Haiti Place Thousands of Haitians fleeing Dominican Republic stuck in camps

News Information

  • NEWS_POSTED_BY: Haiti Place
  • NEWS_POSTED_ON: Aug 07, 2015
  • Views : 783
  • Category : Haiti News
  • Description : The Guardian
    Wednesday 5 August 2015 21.49 BST

    Photo: Haitians deported from Dominican Republic take refuge close to the border with Dominican Republic in June. Photograph: Hector Retamal/AFP/Getty Images

    Officials estimate population at four camps in the south of Haiti is 2,000 and growing after people fled in response to strict new immigration policy
  • Location : Anse-à-Pitres, Sud-Est, Haiti
  • Website : http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/aug/05/thousands-of-haitians-fleeing-dominican-republic-stuck-in-camps

Overview

  • Tens of thousands of Haitians and Haitian-Dominicans have fled the Dominican Republic in response to its strict new immigration policy with many settling in squalid camps in Haiti.

    Haitian officials estimate the population at four camps in the south of Haiti is at least 2,000 and growing.

    About 400 have settled at the Tete-à-l’eau camp, perched on a hill that slants down to a dry river bed. It was once the site of a larger village washed out in floods decades ago, but now it suffers from a drought.

    Women wash clothes and children fill small buckets of water alongside donkeys drinking from a spring about 1 km from the camp. Without a well or tap in Tete-à-l’eau, camp-dwellers use this water for everything.

    Haiti and the more prosperous Dominican Republic share the Caribbean island of Hispaniola. With Dominicans increasingly intolerant of a growing Haitian population - estimated as high as 1 million - on their side of the border, a 2013 Dominican court ruling stripped Dominican citizenship from children born to undocumented immigrants.

    The vast majority of those affected are Haitian.

    Read more here >>