In a letter to the Boston Globe, Dominican Ambassador in the United States, Jose Tomas Perez, disputed statements published in that newspaper regarding the deportations of Haitians from the Dominican Republic. In the article, Massachusetts State Senator Linda Dorcena Forry, a first generation Haitian-American, and Boston Mayor Martin J. Walsh encourage people to reconsider traveling to the Dominican Republic.
Ambassador Perez states: “Your article on the Dominican Republic contains unfounded accusations against our government while neglecting to report on the findings of numerous international observers who are in the Dominican Republic and have called our new immigration program a success in regularizing the legal status of more than 350,000 people (“Dominicans, Haitians unite over crisis” Metro, July 5.)
The ambassador mentions that “the Dominican Republic is taking careful steps o in consultation with our allies, Haiti, and the international community (including the International Organization for Migration, the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, UNICEF, and many others), to implement a fair and transparent policy for registering both national and immigrant citizens.”
“Like many other countries dealing a large immigrant population, we must enforce the law and carry out repatriation policies according to international norms, like those of the United States. That said, no deportations have occurred since President Danilo Medina decreed a moratorium on this practice in December 2013. In addition, there are no documented cases of statelessness in the Dominican Republic, which is shown by the absence of registries in the UN High Commissioner for Refugees.
“This year, hundreds of thousands of people will have documentation and rights in our country that in 2013 they did not have. This is a big step forward to advancing human rights in the region,” he concludes.
http://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2015/07/04/deportations-noncitizens-dominican-republic-protested-activists-boston/F6CdUXoM9099nshkh7REGJ/story.html