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SANTO DOMINGO, Dominican Republic — Francis’s father left the family a few hours after he was born. At age 6, Francis was moved by his mother from Haiti to the Dominican border town of Elías Piña so she could search for work. When an earthquake struck Haiti in 2010, Francis’s mother returned home to check on family members. He never heard from her again.
Francis, who said he’s now 18, has “gone here and there,” since then, living with friends and acquaintances in Elías Piñas before traveling two years ago to the capital, where he works the night shift stocking watermelons at a local market for roughly 50 pesos per day — a little over U.S. $1. Having heard about a plan to normalize the status of undocumented immigrants, he gathered his paperwork and went to the central administrative building on Thursday to register. He missed the deadline by one day.
“The process was complicated,” Francis told The Huffington Post. “I got there too late.”
But the plan has been widely criticized for inefficiencies and the possibility that it will lead to deportation of Dominicans of Haitian descent who have been stripped of their citizenship.
