“If they send me there, I don’t know what I’ll do,” Yesenia Originé, who was born to Haitian parents in the Dominican Republic, said. Along with hundreds of thousands of others, she fears being round up and sent to Haiti — a country she’s never even been to — due to a clamp down on undocumented people in the Dominican Republic that will go into effect on Wednesday.
There are an estimated 500,000 undocumented people in the Dominican Republic, and while about half of them have registered with the government to avoid the prospect of being deported, many said that they were unable do so because the application process was encumbered with delays. Some believe that Dominican-born people of Haitian descent should not have to register with the government to obtain the right to continue living in the country.
“We tell people to resist and we will continue to press for their recognition as citizens,” said Beneco Enecia, of a community development organization called Cedeso. “They are Dominican, not Haitian.”
“The signals are clear,” he said in an interview with the New York Times. “The Dominican government is setting up logistics, placing vehicles and personnel to start the process of repatriation.”
These initial steps are disconcerting to many, even if they may be slight compared to the size of the Dominican-Haitian population.
Twelve buses, seven light trucks, and two ambulances have been readied and immigration agents and soldiers have been trained to help with the massive deportation campaign, according to Army Gen. Ruben Paulino who heads the Dominican Republic’s immigration agency.
“If they aren’t registered, they will be repatriated,” he told the Associated Press.
Paulino’s remarks contradict a statement made by the country’s interior minister, Ramon Fadul, who said that no mass deportations of sweeps would take place after the deadline for undocumented people to register with the government.
That leaves a lot of uncertainty over what will happen to those who do not register, either because they were unable or unwilling to do so.
Although the Domincan Republic and Haiti share a porous border on the island of Hispaniola, the two have long maintained fraught relations that have at times turned bloody.
In 2013, a court ruling in the Dominican Republic stripped citizenship from generations of Dominican-Haitians. People of Haitian descent who were born after 1929 effectively had their citizenship revoked. After an intensive international outcry. The government eased up on the ruling the following year by promising citizenship to those registered upon birth in the Dominican Republic, but obtaining formal registration — and recognition within the country — is still not a given for people of Haitian descent.
Tensions between the two countries came to a head in 1937 when the Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo slaughtered as many as 20,000 people who appeared to be Haitian. Called “The Parsley Massacre” because soldiers targeted those who were unable to roll the “r” in the word perejil, the Spanish word for parsley, the mayhem has left an indelible mark on Dominican-Haitians — and even non-Haitian Dominicans — who feel their looks might be suspect.
“People are concerned that they will be indiscriminately targeting people who are darker skinned, black Dominicans, Dominican Haitians and Haitian migrants,” Cassandre Theano of the Open Society Foundations said. “There is no science behind how they pick people.”
For 22-year-old Yesenia Originé, the uncertainty has seeped into fear. “There are rumours that on the 18th there will be a roundup at the batey,” she told the Guardian. “I’m afraid to go out on to the street.”