Perceived and Pursued Opportunities from Mass Deportation Threats: The Case of Haitian Migrant-Serving Nonprofit Organizations in the Dominican Republic

4.1 Developing Organizational Networks

The desire to continue to serve the Haitian-migrant population in the face of deportation threats motivated organizations to engage in self-analysis to see how they could be supportive and resilient. As a result, many saw the need to extend their reach through partnering with other organizations, which meant an opportunity for organizational growth. One participant recounted how his organization broadened their objectives to include creating a humanitarian crisis response plan in collaboration with other organizations:

One of the things that I should tell you is that before closing, like a month or two before, and after it closed, the fear was that there would be deportations. So, there was a moment that began…we were working, but our orientation work, assessment, and economic support began to decline, and we started to strengthen strategic plans for responding to a possible humanitarian crisis that we expected would happen before deportations. So, we had meetings in the Dominican Republic and meetings in Haiti. We called for a work plan, and we identified routes where they would possibly deport people. We had placed promotors and organizations at each of those places, in the whole process to identify and have information in time. We sought allies for support, including people who could give us food, water, because we knew that on the Haitian side, they didn’t have the infrastructure to receive so many people, but quickly, the process passed, and the deportations didn’t begin as we had expected. (Translated from Spanish by the author.)

This participant explained that their increased networking resulted in relationships that made the crisis planning process possible. In other similar ways, participants identified how their organizational network expanded to include individuals and other organizations with more experience in certain types of areas. For example, one participant shared:

We invited a guy from an institution called, X, (name withheld for confidentiality purposes), maybe you know him. He says, “I’ve been in this country for 24 years, I’m a Haitian national, but I’ve studied here, I’ve formed my family here.” I mean, he is perfectly familiar, that guy was invited here to speak to the kids and tell them, well, there is a universal right that is the right to education and that every adolescent boy and girl has a right to that. He told them, “One way you all can protect yourselves is by being in school here because you have a right to education.” (Translated from Spanish by the author.)

This insight reveals how the organization did not necessarily feel comfortable depending on their own knowledge and abilities and, therefore, reached out for expertise. Thus, they expanded their capacity to make an impact in their communities. Like this participant’s nonprofit, the majority of organizations that were part of this research were not equipped originally to address the legal and human rights issues that arose from this migration crisis as their missions were mostly oriented toward providing basic, non-legal services. Yet, many wanted to help in any way that they could, especially with the regularization plan deadline looming and potential for increase in raids and deportations. However, doing so often meant that they would have to rely on the strengths of other institutions, in order to enhance their ability to be effective and be resilient.

Engaging in joint action with other organizations thus became a central way to extend their resources to places where they did not typically work but knew were in need of support. For example, one participant, a leader of a nonprofit that focuses on housing for migrants, explained how she sought to collaborate with an organization that works on the Dominican-Haitian border to design and construct temporary housing:

I have been talking to an organization helping on the border. They’re a fantastic organization, their director is very involved and I have offered my assistance to him if we need to build temporary housing out there. So, that’s another way that I talk to people about partnership, it’s really based on like projects and if they need something and I can provide it to them, then I’m going to one hundred percent do that.

Later in the interview, she explained her attempt to partner in more detail:

Well, I mean there are a lot of refugees now on the border. X (organization’s name not disclosed for confidentiality purposes) has a lot of information that they’ve been posting about that recently. I talked to the director before Christmas, but I haven’t heard back from him yet because I wanted to offer. You know…whenever I can offer design assistance, and what I mean is, like I can go to my university and be like, “I have a project where we can design temporary housing for Haitians on the border. I need nine weeks” and they’re like, “This is awesome,” because it’s a real-life project, and they can do everything at the university. So, that’s why I offer my design assistance to situations like that because it’s an opportunity for my students to be involved in something that’s life changing and to have an impact on the country.

This participant works with university students, who study architecture in the United States and make trips to the Dominican Republic to gain practice implementing their housing design skills. Her organization focuses on housing in bateys, which are communities that were historically home to Haitian agricultural workers. She saw collaboration as a way that she could expand the reach of her organization to the border and give her students an opportunity for personal and professional growth, given the needs created in the region by the migration crisis.

4.2 Expanding Organizational Activities

Growth was experienced at both the individual and organizational level as participants and their organizations resiliently stepped into roles that they never had performed before and expanded the ways that they typically engaged activities. What these actions often required was using local knowledge, involving community members, and building their organizational networks. As one participant explained,

I feel like there’s a lot of active community members that can be involved and we can support the opportunity to talk to lawyers and make that connection to be with community members who have questions about documentation. And we support that effort…I’ve been talking to people and they’re interested. There needs to be support even if it’s not a program but that like, an initiative by having community members who are very knowledgeable and here to provide that network.

