The Dominican Republic has strongly denied allegations that citizens of Haitian descent have been arbitrarily and illegally deported to Haiti following the government’s implementation of legislation designed to document and regularise the country’s population.

It has, however, conceded that there have been “isolated cases” of people being stopped and searched before being taken to the border – and even, on at least one occasion, moved across it.



Two years ago, the country’s constitutional court used a retroactive reinterpretation of the law to strip thousands of Haitian descent of Dominican citizenship. It ruled that while anyone born in the Dominican Republic between 1929 and 2010 was entitled to citizenship, those born to parents who were in the country as undocumented migrants were not.

Previously, all children born in the Dominican Republic, except those considered to be in transit, such as the children of foreign diplomats, were granted citizenship. This included hundreds of thousands of children born to immigrants, once their birth was registered.

Dominicans of Haitian descent denied a right to nationality – video Guardian

Following the controversy generated by the 2013 ruling, the government of President Danilo Medina introduced a naturalisation law allowing those whose birth was never registered in the Dominican Republic to apply for residency permits as foreigners. After two years, they can apply for naturalisation. It also brought in a registration plan to enable undocumented workers to obtain visas to stay in the country for two years.



Josué Fiallo, senior adviser to the Dominican presidency, said that 41,200 people – the majority of them Haitian – had voluntarily left the country between the 17 June deadline for registration and the end of last week.

Although Fiallo insisted no Dominicans of Haitian descent had suffered arbitrary deportations, Human Rights Watch has accused the military and immigration authorities of “repeatedly profiling” such people, of trying to discourage them from registering, and of detaining and forcibly deporting them even when they have valid documents.

Others have also recorded instances of intimidation and deportation, while the UN working group of experts of people of African descent last week called on the government to take steps to prevent arbitrary deportations and adopt measures to address allegations of racial profiling during deportations of people of Haitian descent.

Fiallo said that the Dominican authorities had no intention of arbitrarily deporting people, but conceded there had been “isolated cases and events” where official protocol had not been followed.

“We have had situations – very unfortunate situations, into which we are opening investigations – where some public officials have been getting involved in practices that are not allowed and which we, as a government, do not back,” he said.



“Some people have actually been subject to stop-and-search and some of them have even been moved to the border. These are isolated cases and events and in some incidences where the Dominican authorities have done this, the government has taken notice of it and has taken steps.”

Fiallo said that in February, some members of the army had become confused over the deadlines for registration and regularisation and wrongly stopped a bus and sent it across the border.

He added: “Within 24 hours, it was immediately solved and the bus was allowed to cross back into Dominican territory.”

Fiallo said that the government had repeatedly called for NGOs and those working on the border to provide evidence to support their allegations of forced deportations, but that its efforts to investigate had been stymied by the use of anyonymous testimony.

“How are we going to investigate and how are we going to establish responsiblity if this is not brought to us?” he said.

He flatly denied that government-sanctioned arbitrary deportations were occurring, saying: “It’s very easy to go and sit on the border and wait and see if we are carrying out these deportations. It is not happening.”

Fiallo added that apart from the case involving the military and another concerning a church group in the southwest of the country, the government had not recorded a single incidence of such practices.

“This is not a very possible situation because President Medina issued a direct order not only to the army, to the police and to the immigration officers but also to civilian authorities that, first of all, the only way a person can be deported is following a protocol that has been established for some time and which requires an immigration official to verify each person biometrically through a database,” he said. “If a person has not been registered biometrically and if the data is not there, a deportation order cannot be issued.”



The Haitian government has accused its neighbour on the island of Hispaniola of creating a humanitarian crisis through its policies. On Wednesday, the Haitian authorities said that thousands of Dominican-Haitians had crossed the border with at least 2,000 of them stuck in four camps in the south of the country.



Earlier this month, the Haitian foreign minister, Lener Renauld, said the Dominican Republic was dumping undocumented Haitians at the border “like dogs”.

He said that the Haitian government had a right to protect their “brothers and sisters”.



“You can’t stop Haitians from reacting to the deportations, he told the Miami Herald. “We’ve denounced it because we see mothers arriving who don’t know where their children are, husbands who arrive at one border point and their wives were dropped off at another.”



But Fiallo countered that the Haitian government was trying to use the situation as an excuse for its failure to live up to its commitments to help provide documentation to Haitians in the Dominican Republic – and as a way of distracting attention from its long-delayed elections.

“What we are looking at now is the Haitian goverment trying to avoid the responsibility of taking care of their population in the Dominican Republic,” he said.



“They’re trying to create a sense that there is a humanitarian crisis in Haiti now because we are going to deport, even if we are not deporting yet. All this is because the Haitian authorities are trying to avoid the electoral process … They’re trying to create this false sense that we’re generating a humanitarian crisis that somehow is hindering their electoral process.”

Fiallo added that if people continued to leave the country voluntarily at the present rates, “there will be no need for us to start deporting people”. He did, however, say that anyone who had failed to register or who had recently crossed the border would “of course” be subject to deportation.



A 2012 survey by the Dominican Republic’s national statistics office found that there were 524,000 foreigners in the country and that they had had 244,000 children – of whom 208,000 were direct descendants of Haitians.



The government says that, because of its initiatives, a total of 288,486 undocumented workers have applied for regularisation, and 55,000 Dominicans of Haitian descent have been issued with a birth certificate or national ID. More than 8,755 undocumented people born to foreign parents in irregular immigration status have also registered for the process that guarantees citizenship within two years.

Fiallo admitted that the Dominican Republic did not have “a brilliant past” when it came to immigration policies and practice, but said the country was being unfairly vilified and judged on the basis of old atrocities, which include the so-called Parsley massacre of 1937, when thousands of Haitians were slaughtered in border areas.



“We are not proud of many things that happened in the past and we are very concerned about references to despicable acts that happened in the 1930s carried out by our dictator, and which keep coming up and up and up,” he said.



“We’re not proud of some of the things that happened in the 1970s and early 80s but what we have been seeing and what we have been reading is a judgment about the Dominican Republic for what has happened in the past, for which the current generation is not responsible and the people who are governing now are not. What we are doing now is not being judged fairly.”

This article was amended on 6 August 2015 to clarify the details surrounding the government initiative figures. The original stated that 288,486 people who had some documentation certifying them as Dominican nationals have applied for regularisation; in fact, this figure relates to undocumented workers. This has now been corrected. In addition, the 55,000 people issued with a birth certificate or national ID were all Dominicans of Haitian descent, a fact that has now been made clearer.





