PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — Haiti’s foreign minister on Monday slammed a policy announced last week by the neighboring Dominican Republic to deport tens of thousands of migrants to Haiti. Gang violence is fueling a devastating humanitarian crisis in Haiti.
“The brutal scenes of roundups and deportations that we are witnessing are an affront to human dignity,” Haitian Foreign Minister Dominique Dupuis said on Program X. “We stand behind these inhuman acts. We strongly condemn this and demand respect and justice.”
The number of illegal immigrants soared last week after the Dominican Republic, which shares the Caribbean island of Hispaniola with Haiti, announced it would expel up to 10,000 illegal immigrants per week.
The Dominican Republic has deported more than 9,000 people so far this month, more than 7,000 of whom have been returned since Thursday, the country’s immigration agency said in a statement on Monday.
More than 4,900 of those people were Haitian, a Dominican Republic official told Reuters on condition of anonymity.
Dominican authorities said they are carrying out deportations with respect for human rights.
The Dominican government blames the unrest in Haiti for crime and security problems in the Dominican region of the island, and blames slow progress on international security missions mandated to help resolve the crisis in Haiti. He says he has lost his patience.
The United Nations has called on countries in the region to halt forced deportations of Haitians to their homelands in dangerous conditions.
If the Dominican Republic follows through with its plan, the number of deportations per year would jump from the more than 200,000 Haitians deported last year.
Dupuis said Dominica’s policies violate human rights standards and has alerted relevant international organizations.
Her statement followed an unverified video on social media that appeared to show a crowd running away from Dominican government officials near the popular tourist destination of Punta Cana.
Dominican media reported Monday that Haitian construction workers in the Dominican Republic are protesting to demand that their employers issue them work permits to avoid being deported.
William Charpentier, director of the Dominican Republic’s National Immigration and Refugee Agency, a rights-based private organization, told CNN on Sunday that deporting more than 1,000 people a day would give the immigration system more time to consider individual cases. He said it was too scarce to account for large numbers of people. The forced repatriation violated international law.
“We understand that the government has every right to deport people within its territory without documentation, but there are limits to this right,” he said.
In the United States, presidential candidate Donald Trump has also promised mass deportations and made false claims about Haitian immigrants in the town of Springfield, Ohio.
