authorities’ final intentions towards them and, in some cases on the eve of renewed deportations, went into hiding or moved to be non-traceable to the authorities. Secondly, the presidential decree in late 2013 unleashing the Regularization Plan had instructed the Dominican authorities to suspend deportations during the eighteen months when the Plan was established and operated. The Herculean task of now resuming these and deporting as many hundreds of thousands of persons as had managed to register was daunting and, in terms of logistics, a non-starter. It was against this background that the authorities hit on the idea of encouraging so-called “spontaneous returns” for irregular migrants who had not signed up to the Plan, before commencing official deportations two months later. A third conundrum was the need to face “A third conundrum was the need to face up to local up to local and international concerns around the possible expatriation of some of the 133,000 and international concerns Dominicans of Haitian ancestry who had been around the possible expat- denationalized by a Constitutional Tribunal Sentence of 2013, most of whom did not have the riation of some of the papers in hand to prove Dominican citizenship. 133,000 Dominicans of According to the International OrganizaHaitian ancestry who had tion for Migration (IOM), between June 2015 been denationalized by a and December 2016, 96, 476 families, equivalent to 160,452 persons crossed the border in Constitutional Tribunal mixed flows. The bulk of the returns were Sentence of 2013, most of these so-called “spontaneous returns” (totaling some whom did not have the 97, 854 events), although many of those interviewed alleged that they moved because of papers in hand to prove heightened inter-ethnic tensions in the DominiDominican citizenship” can Republic observed from mid-2015 onwards. Assisted returns (initially on offer by the Dominican authorities) totaled some 462 persons. Official deportations observed were 54,510 while 27,445 persons alleged that they had been deported extra-officially. Persons who returned, despite alleging they had signed up for the Regularization Plan, registered 11,193, most of whom moved spontaneously. Although the number of persons born in the Dominican Republic and deported to Haiti was relatively low at an estimated 4.8%, two worrying trends were observed. Most of those in this category of Haitian ancestry persons born in the Dominican Republic had moved spontaneously across the border; while of those deported in this category the biggest group was extra-official. The humanitarian crisis derived from this intense cross-border movement is perhaps best exemplified by the camps established on the Haitian-Dominican border, the Parc Cadeau complex, especially as a result of the spontaneous movers not having necessarily anywhere to go in Haiti. Accordingly, many of these latter took root in one of http://community.apsanet.org/migrationcitizenship/home 24