A Dominican national police officer assaulted by three immigration agents from his own country. A baby hanging outside the deportation truck held by the mother, locked inside, on the way to the border between the Dominican Republic and Haiti. A soldier hitting a young man on the ground in the face. Four men — two of them dressed in civilian clothes — dragging a boy across the ground as he screams and clutches his stomach in pain. Dominican immigration policy has been creating images that are difficult to look at for years.
But the team of Evidence Lab, Amnesty International has wanted not only to view them, but to analyze a dozen videos sent by citizens and human rights organizations. In a verification exercise, the organization has shown that these behaviors do not fall within a “margin of error,” as President Luis Abinader has defended several times. “We have been able to document abuses committed during immigration operations and we have called on the authorities to comply with their constitutional obligations,” explains Johanna Cilano, regional researcher for the international organization, by phone. “It is urgent that the Dominican authorities stop these collective expulsions and respect human rights. Abinader has the opportunity to rectify.”
In the Dominican Republic, there is a state of emergency regarding the rights of the Haitian immigrant community, Dominicans of Haitian descent, and all black people who immigration, police and military agents identify as Haitian. pic.twitter.com/xWhA78JeCf
— Organized Sugarcane Growers (@EsclavizadosRD) September 4, 2023
However, it seems that, far from rethinking his country’s immigration policy, the president is gaining greater political benefit from this anti-immigration speech that led him to a second term on August 16, with more than 57.45% of the votes. Although it is only 54 kilometers long (and there has been no progress in its construction since 2022), it promised a wall that will divide both countries, in the purest style Trumpist and pointed to international organizations that denounced the violation of human rights, for wanting to interfere in “national affairs.” “We will not stop deportations to Haiti nor authorize refugee camps,” he warned the BBC a month before the elections. During the weekend of the elections, in fact, in Dajabón, the busiest border point, raids tripled. And during his first term, Abinader himself congratulated himself for having “multiplied operations by ten.”
Since 2022, the Dominican Republic has become the country that deports the most Haitian people on the move, despite the call in November 2022 by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) to states to stop forced returns to Haiti, a country facing one of the worst political and security crises in the world. However, according to the International Organization for Migration (IOM), in 2023 208,166 people were deported Haitians. Of these, more than 20,000 are adolescents, girls and boys. During 2024, the figure will be around 98,594 people, among them, more than 5,000 minors. 85% of these numbers occurred in the Dominican Republic.
“Migrants and people in need of international protection should not be subjected to punitive measures, such as detention,” Cilano concludes. “The situation of irregular immigration does not constitute a crime. Applying, in a generalized manner, measures restricting freedom due to the situation of irregularity in the country generates arbitrary detentions and exceeds the legitimate interest of President Abinader’s Government in managing migration.”
Violence and excessive use of force are a constant in the testimonies of the victims contacted by the organization. EL PAÍS has been able to collect more than 15 testimonies about traumatic experiences such as groping, extortion, assaults and overcrowding in detention centers, as well as clear racial profiling. “The Dominican Republic established apartheid,” Roudy Joseph, spokesperson for the HaitiansRD collective, explained to this media outlet in May. “There is an obsession with excluding anyone who is Haitian or appears to be.” As part of this verification exercise of videos recorded between July 2023 and July 2024, the organization also received a complaint of sexual violence against a 14-year-old girl.
This government is a political and moral heir of Trujillo and Balaguer. The DGM not only expels unaccompanied children. It also expels mothers without their children. In this case, the DGM truck drives off while a child hangs from the outside of the cage. Criminals! pic.twitter.com/OcbWw0LoMx
— MST_RD (@trabajadores_rd) June 2, 2023
“This effectively puts Dominicans of Haitian descent at risk, including those who are beneficiaries of Law 169-14,” Cilano emphasizes. The doctor in History and Regional Studies refers to an amendment that arose after ruling 168-13 of 2013, one of the darkest episodes of the country’s immigration policy, a ruling that set a precedent for denationalizing Dominicans of Haitian descent since 1929.
That ruling annulled the documents of some 90,000 people from the first generation (and affected to more than 133,000 including their children and grandchildren) who were left helpless overnight; a modest figure in the eyes of human rights organisations. The law also closed the door to any possibility of requesting nationality through legal means and some 130,000 people were left stateless. Law 169-14 sought to amend the wave of criticism that this measure received. However, a decade later there are still many citizens who are undocumented.
They call the deportation trucks trucks (because of the way migrants pronounce it) or prisons on wheels. Any resident of a border area quickly recognizes the bars that cover them and they are daily spectators of the little fingers of children clinging to the bars and the screams of those who did not manage to reach the other side. In one of the videos, a woman explodes with rage and shouts at the agents: “Get those children out of that cage, for the love of God!” Next to her, another neighbor from the neighborhood, much more comfortable with the scene, tells her to calm down, that they are not going to die. “It’s not that they are not going to die. It’s that they are violating human rights,” she says indignantly.
“They have difficulty breathing”
No one wants to get on the deportation trucks. Much less to be returned to a country where they are practically half of the population is hungry. But according to Amnesty’s statement, people are routinely beaten and forced into the bus and “even have difficulty breathing” because of the overcrowding of these buses, which carry up to 90 people in a vehicle with a capacity for 40. “They are left there in high temperatures for hours before being transferred to the interdiction centre, without access to water, sanitation or food, putting their safety at serious risk,” the statement, published on Wednesday, says. Once inside the centres, the situation does not improve. Overcrowding continues, there is no access to water or food and they are restricted from speaking to relatives or lawyers.
In addition, the organization received information from women who have been victims of sexual violence by authorities, including touching, comments about their bodies and “demands for sexual favors in exchange for release.” According to testimonies collected, some Haitian women who are pregnant, living in bateyes (poor neighborhoods usually inhabited by migrants) or who require postnatal care do not seek medical attention for fear of detention and deportation.
They have also been notified of the handover of children and adolescents by the National Council for Children and Adolescents (Conani) to the Haitian authorities without a protocol for such handover, nor mechanisms that guarantee the principle of the best interests of the child. “It is imperative to investigate and punish those responsible for human rights violations and other abuses, as well as to adopt concrete measures to eliminate and prevent racist violence and racial discrimination in immigration operations, with special attention to those that affect children and pregnant people,” Cilano concludes.
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