It was about 3 a.m. when immigration police began breaking down doors and dragging people away from a remote sugarcane cutters’ camp in the eastern Dominican Republic.

When the sun rose that morning, 17-year-old Arturo Mejia found himself crammed into a paddy wagon along with dozens of grizzled farm hands, pregnant women and children. They were told they were being trucked to neighboring Haiti.

As Donald Trump promises to deport migrants en masse from the U.S., and to target Haitians on temporary visas specifically, the Dominican Republic provides a glimpse of what that might look like.

The Caribbean nation of 11.3 million people says it has deported more than 330,000 Haitians this year, with the pace gaining steam after President Luis Abinader vowed in October to expel 10,000 people a week.

Haitians are being picked up on their way to school, hauled off buses and snatched from their workplaces in what has emerged as the largest deportation program per capita in the hemisphere.

From October through Dec. 10, at least 78,151 people were expelled from the country, immigration officials say. That would be the equivalent of the U.S. shipping out 2.3 million people in two months — or, roughly, the entire population of Houston.

The deportation push is still in its early days, and the full impact has yet to be seen. But already it’s causing labor shortages and missed exports that threaten to cast a shadow on one of the region’s fastest-growing economies, an outcome that businesses have warned could be replicated in the U.S. if the Trump administration makes good on its threats.

Industry groups that rely on Haitian workers are begging the government for relief. And undocumented migrants are living in fear.

“You don’t feel safe anywhere anymore,” said Mejia, who was born in the Dominican Republic to Haitian parents and is undocumented. After being taken to a detention center, he managed to get released two days later only after a local priest interceded on his behalf. “People are still sleeping in the sugarcane fields because they’re afraid of getting raided at night.”

Of the estimated 500,000 Haitians who live in the Dominican Republic, almost a third are thought to have been born there to Haitian parents. Unlike most nations in the hemisphere, Dominican laws don’t grant automatic citizenship by birth.

It’s an immigration policy that Trump has seized on. In an interview with NBC News this month, he said he would end birthright citizenship in the U.S. via executive action, calling the policy “ridiculous.” The U.S. Constitution has long been understood as making anyone born on U.S. soil an American citizen.

For his part, Abinader says the mass expulsions are about keeping Haiti’s chaos on its side of the border.

As violent gangs have seized control of about 80% of Haiti’s capital, they’ve murdered more than 5,000 people and forced more than 700,000 to flee their homes this year alone. More than half of Haiti’s 11.7 million people are going hungry and the economy is in tatters.

While the World Bank expects the Dominican Republic to grow 5.1% this year, the economy of neighboring Haiti is expected to shrink 4.2% — the poorest performance in the hemisphere.

Despite the condemnation of human rights groups and the international community, Abinader’s mass deportations have proved popular and helped him win reelection in May.

Also like Trump during his first administration, Abinader began building a 164-kilometer (100-mile) concrete-and-steel border wall in 2022 that splits the shared island of Hispaniola. That project remains incomplete and has done little to stop Haitians looking for security and work from crossing the border into a country where the minimum wage is more than double Haiti’s.

The immigration crackdown is about the “reality on the ground in the Dominican Republic,” Foreign Minister Roberto Alvarez said during an interview in the capital.

As the neighboring country has collapsed, the influx of Haitians is putting stress on Dominican schools, hospitals and budgets, he said. Almost 40% of hospital delivery beds in the country, for example, are occupied by Haitians.

“National resentment has risen to the point that the government’s responsibility is first to the Dominican population,” Alvarez said. “We are not responsible for the situation in Haiti,” adding that the international community needs to step up support to stabilize the poorest country in the Americas.

Dominican Backbone

The roundups may be politically popular, but they’re sending shudders through businesses that rely on cheap Haitian labor — particularly the construction and agriculture sectors, which account for about 20% of the economy. Farm workers typically earn the equivalent of $50 to $60 a week, while construction jobs often pay closer to $100 a week.

Martin Peña, the executive director of the Dominican Association of Banana Producers, said some farms have missed export deadlines because the migrant raids have snatched key employees.

Like in the U.S., many agricultural jobs in the Dominican Republic are done by foreigners, he said, and about 75% of the country’s estimated 32,000 banana workers are Haitian.

“The reality here is that we cannot find Dominican agriculture workers,” he said.

Perhaps nowhere are the raids being felt more intensely than in the Dominican sugar industry, which has been built on Haitian labor.

At a remote workers’ camp in Santa Cruz del Seibo, 83-year-old Jose Luis said the immigration enforcement had made him too scared to travel to a nearby town to pick up a severance check.

Born in Haiti, Luis said he has been living and working in the Dominican Republic since 1962. But his only form of identification is a company-issued card that claims he was born in 1899 — which would make him 125 years old.

For decades the flawed ID was enough to satisfy authorities. Now it would almost certainly get him deported.

“I haven’t left here in more than a month,” he said of the squalid camp, where there is no electricity and laborers share a latrine. “I can’t get sent to Haiti right now. I need that money.”

Enrique Carlos de Castro, who runs a nearby family-owned sugar farm, said the new immigration policies have made his workers and the industry “uncertain about where we stand.”

“We’re in a Catch-22,” he said. “We need the migratory labor force, but at the same time we need to have a system that controls it and knows where the migrants are in the Dominican Republic.”

In the past, Haitians would cross the border for the cutting or planting season and then go home. But as Haiti has spiraled into chaos, many of those workers are now stranded in the Dominican Republic.

Human Rights

The migratory issues are also at the root of human rights worries. In 2022, the U.S. banned sugar imports from the Dominican Republic’s biggest producer, Central Romana, over concerns that it was using forced labor. The company is run by Jose Fanjul Jr., of the influential Cuban-American family behind Domino Sugar and Florida Crystals.

The sugar industry has now joined other powerful sectors, including construction, rice and banana producers, in asking the government to legalize seasonal foreign workers. Likewise, as Trump is promising the largest deportation effort in U.S. history, some labor-intensive sectors are clamoring for more temporary worker visas.

Alvarez, the foreign minister, said the Dominican Republic and Haiti had been working on those permits in 2021, when Haitian President Jovenel Moise was murdered and elections were called off. Since then, there’s been no one to talk to on the other side of the border, he said.

The incoming Trump administration is expected to be particularly hard on the Haitian population. Of the estimated 1.1 million people of Haitian descent living in the U.S., some 240,000 were admitted under the 2023 humanitarian “parole” program that allows them to work in the country for up to two years. In October, President Joe Biden announced he was ending the program, and Trump has openly talked about targeting Haitians for return.

Still, the allure of the American dream is strong.

Mejia, the teenager temporarily picked up by immigration authorities, said he wants to leave the Dominican Republic and its sugar fields before someone tries to send him again to Haiti — a country he’s never been to.

Instead, he imagines himself washing cars or working in construction in California, where his hero, basketball player Lebron James, plays for the Los Angeles Lakers.

“I’ve thought about it a lot,” Mejia said. “I think that’s where I should be.”

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