This participant discussed how members of her organization’s board wanted to delve deeply and immediately into providing documentation support. However, she did not feel that her organization had the capacity to carry out this work. She mentioned that she had a small team and would rather be indirectly involved by creating a support network, providing access to information, and making referrals to lawyers who might be able to take on cases pro bono.

One participant described how their funding capabilities loosened to include supplementing the costs that community members experienced when travelling to obtain their documents. She explained:

In fact, just last week or the week before, I had a young person come and say, “I’m going to the capitol to sort out some documents and I need money just to get there.” They know that we operate within a set of guidelines and within a set of rules. We’ve always had medical funds to help people with medical emergencies, for example. So, they know that we’re here and available for them. But I think they also know, and quite rightly, that as foreigners, we don’t have the expertise to unravel a system for them and that they do actually need to go to those people who are very well informed and know what exactly needs to be presented and to whom, and in what form because they seem to be quite pedantic about the form here of a letter or document. So, we are not in the immediate loop, but if somebody were to come to us and say I need to go and get this sorted and I can’t afford to do it, that’s probably where we would come in.

As this participant mentioned, her organization became sensitive to the pressing monetary needs of community members and became more flexible with their funding guidelines. Additionally, this participant noted how there were times where she would offer to give her own money when she felt constrained by her organization’s funding policies. She described how she was once approached to help pay a bribe related to the documentation process, but she felt like she had to draw the line there. Therefore, her organization, like the others included in this study, shifted in ways that they could to be supportive, but there were limits.

When there was increased fear that there would be a raid in the community, participants noted that some families went back to Haiti of their own accord. They also noted that there would be a lack in attendance at organizational activities, including school. Regarding mass deportations, one participant said:

There wasn’t really any big deportations from what I know. There’s like a few raids where they took a few families, but then there was a lot of people who left voluntarily because they thought that they were going to get deported.

Participants described how voluntary deportation was provoked out of worry, so migrants would often take their belongings to Haiti before losing them in a raid or while being deported. The anxiety-level was so high for the supervisor of one of the participants that she allowed community members to reside in the organization’s building until the deadline passed. Once they saw that mass deportations were not happening, families returned to their homes.

Even if participants did not always think that mass removals would occur, they came to take seriously the fear that community members had about being deported to Haiti. One organization even relocated to Haiti with many of its constituents out of the concern that life would never get easier for Haitian migrants in the Dominican Republic. However, this case was an outlier. The common organizational response to the threats stemming from the migration crisis was not flight but to fight, and learning how to effectively and appropriately serve their communities during this period was often a first step.

5.1 Stepping into New Advocacy Roles

Most of the organizations that were part of this study were mainly service providers. They did little, if any, advocating for policy change, and interacting with government officials was not typically part of their work prior to the implementation of Law 169-14 and the Regularization Plan. However, they perceived an opportunity to advocate and were resilient in this work. One participant revealed how she advocated for the non-deportation of children by negotiating an agreement with government officials:

We have worked with officials on not deporting children. We accompany them because they can’t do that, but you know that many times they do. Not everyone complies with things and, in that moment, we achieved reaching an agreement with the military, with migration officials, so that this type of thing does not happen. (Translated from Spanish by the author.)

This particular participant, like others, recognized the uncomfortable, and sometimes dangerous, advocacy work that they engage in and how they even receive threats. She continued to describe her resilience, in spite of threats and difficult interactions that she has to navigate:

You do it because it is in your blood because you don’t tolerate abuse. One has to confront the military…I have had to, in certain circumstances, confront prosecutors and sit with a group of powerful people, and doing so runs a risk. (Translated from Spanish by the author.)

By stating that she does not “tolerate abuse,” she alluded to a moral grounding upon which she found it necessary to step into a new advocacy role.

Although several participants said that there were no raids or deportations in the communities where they worked, others shared that they knew of deportations happening. In one case, one of the participants described that there was military presence in her community and a situation occurred in which one of the organization’s workers was repatriated illegally even after showing proper identification. She narrated:

The military officers…they told him that it doesn’t matter if you have your cédula (ID), that you’re Haitian, you live in the batey (Haitian immigrant community), you’re black, and you speak Creole…We knew his name already. We knew that he had his documents. We knew that he was illegally deported. We already had all of this type of information, and so it was easier for us to act pretty quickly. And I think, unfortunately, for community members who don’t work with the organization, it ends up being a slower, more drawn-out process.

