Ray Laforest is a born activist. Though he now makes his living as a labor organizer in New York, his fighting spirit began when he was a boy in Haiti. Members of his family were killed during the era of the Duvalier dictatorship. “But Duvalier was kicked out,” he says, ever hopeful. “It was the Haitian people getting up and saying, ‘I’m not taking this anymore.’”

That is exactly the same message he has for the Dominican government today. Teaming up with Haitians and Dominicans, such as Columbia University graduate student Alba Mota, he is a regular outside the Dominican Embassy in Manhattan, protesting the deportation of Haitians in the Dominican Republic.

Tens of thousands of Haitians are deported from the Dominican Republic every year without due process, according to reports. “Historically, Haitians have been the group you could blame everything on,” Laforest said. “Racism would not survive unless there was an economic benefit.”

The latent racism lying right beneath the surface of Dominican society erupted in a thrust of violence against Haitians last year, Laforest said.

In May 2005, a young Dominican woman was killed in the northwest region of Hatillo Palma. Haitians were blamed for the murder, though there was no evidence to support the allegations.

Nevertheless, the incident caused a backlash against Haitians and people of Haitian descent. Haitians were forced from their homes, lynched, beaten and burned to death on several occasions, according to reports and Laforest.

“You can’t organize a pogrom against an entire community because of the death of one person,” Laforest said.

The woman’s death spurred vigilantes to attack Haitian communities with machetes.

Mota said that this kind of xenophobia on the part of Dominican citizens and their government is what the Haitian and Dominican coalition protests every month outside the doors of the Dominican Consulate in New York.

Mota, of Dominican descent, leads a coalition of student activists who protest weekly during the school year. “Our message is not only to the Dominican Consul but also to the U.S. government,” she says. “We want to say: ‘As Dominicans, we do not support this, and Dominican government officials should feel ashamed of what they are doing.’”

The Dominican Consulate and the Dominican Ministry of Foreign Affairs were not immediately available for comment.

“We want to embarrass the (Dominican) government into recognizing them,” says Laforest, who is part of the effort to demand citizenship for Haitian immigrants in the Dominican Republic.

Hospital officials fail to provide birth certificates to a child born of Haitian parents in the Dominican Republic, Laforest said. “Every hospital knows not to give papers saying that a baby was born there,” he said.

Without official documentation to prove their citizenship, these children are not allowed to attend Dominican public schools and, like their parents, are subject to indiscriminate deportation to Haiti, coalition members said.

Laforest says his advocacy work is important because these Haitian immigrants are people who feel they cannot stand up for themselves. “ They cannot organize because they were never given nationality,” he said. “They have no power because they can’t vote. When they are deported, they are kidnapped at the border and thrown on a truck like potatoes,” Laforest said. “They are left at the border without enough money to get home.”

The Dominican government has been reported to deport someone for “looking Haitian,” or for being darker skinned, according to a Human Rights Watch report entitled: “Illegal People: Haitians and Dominico-Haitians in the Dominican Republic.”

This blend of racism, nationalism and anti-Haitian sentiment has been around for decades.

Rafael Trujillo, the Dominican dictator of the 1930s, orchestrated the genocide of 35,000 Haitians in 1937.

Recently, the issues that Mota and Laforest are protesting have been at the center of a heated legal debate in the Dominican Republic.

In December 2005, the Dominican Supreme Court ruled that children of undocumented immigrants are not citizens. “They decided that nationality is based on blood, not geography,” Laforest said.

For activists like Mota and Laforest, the court ruling does not mark the end of their struggle. In September, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, the judicial body of the Organization of American States (OAS), ruled in Yean and Bosico v. Dominican Republic that the Dominican Republic violated the right of nationality by denying two young girls of Haitian descent their birth certificates.

The government of the Dominican Republic responded unfavorably. A statement by the Dominican Ministry of Foreign Affairs called the court’s decision “unacceptable.” Compliance with the OAS is unlikely to be reliable, officials said.

Laforest said Sonia Pierre, executive director of the Movement of Haitian-Dominican Women (MUDHA), the organization that brought the case against the government, received several death threats over the course of the case.

At stake is Article 11 of the Dominican Constitution, which grants Dominican nationality to anyone born in the Dominican Republic, with the exception of children of diplomats or other people who are “in transit.” The government has thus interpreted “in transit” to include all undocumented immigrants, while the Inter-American Court ruled otherwise.