Dominican Republic

Last month, the Dominican Republic suspended municipal elections when officials realized the electronic voting machines were malfunctioning. Protests followed in front of the Central Elections Board building and throughout the country. In Miami, protests held in solidarity with the Dominicans were held Downtown.

This weekend a festival in Downtown Doral celebrated the country’s independence day, but not everyone wanted to talk politics.

SAN JUAN, PUERTO RICO

The first confirmed cases of coronavirus are being reported in the Caribbean, after authorities in the Dominican Republic on Sunday confirmed that an Italian national was checked into a Santo Domingo hospital over the weekend.

Drug and money-laundering investigators joined by U.S. federal agents raided a villa linked to one of Venezuela's richest men, Dominican officials say.

Billionaire Samark López Bello was recently indicted by federal prosecutors in New York for allegedly violating sanctions on Venezuela. He has close ties to former Venezuelan Vice President Tareck El Aissami, who is accused by the U.S. of being linked to Hezbollah and drug traffickers.

The nonprofit agency Food For The Poor will build 100 homes in Haiti for  families that have fled the Dominican Republic out of fear of being deported.

The Haitian government has donated  to the nonprofit 76 acres of land in the border village of Fond  Bayard where families with children have been arriving from the Dominican Republic.

A constitutional ruling passed by the Dominican Republic took away birthright citizenship  to people born to non-citizen parents. The ruling was applied retroactively to 1929 and mostly affects Dominicans of Haitian heritage. 

OPINION

You don’t need to be a detective to know that the Dominican Republic has already begun deporting Haitian-Dominicans.

International media report this week that tent cities are sprouting up at towns like Anse-à-Pitres on Haiti’s side of its border with the D.R. This morning I spoke by phone with Mia Pean, a Haitian-American relief worker who lives near Anse-à-Pitres. Her organization just received a group of Haitian-Dominican youths who say they were deported from the D.R. a few days ago – even though they claim they were born there.

Is the Dominican Republic’s controversial plan to deport hundreds of thousands of people of Haitian descent on hold? 

Almost half a million people living in the Dominican Republic have Haitian ancestry. But the Dominican Supreme Court has ruled that anyone born in the D.R. after 1929 will have their citizenship revoked if their parents were not Dominican. That has set the stage this summer for the deportation of hundreds of thousands of Haitian-Dominicans.

On Wednesday the Miami Workers Center, a Miami-based social justice group, hosted a standing-room-only community forum about the potential mass deportation of Haitians and Dominicans of Haitian descent from the Dominican Republic.

Haitian-rights activists rallied in Little Haiti Thursday morning to decry a Dominican Republic court ruling that strips thousands born in the Dominican Republic of their citizenship.

In 2013, the Dominican Constitutional Court passed a ruling retroactively denying citizenship to anyone born after 1929 who doesn’t have one parent of Dominican blood.  

After public outcry and pressure from the international community, the Dominican Republic passed new legislation allowing people with Dominican birth certificates to regain their citizenship.

Pope Francis didn’t have to say it. He let the timing say it for him.

The pope this week named Haitian Bishop Chibly Langlois as one of 19 new cardinals of the Roman Catholic Church. In the process, he all but declared a shift in clerical power on the large Caribbean island of Hispaniola. And he may also have delivered a rebuke to the Dominican Republic, the country that shares that isle with Haiti, and to the D.R.’s controversial cardinal, Nicolás López.