In the Expelled decision and in a related case, Yean and Bosico v. Dominican Republic, the Inter-American Court underlined the overriding importance of ensuring equal treatment and prohibiting discrimination in the content and application of nationality law, particularly in respect of denial or deprivation of nationality leading to statelessness.121 These decisions addressed a longstanding struggle of the Haitian minority in the Dominican Republic for equal access to nationality under the law. From the 1920s until 2010, the Dominican constitution established a relatively straightforward regime of nationality acquisition by birth on the territory (jus soli). Beginning in the 1990s, nationalist groups promoted an interpretation of the country’s jus soli law to exclude children of undocumented migrants. Since then, thousands of people of Haitian descent in the Dominican Republic have been refused birth registration and national identity cards, which are necessary to work, register children, get married, open bank accounts, attend public universities, and participate in many other civil activities.122 A 2004 migration law took the de facto citizenship denial regime one step closer to formalization, codifying a new interpretation of an exception to jus soli for children deemed by the state to be born to parents “in transit.”123 The law affirmatively stated that seasonal and undocumented workers were “in transit,” a term that since the 1920s had been interpreted narrowly, to signify a person in the country for less than 10 days. The government applied the new law retroactively, introducing a nationwide policy in 2007, enacted through internal administrative decisions, systematically halting the issuance of new or renewal documentation to people of Haitian descent, including birth registration for Dominican-born children. In 2005, the Dominican secretary of labor unveiled a plan to “dehaitianize” the country.124 In January 2010, a new Constitution further formalized the restrictive interpretation of jus soli, foreclosing access to citizenship for children born to undocumented migrants in the Dominican Republic. Current Senior ICE Advisor Jon Feere has “praised the ‘clarity’ of the Dominican Republic’s new immigration-limiting constitution.”125 A September 2013 Dominican Constitutional Tribunal decision—now referred to ominously as La Sentencia (the ruling)—stripped thousands of Dominicans of their nationality, through a dramatic, retroactive re-interpretation of the country’s nationality laws.126 The case was brought by Juliana Deguis Pierre, who was born in the Dominican Republic to Haitian migrant parents in 1984, and was denied access to proof of her Dominican nationality due to policies in place following the 2004 migration law. The court held that Deguis Pierre had been registered as a Dominican national erroneously because her parents could not prove their regular migration status and were accordingly “in transit” at the time of her birth. The court, extraordinarily, treated the case, brought by one woman, as a collective action, and used that posture 36 UNMAKING AMERICANS