and other services, and to establish some 60 JCE delegations in the main hospital maternity wards to facilitate access to timely birth registration. In 2009-2010, late birth declaration drives were launched in order to address the problem of chronic under-registration, given that the DR had one of the highest rates of under-registration of its population in all of Latin America and the Caribbean (Brito, Corbacho, and Osorio 2013). In addition, the country had begun to implement various social protection programs that required correcting under-registration in rural areas in order to reach the poorest people (see the section on Social Protection for more information). By 2014, the registration situation was already improving, increasing from 78% of children under the age of five who were registered in 2009, to 88% (UNICEF 2016). However, under-registration persists and, therefore, so does the social exclusion of a significant segment of the Dominican population. As of February 2020, data from UNICEF estimated that the under-registration rate may be between 8 and 18% of the adult population in the Dominican Republic (UNHCR and OAS 2020). It is clear that not all children have benefited from these efforts, especially when their mothers or fathers are of foreign origin and/or have irregular migration status. The civil registry modernization efforts coincide in time with the practices of arbitrary suspension of identity documents and denationalization of people of Haitian descent, which have been made visible before the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACtHR) and widely documented (Riveros 2014; Wooding 2018; Petrozziello 2014/2017; Hayes 2021). There is a noticeable pattern in the practices of exclusion from the civil registry: each initiative to expand the coverage of the civil registry and by extension, the electoral roll, entails the exclusion of members of this group, which certain political elites have designated as undesirable.1 In other words, the same mechanisms that have been created to modernize the civil registry — mobile units, late birth declaration unit, digitization and biometric registration —have been used to identify and denationalize those who for decades had considered themselves DominiCivil society organizations in the Dominican Republic, as well as the National Human Rights Commission, have documented the systematic exclusion of the Haitian descended population at key moments, such as during the replacement of plastic ID cards prior to the 2016 elections, an event that violated the political rights of the population. 1. cans, in accordance with the Constitution in force at the time of their birth in the Dominican territory. In previous studies, we documented how the late declaration campaigns carried out by the JCE in conjunction with the Ministry of Education, for example, had not managed to correct all the informal practices and irregularities that have been hindering access to civil registration for this population (Petrozziello et al. 2014/2017). Others have observed that it has been precisely in the context of strengthening social policy, through programs such as the Solidarity Card that the Dominican State has sought to exclude the descendants of migrants (Hayes de Kalaf 2019, 2021). In contrast to the use of violence or discriminatory practices against migrants and their descendants, there was a bio-political turn in the mode of anti-Haitian exclusionism within state structures (Martínez and Wooding 2017), including the cancellation of birth certificates and identification cards and/or the refusal to issue documentation proving Dominican nationality for descendants of migrants. Implementation of Naturalization Law 169-14 Before the COVID-19 pandemic began, Law 169-14 was being implemented gradually. The aforementioned law was enacted in 2014 subsequent to the statelessness crisis caused by Sentence 168-13 of the Constitutional Court, which ordered the erasure from the civil registry of all those whose births had been registered to migrant parents without regular immigration status between 1929 and 2007. Law 169-14 established a special regime to facilitate the recognition of some and the eventual naturalization of others, thus dividing the affected population into two groups: Group A: Children of non-resident foreign parents born in the national territory between June 16, 1929 and April 18, 2007, whose birth was registered in the Dominican Civil Registry using documents not recognized by the applicable regulations for those purposes at the time of registration; and Group B: Children of foreign parents in an irregular situation, who were born in the Dominican Republic and whose birth is not registered in the Civil Registry. The implementation of Law 169-14, which allegedly would resolve the statelessness situation, has been slow, partial, and full of administrative obstacles. 16 Research Brief: COVID-19 Impacts on Haitian Migrants and their Descendants on the Southern Border of the D.R.