596 Wendy Hunter and Francesca Reece Dominican Republic to migrant workers, as the then most recent 2002 constitution did not include any provisions for nonresidents and their children. The law went into effect in April 2007 with no clarification of status for the children of workers fully settled in the country but who were now considered nonresidents permanently in transit.13 Against the backdrop of dismal civil registration and political pushback against immigration, the first legal debate over what it meant for nonresidents to be in transit began when the DR denied late-issued birth certificates to two children of Haitian ancestry who in fact had evidence of having been born in the DR. In 2005, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights received the initial complaint and, after determining that its severity warranted judicial application of the 1969 American Convention on Human Rights, forwarded the case to the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACtHR) for further judgment. In Case of the Girls Yean and Bosico v. Dominican Republic, the IACtHR held that, by reinterpreting the “in transit” clause to determine the nationality of the nonresidents, the DR was purposefully excluding Dominico-Haitians from their legal right to Dominican citizenship (Inter-American Court of Human Rights 2005). Even before the Yean and Bosico ruling, however, the DR made the strategic decision to present the girls with birth certificates (Inter-American Court of Human Rights 2005). Fearing damage to the country’s reputation, yet doing the minimum to evade criticism, the government blamed the shoddy Dominican civil registry for overlooking the girls and fixed their individual issue by granting them birth certificates. Despite this concession, however, the IACtHR condemned the Dominican Republic for violating the cornerstone principle of birthright citizenship. Although the government awarded the girls additional reparations, it did not address the underlying structural cause of their deprivation or systematically work to improve registration services in the country. Therefore, despite the IACtHR’s condemnation, this strategy of “turning down the heat” by resolving cases on an individual level persisted in the events that followed. Administrative obstructionism emerges as a strategy: 2006–2009 After the negative attention created by the Yean and Bosico case, the DR continued to discriminate against Dominicans of Haitian lineage, yet in a more subterranean fashion. Circular 017, a memo the JCE issued in 2007 with the acquiescence of the national government, prohibited the offspring of those in an “irregular migratory situation” from accessing any existing birth records. This policy was no doubt intended to target DominicoHaitians: copies of the memo found in various offices had “foreign parents” crossed out and “Haitian parents” written instead as a reason for deeming records “irregular” (Open Society Foundations 2010, 11; Amnesty International 2015, 15). A second policy, Resolución 12-2007, further restricted the access that DominicoHaitians had to their government records by authorizing civil registrars to suspend any state-issued documents found to contain “irregularities” (República Dominicana Junta Central Electoral 2007). The policy suspended any birth certificates issued to children born in the DR whose parents lacked legal documentation at the time of their birth, effectively jeopardizing the citizenship of people whose legal status had never before been officially questioned (Inter-American Commission on Human Rights 2015, 78). Within one year of this policy, the vast majority of the suspended documents belonged to DominicoHaitians (Open Society Foundations 2010, 13). This act of disenfranchisement led to a spike in media attention throughout 2007, which tapered off in 2008 when the Dominican government employed blame avoidance by holding the JCE and its incompetent, xenophobic officials responsible for the invalidations. 13 Hayes de Kalaf (2018) informs this chronology of events. https://doi.org/10.1017/lar.2022.48 Published online by Cambridge University Press