The Dominican Republic deported approximately 20,000 Haitians in April 2025 — the highest monthly total recorded — as the Dominican government intensified its enforcement operations despite the catastrophic conditions in Haiti that made any return profoundly dangerous. The International Organization for Migration, which provided reception services at border crossings, described the situation as “increasingly critical” and flagged particular alarm at the sharp increase in extremely vulnerable deportees including pregnant women, lactating mothers, and newborns.
IOM reported that since April 22, its teams at the Belladère and Ouanaminthe border crossings were assisting an average of 15 pregnant women and 15 lactating mothers daily among those being deported. The deportation of women in the final stages of pregnancy or with newborn infants to a country with a collapsed healthcare system and active gang violence represented a direct threat to life.
The UN Human Rights office raised specific concerns about the deportation of vulnerable Haitians in the context of documented mass killings, famine conditions, and the absence of any functioning support system for returnees. The Haitian government’s capacity to receive, register, and support tens of thousands of monthly deportees was essentially nonexistent, leaving returnees to navigate on their own a country in which they often had no remaining social network or economic resources.
The Dominican Republic maintained that its enforcement operations were a sovereign necessity in response to irregular migration that strained public services. Human rights organizations acknowledged the complexity of migration management while insisting that the scale, speed, and targeting of the deportation operations violated international protection standards and that the systematic deportation of pregnant women and mothers with newborns to conditions of active humanitarian emergency crossed a legal and moral threshold that demanded international response.