were part of ‘Quisqueya Aprende Contigo’17 [Quisqueya learns with you] and they got a pension of six thousand pesos a month.” People receiving benefits outside of government programs are sometimes unclear as to the source of this external aid. Nonetheless, several participants mentioned CEDESO in collaboration with Oxfam18, and child sponsorship programs offered by World Vision19 and Compassion International.20 Others mentioned sporadic assistance from a church. Jean, a 48-year-old migrant man in the PNRE, explained that the Dominican State does not take much initiative with certain groups in society. He explained the scant assistance available as follows: “Sometimes when God the Father passes through an institution He may help us eat, but directly from the authorities around here? ... Well, only at school. When they cook, they come and distribute it to the children, they give cooked food to the children.” People who do have their documentation and obtain state benefits during the pandemic deem this charitable alternative aid to be positive. Mateo, a Dominican man of Haitian descent who has never had any problems with his documents, made the following observation: “I saw that about a month ago, CEDESO helped people who do not have documents. It’s a great initiative because the truth is that they do not have the same privileges as those who have documents, those of us who participate in ‘Fase’, others in ‘Quédate en Casa’. Since they don’t have any kind of protection, I think it’s a good thing that CEDESO has done this.” In early 2007, the Dominican government committed to major reforms to its social assistance programs. An effort to locate and provide documentation to poor people who had been excluded from social services due to the lack of legal identity documents was key. National literacy plan: https://minpre.gob.do/transparencia/ proyectos-y-programas/plan-nacional-de-alfabetizacion-quisqueya-aprende-contigo/ 18. https://www.oxfam.org/es/que-hacemos/donde-trabajamos/ paises/republica-Dominicana 19. https://www.worldvision.org.do/ 20. https://www.compassion.es/republica-Dominicana.php 17. Strengthening the ability for the social programs to reach their target population, especially through cash transfers, was another goal. The government identified approximately 400,000 poor individuals who would be eligible for social assistance programs (subsidized health insurance and cash transfers, among others) but who had been excluded by virtue of not having legal identity documents (World Bank 2017). The objective of the Social Protection Investment Project was to improve the coverage, scope and effectiveness of social protection programs in the DR. However, in that same year of 2007, the Central Electoral Board’s resolutions (JCE 2007a, JCE 2007b) launched a process of incipient denationalization of many Dominicans of foreign descent (mostly Haitian). That is to say, the authorities arranged to provide legal Dominican identity to some people for the first time, while concurrently taking advantage of the exercise in order to exclude other Dominican citizens of Haitian descent who had already acquired their bona fide Dominican nationality but then found themselves under the threat of being deprived of their citizenship. This process was compounded by Sentence 168-13. This study has found these pre-existing inequalities, as conceptualized by Hayes’ research (2021), have been exacerbated under the pandemic. This observation coincides with findings from other countries during the pandemic. In Kenya, Uganda and India, the digitalization of identity can have negative effects on the distribution of humanitarian aid and vaccination campaigns, as it allows for exclusion of certain populations from the response (Privacy International 2021). This is also consistent with a study carried out by OBMICA in Santo Domingo (Morales 2020), which reveals the relative disadvantage of the Haitian and Venezuelan populations in disaster risk reduction efforts, both for natural and health emergencies. On the other extreme, some countries have endeavored to regularize migrants in the midst of a pandemic precisely because of the urgent need to facilitate their access to social protection. In the region, we have the example of Uruguay, which has integrated a human rights-based approach into its migration policy. There, authorities recently took advantage of humanitarian aid delivery operations to facilitate the regularization of migrants without national documentation. When the Ministry of Social Development was delivering food baskets to people in vulnerable situations, they were surprised by the number of migrants without a national 26 Research Brief: COVID-19 Impacts on Haitian Migrants and their Descendants on the Southern Border of the D.R.