Originally published in ¡Mira! con Marcela Garcia on October 18, 2024

Something very disturbing is unfolding in the Caribbean. 

On Oct. 2, Luis Abinader, the president of the Dominican Republic, announced a plan to deport up to 10,000 Haitian people per week, the largest deportations in the country’s recent history. The drastic move, to my shock, barely generated mainstream news headlines in America. It has yet to cause widespread international outrage or condemnation.

The cruel pledge logically calls to mind what would happen in the United States if Donald Trump were to be elected president next month. As described by Trump in multiple speeches, a second Trump administration would attempt to forcibly remove millions of undocumented immigrants, echoing Abinader’s sinister plan, which in its first week deported nearly 11,000 Haitians.

It’s important that the US public pay more attention to Abinader’s pledge, for it contains a lesson for our country that cannot be overlooked.

Abinader’s policy is a continuation of long-simmering tensions between the two countries that share the island of Hispaniola. In fact, the Dominican president’s announcement came on the anniversary of one of the darkest chapters in the history of both countries: The Parsley massacre nearly 90 years ago. That’s when Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo ordered the military to execute thousands of Haitian families and Dominicans of Haitian descent.

It’s beyond disturbing that Abinader chose that date to announce his plan. It shows an alarming disregard of fundamental human rights and an absence of responsibility for discriminatory immigration practices targeting vulnerable Black populations. 

Sadly, this isn’t the first time the Dominican Republic has forcibly removed Haitians. But what makes Abinader’s new policy particularly egregious is the status quo in Haiti, a country with a transitional government that has been deeply besieged by crime, gang violence, and poverty and is in no way capable of absorbing its citizens. 

Just last week, a gang attack in a small town in central Haiti left more than 100 people dead, including babies and young mothers. Only 28 percent of health services are working normally and nearly 5 million people are suffering from acute food insecurity, according to the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights. “There are currently at least 700,000 internally displaced people (IDPs) in Haiti. More than half are children,” read the same UN report from last month.

What Abinader is doing is “a strategy of ethnic cleansing” and “a discriminatory campaign” against Haitians based on the color of their skin and national origin, said Gandy Thomas, Haiti’s representative to the Organization of American States. He’s right.

Much like here in America, many sectors in the Dominican Republic rely on Haitian migrant labor: In the country’s sugarcane fields and the banana industry, in construction and tourism. It is estimated that between 500,000 and 1 million Haitians live in their neighboring country. If Abinader is successful, that large Haitian workforce will disappear. What’s going to happen to those businesses? Who’s going to do those jobs?

That’s one of the lessons to be learned from the Dominican plan. The moral case against mass deportations is compelling enough: They destabilize communities, cause trauma, and can potentially violate human dignity and rights. And for a country’s economy, deportations are akin to shooting oneself in the foot.