What if they were white ?
Advocacy Campaign To End Mass Deportations
The Challenge
The island of Hispaniola, located in the heart of the Caribbean Sea, is shared by two deeply different yet inseparably linked nations: Haiti and the Dominican Republic. While the eastern Dominican side has experienced decades of relative political stability and economic growth, the western Haitian side faces one of the most prolonged and severe humanitarian crises in the Americas.
Haiti is now considered a failed state. Since the assassination of President Jovenel Moïse in 2021, the country has plunged into institutional collapse, with no democratically elected government and no functional state capable of guaranteeing even the most basic rights. The capital, Port-au-Prince, is largely controlled by armed gangs that wield de facto power through terror, extortion, and sexual violence as a tool of social control. Kidnappings, murders, and internal displacement have reached critical levels.
This is compounded by a severe hunger crisis, a cholera outbreak, water scarcity, the collapse of the health system, and an economy shattered by centuries of plundering. Haiti is also a clear example of contemporary neocolonialism, where foreign powers and multinational corporations have exploited its natural resources, undermined its sovereignty, and conditioned its political and economic future through covert interventions and illegitimate debt.
In this context, thousands of people are forced to flee every week. Contrary to popular belief, they do not head mainly to Europe or the U.S., but to the neighboring Dominican Republic. However, crossing this border—an invisible line 392 kilometers long—has become increasingly dangerous, not only because of the physical wall currently being built by the Dominican government along 164 kilometers, but also due to increased militarization, institutional corruption, and human smuggling networks, where women and girls are especially vulnerable to trafficking for sexual exploitation.
Since 2022, the Dominican government has escalated mass deportations of Haitians and Dominicans of Haitian descent. It is estimated that more than 10,000 people per week are being deported without due process or respect for their fundamental rights. Men, pregnant women, and children are arbitrarily detained, often without being allowed to present documentation, and then transported in inhumane conditions, crammed into trucks belonging to the General Directorate of Migration (Dirección General de Migración – DGM), which have a capacity for 52 people, yet often carry more than 110 per trip.
These immigration raids are carried out across the country, frequently without a court order. In many cases, authorities break into bateyes (informal settlements where Haitian-origin communities live) at night and detain people while they sleep. This pattern of arbitrary detention has created a constant state of fear.
Today, thousands of people live in what could be described as open-air prisons. They are afraid to leave the bateyes even to work or go to the hospital, knowing they could be detained and deported at any moment. This has led to the collapse of already fragile livelihoods and worsening physical and mental health in affected communities.
Alarmingly, many of those deported are not recent migrants, but rather Dominican-born individuals—second- and third-generation descendants of Haitian migrants. The 2013 Constitutional Court ruling (Sentencia 168-13) retroactively stripped tens of thousands of people of their nationality, creating a stateless crisis that remains unresolved. These individuals, now rendered “illegal” in the only country they have ever known, have no access to education, healthcare, employment, or legal protection.
Regularizing their immigration status costs about USD 250, an amount entirely out of reach for people living in extreme poverty.
Our Response
Our Response
We are working alongside local and international organizations to:
- Raise awareness through a powerful documentary, “What If They Were White?”,
- Advocate for a reform of the immigration law that respects international human rights standards.
- Establish legal procedures to address and reverse statelessness.
- Provide legal assistance and documentation support to Haitian and Dominican-Haitian residents.
- exposing the racial injustice and human rights violations behind the current deportation policy.
- Implement a social media strategy to combat hate speech and promote truthful, empathetic narratives about the affected communities, in collaboration with the Human Rights and Migration Collective of the Dominican Republic.
How can you help?
How can you help?
- Fund the production of the documentary to raise global awareness.
- Partner with us to expand legal and humanitarian aid.
- Share our campaign to help us amplify the voices of those affected by forced displacement and statelessness.
“Nationality is more than a legal status — it is dignity, identity, and the right to belong.”