Jean says he waited until the truck disappeared from sight, then simply walked back into the Dominican Republic. He splashed across the shallow Pedernales River and trudged up into the green mountains, past cattle herds, fields of plantain trees and the rhythmically whooshing turbines of a wind farm, carefully avoiding the checkpoints manned by soldiers on the lookout for Haitians. After two days of walking, he reached the palmwood shack, where Lamour and the children were waiting, with no idea where he had gone. They rushed to embrace him. Then they gathered their things and left.

At first, Jean and Lamour thought they might be able to stay in the Dominican Republic, resettling somewhere far enough from Los Patos that they could avoid detection by the men who deported Jean. They went to Avila, a rural district near the Haitian border. That way, they figured, if the situation worsened, they could escape quickly. They tried to make a living by planting a crop of beans, but a severe regionwide drought withered the plants. They finally registered themselves in the regularization program. Confused about the rules and afraid of the authorities, they didn’t register their children.

As the June 17 deadline approached, rumors of impending violence grew louder. Dominican neighbors reminded Jean that it was almost time to go. One flashed a hatchet blade. Uncertain of what might happen to their children, Jean and Lamour finally gave up. Lamour’s mother, who felt confident she could register and stay, came from her home in the eastern Dominican Republic and picked up their 2-year-old daughter, Miliana — the only one of their children with serviceable documentation — and took her back east. Then the rest of the family set out for Haiti.

Jean and Lamour found a man with a truck. They asked him to take them and their few possessions through a clandestine border crossing north of Anse-à-Pitre, a shallow bend of the Pedernales River frequented by truckers and taxi drivers on both sides. They had only enough money to pay him to take them just past the river to the makeshift camp at Parc Cadeau.

In August, in the northwestern Dominican town Hatillo Palma, an accountant for the town council was raped, and she accused three unnamed haitianos of the crime. Soon after, a man of Haitian descent was hacked to death with a machete in the town. Several houses were destroyed, and hundreds of haitianos fled.

The episode signaled a new stage in the crisis: As the news of reprisals spread, so did the exodus. Across the country, haitianos loaded minibuses and trucks and headed toward the border. There they met deportees stepping off the Dominican Immigration Ministry’s yellow school buses. Together they walked through the concrete and metal gates into a country some of them knew only from their relatives’ stories.

Thousands more people of Haitian descent remain in the Dominican Republic, in legal limbo. According to the Dominican government, 240,000 people have registered under the regularization program to stay for one or two years, but a quarter of those people haven’t gotten their cards. The naturalization applications of other Dominican-born people are still being processed, which leaves thousands more who did not apply for citizenship at all and were accordingly stripped of it.