Thousands of Dominicans of Haitian descent and recent immigrants crowded the streets around the Ministry of the Interior in Santo Domingo on June 17 to register or acquire confirmation of their registration with the government’s regularization plan. Registration by the June 17th deadline offers relief from immediate deportation but does not guarantee that they will acquire residency unless they present all necessary documents in 45 days from the deadline.
People wait their turn inside the Dominican Interior Ministry building to register in the national regularization plan.
Tensions flare on June 17 as the midnight deadline to register in the national regularization plan looms and many of the thousands that showed up will not get a chance to register.
Sanu Bresil, 23, from Cabral, Dominican Republic photographed at the Fond Bayord School in Malpasse, Haiti where he staying along with other Haitians deported from Dominican Republic.
At left is Sunel Jean Joseph, 15, who was deported with his father. Both young men are effectively stateless. They both were born in Dominican Republic to parents also born there but now live in Haiti, where they don’t have citizenship or family.
A man fixes his shirt before getting photographed and fingerprinted as part of the registration process.
A worker in the Interior Ministry takes biometrics of a Dominican of Haitian descent registering with the government regularization plan.
Ana, 8 years old, is a resident of el Batey Naranjo in the eastern outskirts of Santo Domingo. It is a community of mostly Haitian descent founded as a labour camp for sugar cane cutters.
Batey Naranjo in the eastern outskirts of Santo Domingo is a community of mostly Haitian descent. Founded as a camp for Haitian sugar cane workers it is now marred in poverty and neglect. About 90 percent of the community of four thousand is of Haitian descent and despite some of the residents having their citizenship many, although rightful citizens, have not been able to register; rendering them stateless.
Here a man cools himself with ice as he waits to register for the regularization plan. Many of the people in line reported waiting for various days often sleeping in the streets.
Eighteen-year-old Luis Miguel was born in the Dominican Republic and could face immediate deportation because he was not registered with the Dominican Government at birth. Many children born in Bateyes are born to midwives and often not registered with the government to acquire their birth certificate.
A former sugar cane field outside Batey Naranjo. Sugar cane in the Dominican Republic suffered a steady decline over the 1980’s and 90’s but were decimated during Hurricane Georges in 1998 and were never replanted.
Sanu’s sister Mavena Bresil, 24, from Cabral, Dominican Republic was forcefully deported in December 2014. Despite being born and living her entire life in the Dominican Republic she was deported in December along with her son, Jean Vincent, 8, to a country in which she does not have citizenship or any connection.
Asnel Casten, 1, from Barahona, Dominican Republic sleeps where he is staying along with his two siblings, his mother and about 30 other Haitians deported from Dominican Republic just across the border in Malpasse.
Dajabón and its Haitian sister town of Ouanaminthe is one of the largest border crossings and in 1937 was the site of a genocide of 20,000 Haitians living in the Dominican Republic. The river that runs through it is aptly named Massacre River after bloody colonial battles that took place there in the 17th Century.
Officers of the border security division of the Dominican Military (CESFRONT) stop a woman who had tried repeatedly to cross into Dominican Republic at the Jimaní border with Haiti. Checkpoints like these are ubiquitous on all roads leading into the country from the border and an integral part of enforcing the new immigration laws.
Twice a week the gates are opened for Haitians to come into the Dominican Republic to buy goods at the market in Dajabón. Haiti has become the largest market for Dominican goods after the US.
Igamen Gistav (third from left) gets a ride from the Haitian border town of Ouanaminthe to a nearby town to start over again with her husband Josue and their sister’s child. They are one of the hundreds of self deportees who have already streamed back into Haiti fearing further violence in the Dominican Republic in the face of the new immigration laws.
Jose Manuel Gustavo reads a bible in creole while he waits outside the Interior Ministry in Santo Domingo. He waited in line for three days.
The scene at the Dajabón crossing on market day.
A motorcycle driver who makes a living ferrying goods and people across the border at the Dajabón Crossing.
Josue Inelis, 33, crosses into Haiti at the Dajabón crossing with all his belongings, fleeing discriminatory violence in the Dominican City of Santiago where he lived with his wife and children.
The birth certificate of Asnel Casten, 1, from Barahona, Dominican Republic who was deported with his mother and two siblings.
A deportee sleeps in one of the three classrooms of the Fond Bayord school in Malpasse, Haiti that have been appropriated as a halfway house for about 30 recent deportees.
A young girl with braids at the Fond Bayord School in Malpasse Haiti.
The Jimaní-Malpasse crossing.
“…how hard it is to become a man again when one has ceased to be a man." -The Lost Steps, Alejo Carpentier
On the dusty white banks of the Étang Saumâtre lake on the Haiti-Dominican Republic border 23 year-old Sanu Bresil wades out into the bright green water of the Étang Saumâtre lake with a fish trap he fashioned from a water bottle, hoping to catch a meal. Just a week before he was forcefully removed from his village in the DR and driven an hour and half to the border by uniformed men wielding knives and machetes. The men tore up his birth certificate and loaded him onto a bus bound for the border where he was left, unable to return to the Dominican Republic.
“I’ve never been to Haiti,” Sanu, told me, “I don’t know where to go.”
In 2013 a Dominican Supreme Court ruling stripped an estimated 200,000 Dominicans of Haitian descent of their citizenship leaving them essentially stateless. Under international pressure, the Dominican government extended a regularization opportunity to those affected, as well as recent Haitian migrants, that recently ended on June 17. That process, however, is believed by many to be marred by bureaucratic requirements too difficult for the humble Haitian community to produce.
For almost a century Haitians have been brought to the Dominican Republic to work the sugarcane fields. Many of them formed labor camps called Bateyes long ago, married and had children.
These communities, which form the backbone of agricultural labor and construction work across the Dominican Republic, are now in the crosshairs of deportation and discriminatory violence. Just a week past the June 17 deadline hundreds of Haitians who were unable to register for regularization were self deporting, fleeing discrimination. Furthermore, rural communities like Sanu’s are already being visited by authorities and civilians alike seeking to eject Dominicans of Haitian descent into a land they have never known.
