Saint Dominic. The Dominican Republic deported almost eleven thousand Haitians in the last week as the neighboring country struggles to manage that influx amid the siege of poverty and gang violence.
Last week the Dominican government announced that it would deport up to ten thousand Haitians per week due to an “excess” of immigrants. The announcement led Haitian officials to request an emergency meeting at the Organization of American States (OAS) scheduled for Tuesday afternoon.
“The forced and massive deportation of our fellow Haitians from the Dominican Republic is a violation of the fundamental principles of human dignity,” Haitian Prime Minister Garry Conille wrote on Tuesday on the social network X, formerly Twitter.
For their part, activists say the deportations are putting the lives of thousands of people at risk as Haiti struggles to contain rampant gang violence and emerge from deepening poverty.
A United Nations-backed mission led by Kenyan police that began earlier this year is suffering from a lack of funding and personnel.
Dominique Dupuy, Haiti’s foreign minister, condemned what she called “dehumanizing acts.”
“The brutal scenes of raids and deportations that we are witnessing are an affront to human dignity,” he wrote the day before in X.
Mass deportations have also caused an increase in the number of abandoned children in the Dominican Republic, warned activist William Charpentier, coordinator of the Migration Roundtable.
“They take their parents, or one of the parents, and leave the children who are even in school,” he told The Associated Press.
Charpentier called the mass deportations “a kind of persecution against black people, against everyone they presume to be Haitian” and said that even people with legal documents are being detained and deported.
Complaints about alleged extortion have also increased.
Ocicle Batista, a 45-year-old Haitian migrant who sells avocados in Santo Domingo, accused the soldiers of demanding between 230 and 330 dollars from immigrants to avoid deportation “even having the papers in their hand.”
“You come to work,” the woman who has been in the Dominican Republic for more than 20 years told AP.
The Dominican Director of Immigration, Luis Rafael Lee Ballester, said that human rights are being respected and that there is a proportional use of force in immigrant arrest operations and clarified that those who had documents and were detained did not have “reliable identification.” ” that justified their presence in the country.
From October 1 to 7, 7,591 people were deported and 3,323 repatriated, according to the government, all of them Haitians.
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