Tens of thousands of Haitians fled to the Dominican Republic in 2022 as conditions in Haiti continued to deteriorate, with gang violence, food insecurity, and the political crisis driving a migration wave that strained the border management capacity of both countries. The Dominican Republic, which already hosted the largest Haitian migrant community outside Haiti itself, received nearly 59,000 Haitian deportees between February and October 2022 — many of them individuals who had crossed the border seeking safety and found themselves returned to the conditions they had fled.
The treatment of Haitian migrants in the Dominican Republic remained deeply controversial. Human rights organizations documented deportation procedures that violated due process standards, including mass expulsions that denied individuals the opportunity to claim asylum or challenge their removal. The Dominican government maintained that it had the sovereign right to control its borders and argued that the scale of irregular migration required firm enforcement measures.
Particular concern was expressed about the situation of Haitian-descended individuals born in the Dominican Republic who had been rendered stateless by a 2013 Dominican Constitutional Court ruling that retroactively stripped citizenship from people born in the DR to undocumented Haitian parents. Many of these individuals, who had no meaningful connection to Haiti and did not speak Haitian Creole, were being deported to a country they had never lived in.
The Dominican Republic’s decision to accelerate the construction of a border fence — partially funded by the Dominican government with some international support — reflected the degree to which the Haitian crisis had become a regional issue with significant political implications for the island’s other country. The fence, whatever its effectiveness as a migration control measure, was a physical symbol of the diverging trajectories of the two nations sharing Hispaniola.