Dealing directly with legal aspects of migration issues, particularly with deportations, was not something her organization was used to doing. Yet, she recognized the important role that nonprofits could play in advocating on behalf of their communities noting that individuals, who did not have the backing of an organization, were at a disadvantage. Even though this participant had firsthand knowledge of deportations, she shared that she had not anticipated there to be mass removals because the Dominican Republic needs Haitian workers. Some other participants revealed similar beliefs and, in fact, were confused by many of the media reports of mass deportation threats, since there was relative calmness in their communities.

5.2 Building on Advocacy Work

For participants that were already engaged in advocacy work, they saw that they had more advocating to do. Therefore, they used their knowledge and resources to mobilize in ways that would benefit the cause, which included engaging in protests and demonstrations, raising awareness among their communities, and supporting their constituents in the documentation process. One participant discussed how she stayed with a group of migrants that were attempting to submit their documents at the immigration office until midnight on the day of the deadline. She recounted:

It was the last day. I stayed because there were thousands of people that had not been able to enter. There were a lot, a lot, a lot of people, and listen, migration, what they did…the police, the guard, they put two white trucks and wanted to deport them. Look, I don’t know if they wanted to deport them, but at 12 at night, all of the people had to leave. No one could stay there. They…didn’t deport them, but they made threats to, you know, drive everyone away. (Translated from Spanish by the author.)

She believed that if she had not been at the immigration office to bear witness and advocate for her migrant community members on their behalf, they would have been deported. Her testimony is that there were many inhumane deportations, and she gathered with pastors and community leaders to discuss ways to stop them.

Another participant had worked long-term for a social change organization that was led by Dominican-Haitians, so she had a history of engaging in advocacy. She expressed frustration that her organization was not consulted by the government when developing migration policies. In the quote below, she notes how the migration crisis brought on by the Constitutional Court ruling added new advocacy work for her organization. She detailed:

So, that is our situation. When we that all was set with the 2010 constitution, of course we were still going to work on human rights but to benefit the people that were registering that the state didn’t recognize…and the second thing, to make people, who do not have residency, aware how to declare their children, so that they don’t remain stateless. But after the Constitutional Court ruling, another component was added to our work, which was that we had to keep fighting to verify people on the list and insist to the Central Electoral Board that not everyone is on the list…they are Haitian descendants, and not everyone is registered. So, we have to go and officially try to resolve that…so that is the situation, the new situation that we have now. (Translated from Spanish by author.)

This participant also explained the supposed remedies to the 2013 Constitutional Court ruling. The first was Law 169–14, which created two groups of potential citizens. One group, “Group A,” included those individuals who were recorded in the Civil Registry. Those on this list would have their citizenship restored. The second group, “Group B,” consisted of individuals who were born in the Dominican Republic but did not have documentation. Individuals on this list could apply for naturalization after two years. The second remedy was the Regularization Plan, which provided a way for undocumented individuals born outside the Dominican Republic to obtain documentation (Open Justice Society Initiative 2015). Evident was how the kind of advocacy work that this participant described called for her organization to have a solid understanding of migration policy. She discussed how her nonprofit accompanied migrants to get their paperwork in order and submitted to the proper offices. Therefore, she developed considerable experiential knowledge of the documentation process through her advocacy.

6.1 Gaining a Grassroot Understanding

Having access to Haitian migrant communities put the participants in the position to have an on-the-ground understanding of the local effects of migration policies and practices. Given that this migration crisis and the government’s response were unprecedented, organizations understood that getting educated about the crisis would support their resilience. Accordingly, they took time to read up on what was happening, learn how other organizations were managing, and listen to the stories of community members about how they were being affected.

Participants recognized the complexity of the situation and the general lack of awareness of what was needed to be done. One participant acknowledged how these conditions created chaos:

If I am educated and don’t understand these things, just think of how in the dark…you know? A lot of people didn’t understand regularization until the last minute when they felt so much threat of deportation that they started rushing to the office. And it was a complete mess in the last month of trying to get through the line.

Public confusion about and unfamiliarity with the regularization process thus led to delayed action, which made supporting constituents a hectic endeavor. This participant shared how she accompanied individuals in obtaining their documents and was a firsthand witness to the disorder at government offices that made her work challenging and frustrating. Yet, she learned to navigate the system as best as she could.

This same participant had a history of helping parents obtain birth certificates for their children. Therefore, providing this service was not an unusual task for her nonprofit. However, during the implementation of the regularization plan, she and other participants described that they became familiar with the various illegitimate ways people could obtain documents. She stated:

We’ve paid for a few students to go back to Haiti to look for their birth certificates. I know while the regularization thing was happening, there was a black market for like birth certificates and IDs and stuff …and some people bought falsified documents.

