38 HARPER’S MAGAZINE / MAY 2015 L E T T E R F R O M T H E D O M I N I C A N R E P U B L I C DISPLACED IN THE D.R. A country strips 210,000 of citizenship By Rachel Nolan Even before Juliana Deguis Pierre became famous, or infamous, any Do- minican who saw her would have guessed that she was of Haitian descent. Her dark skin, wide nose, and what is, in the Dominican Republic, called pelo malo —“bad hair”—immediately identify her as the child of Haitians, even though she was born in the Dominican Repub- lic and has never been to Haiti. Until September 2013, Deguis’s life followed a pattern common among children of immi- grants. Like Latin Americans in the United States, Hai- tian immigrants in the D.R. do the me- nial jobs that most Dominican citizens try to avoid: con- struction, harvesting fruits and vegeta- bles, cutting sugarcane, cleaning homes, and nannying children. About 7 percent of the people who live in the D.R. are immigrants, roughly the same proportion of first-generation Latin American immigrants living in the United States. Many Haitians crossed the border at the invitation of Do- minican businesses or were smuggled in by Dominican traffckers. Deguis’s parents immigrated four decades ago, when a Dominican sugar company contracted them to work as cane cut- ters. The company never secured them working papers, but when Deguis was born her parents inscribed her in the civil registry and got her a Dominican birth certifcate. They raised her in a company town called Los Jovillos, where she still lives today. Deguis has held several jobs, most recently caring for children and working as a maid in San- to Domingo, the capital, which lies two hours south of Los Jovillos, for 1,500 pesos (about $35) per week. In 2008, the family that employed her suggested that she register for the cédula, or I.D. card, that is necessary to work legally in the Dominican Republic. Deguis was twenty-four years old and pregnant with a son, and she would need the I.D. card to get him a birth certifcate. At the Junta Central Electoral, the Dominican equivalent of a passport offce and D.M.V., offcials told Deguis that her birth certifcate was invalid and that she was not eligible for an I.D. card. “How is it possible that my birth certifcate is invalid if I was born here?” she asked. Until 2010, the Domini- can constitution guaranteed jus soli, a right that grants citizenship to any- one born in the ter- ritory of a state, with the exception of those whose par- ents were “in tran- sit,” a provision understood to cover diplomats and tour- ists in the country for fewer than ten days. But in the 1990s, the Junta Central Electoral began to refuse pa- pers to Dominicans who, like Deguis, have Haitian names or faces. Without further explanation, the offcials con- fscated Deguis’s birth certifcate. Shocked, Deguis and several other plaintiffs sued the government, and her appeal proceeded all the way to the Constitutional Tribunal, the country’s highest court. There the case backfred badly. On September 23, 2013, the tri- bunal handed down ruling TC/0168/13, “the Sentence,” as it became known around the world. The tribunal revoked Deguis’s citizenship, declaring that her undocumented parents were “in transit” when she was born. More disastrous still, the Sentence applied to all Dominicans with undocumented foreign parents, Rachel Nolan is a doctoral candidate in Latin American and Caribbean history at New York University. CESFRONT border-control guards watch for Haitians trying to cross illegally into the Dominican Republic. Photograph by Pierre Michel Jean