that the government actually described the current deportation actions as a “cleansing” of the country’s immigration rolls.The article quotes Cassandre Theano, a legal officer at the New York-based Open Society Foundations, who said comparisons between the Dominican government’s actions and the denationalization of Jews in Nazi Germany are justified. Denial of citizenship was one of the first acts perpetrated against Jews in Nazi Germany.

New York Mayor Bill de Blasio walked the line between his city’s hundreds of thousands of Dominican and Haitian immigrants when he spoke on Sunday in Washington Heights, the center of the Dominican community there, according to the New York Times.

Because they enjoy immigrant status in the United States, many Dominicans find it difficult to support a policy of deporting Haitians from the Dominican Republic. Manolo De Los Santos, a pastor, told the New York Times. “It is shameful. We are immigrants here. Why would we accept this in our own country?”