FILE PHOTO: A woman pushes a wheelbarrow after Haitians were allowed into a market for needed essentials and trade, as gang violence continues in the aftermath of the resignation of Haiti's Prime Minister Ariel Henry, at a farmer's market in the border town of Dajabon, Dominican Republic, March 18, 2024. REUTERS/Fran Afonso/File Photo
SANTO DOMINGO/PORT-AU-PRINCE (Reuters) -Haiti's foreign minister on Monday blasted a policy announced last week by the neighboring Dominican Republic to deport tens of thousands of migrants back to Haiti, where gang violence is fueling a devastating humanitarian crisis.
"The brutal scenes of roundups and deportations that we are witnessing are an affront to human dignity," Haitian Foreign Minister Dominique Dupuy said on X. "We strongly condemn these dehumanizing acts and demand respect and justice."
The Dominican Republic, which shares the Caribbean island of Hispaniola with Haiti, last week said it would deport up to 10,000 migrants per week who were in the country illegally, a sharp increase.
So far this month, the Dominican Republic has deported more than 9,000 people, more than 7,000 of those since Thursday, the nation's migration agency said in a statement on Monday.
More than 4,900 of the total were Haitians, a Dominican official who declined to be named told Reuters.
The Dominican agency said it was carrying out the deportations while respecting human rights.
The Dominican government blames Haiti's chaos for crime and security problems on the Dominican part of the island, and says it has lost patience with the slow progress of an international security mission mandated to help resolve Haiti's crisis.
The United Nations has asked countries in the region to halt deportations of Haitians home to a situation of danger.
If the Dominican Republic follows through on its plan, the number deported in a year would rise sharply from more than 200,000 Haitians forcibly returned last year.
Dupuy said the Dominican policy contravenes human rights standards and she had alerted relevant international bodies.
Her statement followed unverified video on social media that appeared to show a crowd running away from Dominican officials near Punta Cana, a popular tourist resort.
Dominican media on Monday reported that Haitian construction workers there were protesting to demand their employers provide work permits so they are not deported.
William Charpentier, who heads the Dominican Republic's National Bureau for Migration and Refugees, a rights-focused association of civil organizations, told CNN on Sunday that deporting over 1,000 people a day would give the immigration system too little time to consider individual cases and that mass deportations violated international law.
"We understand that the government has every right to deport people who are in its territory without papers, but this right has a limit," he said.
In the United States, presidential candidate Donald Trump has also pledged mass deportations and has made false claims about Haitian migrants in the town of Springfield, Ohio.
(Reporting by Sarah Morland in Mexico City, Paul Mathieson in Santo Domingo and Harold Isaac in Port-au-Prince; Editing by Rosalba O'Brien and Cynthia Osterman)
