women and nursing mothers, which could lead to their deportation. Migration and other security agency officials’ consideration of documentation held is not uniform. Several people from Group B who applied for naturalization under Law 169-14 as if they were foreigners, reported a lack of respect for the State documents they received in this process. Alberto, a 46-year-old Dominican man of Haitian descent who registered from Group B and has yet to receive authorization to naturalize, shares his lived experiences: “Documentation is important for many reasons: firstly, to walk freely. Sometimes you have to walk like a thief, you walk as if you were a fugitive, you have to be creeping all around to see if Migration [Directorate General of Migration] will come and grab you. Because if they grab you, as in our case, they will take us and we’ll spend forever trying to find our way because we don’t know where we’re going. We were born and raised here. We’ve never been to Haiti.” Many study participants alluded to the fact that some security agents engage in racial profiling, insofar as they detain and/or interrogate people based on alleged documentation status, which they presume based on the person’s skin color. One focus group participant shared the following: “I believe that everyone who is ‘moreno’ [dark-skinned] is discriminated against here. There is a lot of racism here. I go to the capital a lot because my sister is there and I have relatives. I see that sometimes many [light- skinned] morenos who are Haitian nationals walk by, and nobody stops them because of their skin color. They don’t say anything to them and they don’t know any Spanish and they keep moving on. They grill the [dark-skinned] moreno: ‘Give me your papers, moreno’ only because of their skin color.” In general, study participants and their families spent the first months of the pandemic as if under a ceasefire. According to Edwige, a 46-year-old migrant woman in the PNRE: “What’s given us a break has been the coronavirus, which stopped them [General Directorate of Migration and the auxiliary military institutions] a bit.” Unfortunately, the moratorium on deportations has not been prolonged, despite calls by civil society organiza- tions to do so given the ongoing pandemic with all of its consequences (REDH Jacques Viau 2020). In the final three months of 2020, CEDESO reported that they had been able to intervene in 49 events where migrants or their descendants faced arbitrary immigration controls in the Enriquillo subregion.23 Deportations of Haitians from the United States to Haiti in the first months of the Biden administration have exceeded the deportations of the last year of the Trump administration in 2020 (Prospect, 2021). On May 22, 2021, the United States re-issued Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for Haitians for a period of 18 months, because of the adverse security situation in Haiti. Potentially this could herald a reconsideration of the Biden administration’s continued deportation regime for Haitians, recalling that at least one stateless person was among those deported to Haiti from the United States in early 2021. Both land deportations from the DR and deported Haitians arriving by air weigh heavily on the Moïse administration in Haiti, which is highly challenged by a political, social and economic crisis that is unprecedented since the fall of the Duvalier regime in 1986. g) Transnationalism In border regions, the circulation of people, money, and goods are important livelihood strategies. Due to the crisis, the migrants interviewed report less or no money being sent in transfers during the pandemic, despite their recognition of the difficult circumstances their families are experiencing in Haiti. The World Bank has explained that remittances from the DR to Haiti are even more important than remittances sent from the US, insofar as they reach the poorest quintile of the population in Haiti (World Bank 2012). Claire, a 50-year-old migrant woman registered in the PNRE, who has lived in the DR since 2004, describes the economic effects of the health crisis which have impeded her from helping her family: “I have 3 sisters, 4 brothers in Haiti, they can’t [get by], and every so often I send a little money, but this year I’ve not been able to. That has been a problem for me. They call me to tell me that the situation is tough. They know that I’m in another country, I 23. Trato Digno Project: http://tratodigno.obmica.org/ 28 Research Brief: COVID-19 Impacts on Haitian Migrants and their Descendants on the Southern Border of the D.R.