SANTO DOMINGO, April 23, 2025 (BSS/AFP) - Authorities in the Dominican Republic have launched a hunt for undocumented migrants in hospitals, arresting pregnant women and mothers with newborns in a crackdown on arrivals from neighboring Haiti.

Eighty-seven women and 48 children were arrested Monday in hospitals and maternity wards across the Caribbean nation, which is on a drive to expel migrants from gang-plagued, deeply impoverished Haiti.

Over half of the women who were arrested Monday, the first day of the operation targeting hospitals, were pregnant, according to official figures. The rest had recently given birth. No men were detained.

An AFP journalist saw three women with babies in their arms being driven away by immigration officials from Notre-Dame de la Altagracia hospital in the capital Santo Domingo.

Dominican President Luis Abinader has taken a tough line on migration from crisis-ravaged Haiti since coming to power in 2020.

The two countries share the island of Hispaniola, the second-biggest in the Caribbean after Cuba.

The Dominican government has said that while migrants may receive medical care, they will be deported immediately afterwards if they are found to be in the country illegally.

The immigration department said the women arrested Monday were taken to a detention center where they were fingerprinted and photographed.

"They were treated with dignity and given food," it added.

Dalina Pie, a 26-year-old Haitian woman who accompanied a pregnant friend to hospital in Santo Domingo, accused the government of summarily deporting migrants.

"That's not right, it's an abuse, because children are innocent," she said.

She also said that some patients who were being kicked out may require long-term care and monitoring.

In the first three months of the year, the Dominican Republic deported 86,000 Haitians, stepping up the pace compared to 2024, when it expelled 276,000 for the year as a whole.

Abinader has also announced plans to extend a 54-kilometer (33-mile) wall between the nations, and recently deployed more troops to the border.

Under the new hospital protocol, which the president unveiled earlier this month, medical staff must ask migrants for an identification document, a letter from an employer, proof of residence and payment for their care.

"We will admit these people (to hospital) and those who do not have legal status... will be repatriated to their homeland," immigration director Luis Rafael Lee Ballester told reporters.