Pres­i­dent of the Do­mini­can Re­pub­lic, Luis Abi­nad­er, has an­nounced a se­ries of mea­sures aimed at bol­ster­ing bor­der se­cu­ri­ty and tight­en­ing mi­gra­tion con­trol as its neigh­bour, Haiti, con­tin­ues to be faced with po­lit­i­cal and se­cu­ri­ty con­cerns.

The 15 new mea­sures will in­clude ac­cel­er­at­ing the con­struc­tion of the bor­der wall that sep­a­rates the two coun­tries and adding 1500 ad­di­tion­al sol­diers for bor­der sur­veil­lance.

“We will step up sur­veil­lance of the bor­ders with 1,500 ad­di­tion­al troops, on top of 9,500 al­ready de­ployed,” Abi­nad­er told a news con­fer­ence on Sun­day. H said he has since ap­proved the con­struc­tion of a new sec­tion of a wall that sep­a­rates the two coun­tries – which share the sec­ond-largest is­land in the Caribbean.

The bor­der be­tween the two coun­tries stretch­es for more than 186 miles and so far 33 miles of the bor­der wall have been com­plet­ed.

Abi­nad­er said that his lat­est or­der would “speed up con­struc­tion of the bor­der wall” to add a fur­ther eight miles and that le­gal re­forms are al­so on the agen­da with the goal of us­ing tougher penal­ties to de­ter those who fa­cil­i­tate the en­try and stay of im­mi­grants in­to the coun­try.

Abi­nad­er has em­pha­sised the need for tougher bor­der and im­mi­gra­tion con­trols while al­so call­ing for in­ter­na­tion­al as­sis­tance for the French-speak­ing Caribbean Com­mu­ni­ty (CARI­COM) coun­try.

Fig­ures re­leased by the Di­rec­torate Gen­er­al of Mi­gra­tion (DGM) for the pe­ri­od from Oc­to­ber 2024 to March 2025, show that the Do­mini­can Re­pub­lic repa­tri­at­ed to Haiti more than 180,000 Haitians.

Last year,  276,215 Haitians were repa­tri­at­ed.

Ac­cord­ing to Unit­ed Na­tions da­ta, more than 4,200 peo­ple have been killed in Haiti be­tween Ju­ly 2024 and Feb­ru­ary 2025, while an­oth­er 6,000 have been forced to flee their homes..

The Unit­ed Na­tions Se­cu­ri­ty Coun­cil in 2023 passed a res­o­lu­tion for the Kenya-led MSS mis­sion, aimed at com­bat­ing gang vi­o­lence and restor­ing sta­bil­i­ty in the coun­try. Crim­i­nal gangs are seek­ing to take com­plete con­trol of the cap­i­tal, Port-au-Prince, and have launched sev­er­al at­tacks, killing women and chil­dren among oth­ers.

SAN­TO DOMIN­GO, Do­mini­can Re­pub­lic, Apr 7, CMC –

CMC/ag/ir/2025