Haiti migrants no longer stranded on desolate border
ANSE-A-PITRES, Haiti (AP) — Forced out of the Dominican Republic, Anise Germain and her family pitched a flimsy tent of blankets and cardboard on a patch of rocky ground just across the border in Haiti.
More than half are children, and health authorities feared that a growing number of cholera cases would turn into a more widespread outbreak.
Over the last several years, Dominican authorities have begun trying to bolster the largely porous border with Haiti, increasing security at the main crossing points and deporting people who can't prove legal residency.
In September 2013, the Dominican constitutional court issued a much-debated ruling that children born in the country to non-citizens did not qualify for automatic citizenship because their migrant parents were "in transit."
With its migrant policies under international criticism, the Dominican government created a program that allowed people born in Haiti to qualify for legal residency if they could get the necessary paperwork proving they had been in the Dominican Republic since before October 2011.
Most people living in the refugee camps clustered around Anse-a-Pitres are eager to leave, although many in one remote camp known as "Water Head" hope to stay.
In recent years, both the Haitian government and humanitarian groups extensively used the one-year rental subsidies to close tent camps filled with people displaced by the 2010 earthquake.