Saturday 03 May 2025

Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic

“It’s tormenting me,” says a worried Santo Heredia. He has no news of his wife, arrested on Thursday in a Dominican Republic hospital as part of the plan to deport pregnant women activated this week to control Haitian immigration.

Since Monday, the government of Dominican President Luis Abinader, which has made the fight against Haitian immigration one of its battle horses, has been demanding that foreigners visiting hospitals show their papers. If they don’t, they will be expelled from the country after receiving treatment, according to the new protocol.

The measure has frightened many Haitians and hospital attendance by Haitians has dropped, Martin Ortiz Garcia, director of Maternity and Adolescence at the National Health Service, told AFP.

“It’s an abuse, it’s very wrong,” said Miguelina Matos, the Dominican-born daughter of Haitian parents. “I ask Mr. President (Abinader) if he is aware and if he has a family, children…. He could (give) 15 days to these women who give birth” to recover before deporting them, she suggests.

The Dominican Immigration Service reported that “on the first day of the measure, 48 pregnant women and 39 women who had just given birth, accompanied by 48 minors”, were arrested and taken to the Haina detention center, which houses irregular migrants, about 20 minutes from the capital Santo Domingo.
– Containing “Haitianization” –
In the first quarter of 2025, the National Health Service (SNS) recorded a total of 20,362 births, of which 12,930 (63.5%) were Dominican and 7,387 (38%) Haitian.
“My wife has foreign blood, of course, I can’t deny it, but she’s a person who has never set foot here (at the detention center). We don’t know if she’s been deported, she has no family there” in Haiti, says Santo Heredia, a 34-year-old guard.
Although they are married and have a four-year-old daughter, his wife, who was born in the Dominican Republic to Haitian parents, has no legal status in the country due to a lack of money for the paperwork, according to her husband.
Being born in the Dominican Republic does not automatically confer nationality. A constitutional reform in 2010 established that children of parents in an irregular situation do not acquire nationality.

Even without documents, “they are not refused care”, says Mr. Ortiz Garcia of the SNS. “Illegals are taken care of in emergencies. If they require admission, they are admitted, and then, once their medical event is over, they move on to the migration protocol.”
In the first quarter of 2025, the authorities boasted 86,406 expulsions of Haitians. In 2024, they expelled 276,215.
Since coming to power in 2020, Mr. Abinader has tightened migration policy, notably launching the construction of a wall along the border. The Dominican Republic and Haiti share the island of Hispaniola. Relations between the two countries are very tense.
Luisa Zeli Teresa, a foreigner legally residing in the Dominican Republic, believes that “if people don’t have documents, it’s fine (for them to be expelled)”, but she asks Mr. Abinader to allow the Haitian women to recover from their Caesarean sections.
“The situation in Haiti is very bad (…) That’s why people come here,” she laments.
Hundreds of thousands of Haitians are trying to leave their country, plagued by poverty and gang violence, which controls almost 85% of Port-au-Prince, the capital of the region’s poorest nation.

At a demonstration organized on Thursday by the Old Dominican Order, a nationalist NGO already behind several anti-migrant rallies, activists called on President Abinader to curb “Haitianization”.
Vionalé Pier, a 58-year-old Haitian woman who has lived in the Dominican Republic for 25 years, believes it is necessary to reduce the Haitian birth rate: for her, it’s necessary to have “one child, two children and that’s it”, but “one person has five children, no, no, no”…

Humaniterre with AFP