The Dominican Republic deported five more people of Haitian descent on Saturday, continuing a recently enacted policy of deporting undocumented residents, according to news reports.
In 2004, the country enacted a law that excludes children born to undocumented immigrants from receiving citizenship, according to the Open Society Foundations, a pro-immigration non-profit organisation.
A 2013 decision by the country’s Constitutional Court not only upheld the law, but also applied it retroactively to 1929.
After the decision that year, the DR government passed a naturalisation law that allowed people who were born in the country but had never obtained citizenship documents to eventually become citizens. Those people had until June 18 of this year to apply for the status, according to the Huffington Post.
But the Huffington Post reported in February that fewer than 9,000 of the estimated 200,000 undocumented Dominican-born people had successfully completed the application process to become naturalised, and now the remaining people face deportation along with the hundreds of thousands of other undocumented residents.
Numbers as to how many people were naturalised before the June 18 deadline have not been published.
According to Reuters, the DR government has deployed some 2,000 soldiers and opened four holding centres to house immigrants pending expulsion.
See the Aug. 20, 2015 edition for full coverage.
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