Port-au-prince, July 9 (teleSUR-RHC)-- Haiti has called for the intervention of the international community on Wednesday to speed up the regularization of hundreds of thousands of undocumented Haitian-Dominicans facing deportation in the Dominican Republic.

In an address to the Organization of American States, Haiti’s Foreign Minister Lener Renauld urged the Dominican Republic to treat its Haitian descendants more humanely and bring an end to the humanitarian crisis. "Haiti comes to the Americas to urge the Dominican Republic to come to its senses. Haiti does not come to ask for mercy, it comes to protest the treatment of its nationals in the Dominican Republic,” Renauld said.
 

Haiti’s protest at the OAS comes as the interregional forum announced it will send a special mission to the Dominican Republic and Haiti between July 10-14 in the face of the migration crisis there. The mission has the aim to facilitate a “long-term solution that regularizes the legal state of immigrants.” Luis Almagro, Secretary General of the OAS , affirmed that “we cannot forget that immigrants, beyond their legal situation, have the same rights as everyone else.”

The Dominican ambassador to the OAS rebuked criticism from the international community and accused Haiti for not assuming responsibility for taking in Haitian descendants. “Neither can we accept the cynicism of nations that pretend to denounce with hyperbole and exaggeration what they are accustomed to do to immigrants in their own territories,” ambassador Pedro Vergés said.

The migration crisis comes after the Dominican Republic stripped an estimated 200,000 Dominican-Haitians of citizenship in order to deport them on a mass scale. The Dominican government claimed it opened up ways for the now-undocumented Dominican Haitians to gain legal status but media reports claim that only two percent received their papers legalized.