Santo Domingo (AFP) – Still in pain from giving birth, a Haitian mother carrying her newborn was helped onto a migration services bus in the Dominican Republic, joining a family member who was arrested when he visited her in hospital.
Both were detained in a series of raids on Dominican health facilities, launched just over a week ago in the country's latest drive to eject undocumented migrants.
Since early 2024, more than 350,000 Haitians have been deported from the comparatively wealthy and stable Dominican Republic, shuttled across the 340-kilometer (211-mile) border with poverty and gang-violence riddled Haiti.
Dominican President Luis Abinader has championed a MAGA-style hard line on migration since first coming to power in 2020, with mass expulsions of Haitians and the construction of a wall that so far stretches across more than half the border.
Now, his administration has turned its attention to public hospitals, flushing out migrants who may have gone under the radar if it wasn't for the fact that they needed medical attention.
Arresting and deporting new mothers, "I don't like that.... women must be respected," Haitian Erony Auguste, 42, told AFP from the migration bus next to his sister-in-law who had recently given birth.
He claimed he was detained at the hospital despite having residency papers.
For William Charpentier, coordinator of the National Bureau for Migration and Refugees, a Dominican-based rights group, "mixing health with the issue of border control... is really a violation of human rights. It seems a very cruel measure."
Migrants seek the group's help daily, he told AFP, adding they are afraid to seek medical and maternal care for fear of being arrested and expelled from the country so many Haitians see as their only hope for a better life.
The measure "puts people, mainly women, at risk," said Charpentier.
Martin Ortiz Garcia of the Dominican National Health Service (SNS), confirmed the number of Haitians seeking hospital treatment has dropped.
Since 2010, the Dominican Republic does not grant birthright citizenship to children born in the country to undocumented migrants. A 2013 court ruling backdated the restriction to people born as far back as 1929.
Last year, Abinader's government deported over 276,200 Haitians and is on track to exceed that number with more than 86,400 deportations in the first quarter of 2025 alone.
"Of course, everyone is afraid. Sometimes even people with papers are arrested, even Dominicans are arrested if they leave home without papers," merchant Marie Casale, 63, told AFP in the capital Santo Domingo.
The Dominican Migration Service reported that on Day 1 of the hospital crackdown, 48 pregnant women, 39 new mothers, and 48 children were arrested and taken to a detention center for deportation.
At the center, 34-year-old Dominican national Santo Heredia waited, desperate for news of his wife, who is five months pregnant and was detained after a prenatal appointment.
His wife, said Heredia, was born in the Dominican Republic to Haitian parents, but has not been able to legalize her status in the country as they did not have enough money to file the paperwork.
The couple has another daughter, 4.
"She is alone, she has no money on her, she has no means of communicating with anyone," he told AFP. "This has me really tormented, honestly."
Last year, 36 out of every 100 births in Dominican hospitals were to Haitian women, according to Ortiz Garcia of the SNS.
Public hospitals require patients to provide identification, proof of employment and residence, and payment for services rendered.
But Ortiz Garcia insisted care is not denied to the undocumented.
"Illegals are treated in emergencies. If they need admission, they are admitted, and then after their medical event, they go through the migration protocol," he told AFP.
Many migrants from Haiti, a Creole- and French-speaking nation of some 11 million people of mainly African descent, are fleeing violent gangs that control about 85 percent of Port-au-Prince, the capital of the poorest country in the Americas.
Many in the Spanish-speaking Dominican Republic have turned on those of their neighbors who cross the border, accusing them of usurping Dominican jobs and resources.
A nationalist group calling itself "Ancient Dominican Order," has been campaigning against the "Haitianization" of the country and has urged the authorities to be "vigilant at all maternity wards."
On Sunday, two migration trucks with Haitians being deported were jeered at as they drove past a group of nationalist protesters shouting "Go back to your country" and "Out! Out!"