Experts warned Friday that a Dominican court decision to strip citizenship from children of Haitian migrants could cause a human rights crisis, potentially leaving tens of thousands of people stateless, facing mass deportation and discrimination.

“the situation of statelessness… that has not yet been completely corrected after the measures adopted by the Dominican State, is of a magnitude never before seen in the Americas.”

Despite some improvements in the way deportations were carried out by officials, the authorities failed to fully respect international safeguards against arbitrary deportations. For example, the authorities failed to serve deportation orders or to provide mechanisms allowing people who had been brought to detention centres and deported to challenge the legality, necessity and proportionality of detention as well as the deportation itself.1