Dominican Republic Expels Nearly 11,000 Haitians in 1 Week

Dominican Republic soldiers close a border gate on a Haitian man who was hoping to cross into Dajabon, Dominican Republic, on Nov. 19, 2021. Matias Delacroix/AP Photo

The Dominican Republic has removed nearly 11,000 Haitians living illegally in the country within the past week after vowing to reduce what it says are excessive illegal immigrant populations in the Caribbean nation.

Between Oct. 1 and Oct. 7, approximately 7,591 people were deported and 3,323 repatriated, according to the country’s government.

All of the individuals removed were Haitian, it said.

The country’s government last week announced its plan to deport up to 10,000 illegal Haitians every week due to what officials said was an “excess migrant population that is perceived in Dominican communities.”

While Haiti and the Dominican Republic are located on the same island of Hispaniola, the latter has been plagued by a rise in armed gang violence, sexual assaults, home invasions, and murders following a 2021 earthquake and the assassination of President Jovenel Moise in July 2021.

The situation in Haiti further deteriorated in March of this year when armed gangs attacked the country’s two biggest prisons, helping thousands of inmates escape, and took control of at least 80 percent of key roads in the nation’s capital of Port-au-Prince.

A U.N.-backed mission led by Kenyan police that began in Haiti earlier this year as part of efforts to quell gang violence and restore order is currently battling with a lack of funds and personnel.

In the meantime, more than half a million people have left Haiti as the humanitarian crisis has worsened, with most of them fleeing to the Dominican Republic, according to the U.N. International Organization for Migration.

Amid the surge in illegal immigrants, the island has seen its schools, clinics, and hospitals overwhelmed.

While announcing the Dominican Republic’s deportation and repatriation plan last week, the director general of migration, Vice Adm. Luis Rafael Lee Ballester, stressed that everything would be done with “respect for human rights, with prudence and with proportional use of force” as proposed by the country’s National Defense and Security Council, headed by President Luis Abinader.

The deportations would be carried out in accordance with local law, the government said, noting that the plan would initially focus on different neighborhoods and sectors of the National District, the province of Santo Domingo, Santiago, and La Altagraci.

However, the deportation plan has been widely condemned by human rights groups, including the Dominican-based National Coalition for Migrations and Refugees, which says the mass deportations have led to an increase in abandoned children across the Dominican Republic.

Elsewhere, Haiti’s foreign minister, Dominique Dupuy, has criticized the move, writing on the social media platform X: “The brutal scenes of roundups and deportations that we are witnessing are an affront to human dignity.

“We strongly condemn these dehumanizing acts and demand respect and justice.”

Haitian Prime Minister Garry Conille, who was appointed in May by a transitional council to lead the country, has also called the mass deportations “a violation of the fundamental principles of human dignity.”

Reuters and The Associated Press contributed to this report.