Obtaining falsified documents appeared to be viewed as necessary when individuals were faced with financial and bureaucratic barriers that seemed insurmountable. The fact that some organizations gained this insider knowledge likely suggests the high level of trust that community members put in them.

Another participant, who works with street children from Haiti, recounted a story that demonstrates the trust held for her organization, which allowed her to gain a grassroots understanding into the experiences and realities of the communities that she serves:

There is a case now that I’ll tell you about really quickly. A child went to Haiti with his mom. His mom came back to submit her papers for the regularization plan, but I don’t understand why she didn’t also include her child. Seriously, I don’t understand. If she submits her papers as part of the plan, then it’s easier to include her son. So she…maybe this is what she thought…she thought to leave her son in Haiti with family members, but the boy tells me that he can’t be there…that there is nothing there. There is no food. There is nothing. So, the boy came in the process that I told you before through the fields. He didn’t go to his house first. He arrived here, and he had lost almost 15 pounds in the months that he was there. I asked him, “Does your mom know that you’re here?” “No …” Here we gave him food. We took him for a medical consultation. He bathed here. So, that means they have a lot of trust in our institution. (Translated from Spanish by the author.)

During the interviews, participants often discussed cases of individuals facing challenges during the regularization process. What became clear was that the social connections that they had with the community were key for them to obtain insight that would inform their approaches to providing assistance.

Not all participants, however, believed that their community members felt like they could seek out legal support from their organization. They attributed this issue to community members either not thinking that the organization had the capacity to help in that way or not feeling comfortable enough to discuss their documentation status openly with members of the organization. In these instances where less information was available via community members, organizations relied more on what they read in the news and heard from other organizations.

6.2 Creating New Educational Initiatives

As organizations grasped the situation and learned how they could make an impact, they took the lead in educating their communities about their rights and the actions that they needed to take to avoid potentially being deported. Therefore, several organizations provided new educational initiatives that were legal in nature. For example, one participant discussed how they channeled a significant amount of time and resources toward supporting families in the documentation process, including running educational campaigns about the requirements. Her organization ran a school, so these educational campaigns were not entirely beyond the scope of the nonprofit’s educational mission. However, the substance of the educational activities was new.

Participants noted how they experienced increased inquiries from individuals and organizations outside the Dominican Republic to learn about what was occurring, conduct research, and see how they could support Haitian migrant families. Often foreign groups, typically students, would express a desire to collaborate with a Haitian community. Several of the participants shared that their organizations work in mixed communities with Haitians, Dominican-Haitians, and Dominicans, so they did not exclusively serve Haitian migrants and their descendants. Therefore, they tried to open up interests to the idea of supporting initiatives that benefited mixed communities by explaining to outsiders that they take an issues-based approach. For example, one participant explained how they center projects on the common problem of poverty:

So, we know like in these communities there is a lot of poverty, and these kinds of problems that they have, it can happen to anyone. I actually don’t see the difference between this family is Haitian and this family is Dominican…we just see them all as a community.

While not seeing a difference between Haitian and Dominican families can be viewed to be a superficial perspective that does not account for disadvantages of being undocumented nor the discrimination that Dominican-Haitians and Haitian migrants face (Wooding and Moseley-Williams 2004), participants that took this type of viewpoint recognized how this approach could promote cohesion amongst the different groups as well as provide outsiders with a more nuanced understanding of Dominican-Haitian relations and the solidarity that often exists.

Another participant whose work involves bringing together international student groups to collaborate with local communities on development projects described how he considered mass deportation in and of itself to be a learning opportunity. He regularly took students to the Dominican-Haitian border on educational trips to see the bi-national market, which was several hours away from his organization. When asked if he changed any of his strategies out of consideration for potential deportations, he responded:

I thought the opportunity for something to actually happen, the chances were very slim. The other thing is, my thinking was it wouldn’t be a violent situation and it might be one…even though it might be quite traumatic, it might be one we could learn from because it’s quite clear that we are headed in that same direction. You know, it’s quite clear that in this political process now that there’s a tremendous dislike for Hispanic people in the US, legal and illegal. “Round them up, build a wall, ship them off.” So, I thought, well if they do witness something, maybe it’s a learning process that people are human beings. They’re not cattle to be loaded up and hauled off. They’re human beings just trying to live.

This participant thought students could make connections between migration issues in the Dominican Republic and the United States by bearing witness to deportations. Although he explained that his intentions to expose his students to the “traumatic” event of removals were educational, there was no acknowledgement of how doing so might be wrong or, at least, questionable.