Stateless for 10 years. now many are facing deportation
SANTO DOMINGO, DOMINICAN REPUBLIC » Before leaving his house each day, Castillo Javier Police always made sure he carried the essentials. Hat. Wallet. Birth certificate. But the last item still did not stop him from being detained — and then deported.
While picking up groceries one night this summer, he was stopped by Dominican immigration authorities. He pulled out the document showing that he was born in the Dominican Republic. Still, the officials bused him to a detention center.
Days later, Police, 21, was expelled to Haiti, a country he had never been to and is so mired in gang violence that the United Nations on Monday approved a Kenyaled security mission to the country to help quell the unrest.
Police is one of roughly 130,000 descendants of Haitian migrants living in the Dominican Republic without citizenship despite being born there, according to human rights groups. Many with birth certificates are considered essentially stateless, their status the result of a 10-year-old court order ruling that children of migrants lacking permanent legal status are not entitled to citizenship.
The decision has left many of those children walled off from affordable health care, career opportunities, higher education or even high school diplomas.
Now human rights groups and Dominicans themselves warn that they are being targeted for expulsion in an intensified deportation strategy that the government says is aimed at those in the country illegally.
The crackdown comes as the Dominican government tries to cope with the surge of Haitians crossing the two countries' shared border.
The number of deportations soared last year, sending more than 113,490 people to Haiti. That figure is already on pace to double this year, according to the Dominican government's migration data.
But people born on Dominican soil are also increasingly a focus of deportations. In the past year, human rights groups say they helped at least 800 people return to the Dominican Republic after being expelled.
“They live in fear,” said María Bizenny Martínez, a coordinator for Socio-Cultural Movement of Haitian Workers, an advocacy group in the Dominican Republic. “Fear that they will be expelled.”
The expulsion of the stateless Dominicans violates the constitution, Martínez said, and the U.N. has warned that the removals also risk violating international law.
Though only roughly 30 countries worldwide offer unrestricted birthright citizenship, nearly every nation in North and South America has adopted the policy.
In the Dominican Republic, however, a 2010 constitutional amendment and the 2013 court ruling not only excluded Dominican-born children of migrants lacking permanent legal status from citizenship, but also instructed officials to audit birth records and relinquish the citizenship of those who no longer qualified.
Facing pressure from the international community, the government in 2014 introduced a program that would allow some of the stateless to regain their citizenship if they had been previously registered by their parents as being born in the Dominican Republic or if they separately started a new application process to naturalize. But thousands were confronted with tight deadlines and bureaucratic delays. Many were unable to register and even those who did are still waiting for their identification documents.