2026-02-18

The Dominican Republic's General Directorate of Migration announced that more than 525,000 Haitians have been expelled since October 2025, with Vice Admiral Luis Rafael Lee Ballester characterizing the operations as routine migration control. The figure represents a structural escalation of a policy that had operated at approximately 22,500 to 23,000 deportees per month across 2024 and 2025. The current rate of approximately 117,000 per month exceeds those February 18, 2026 annual averages by a factor of five and produces nearly double the entire 2025 IOM-recorded total of 270,214 in just four and a half months. Haiti lacks functional capacity to absorb and reintegrate deportees at this volume. The country hosts 1.4 million internally displaced persons, 5.7 million people in acute food insecurity, and an 880 million USD Humanitarian Response Plan funded at only 3.4 percent. Gangs control approximately 85 to 90 percent of Port-au-Prince and 45 percent of the capital's health facilities are closed or destroyed. IOM has documented deportation of pregnant and postpartum women and children under these conditions. Local Haitian organizations have issued urgent calls for assistance, while IOM and the Migrant Protection Working Group continue to document conditions at the border and reception points. The Dominican Republic has simultaneously accelerated construction of a 160-kilometer border wall equipped with sensors, cameras, and watchtowers, signaling this policy trajectory will not reverse in the near term. The operational consequence for international actors is immediate. The existing HRP funding gap combined with a five-fold deportation acceleration creates a humanitarian math that current programming cannot absorb. IOM and OCHA must reassess planning assumptions based on a figure that was not previously visible at this scale.