For many Dominicans of Haitian background the time to be considered a legal resident of the Dominican Republic is about to run out.

In 2013 a controversial court ruling stripped the offspring of Haitian migrants of their citizenship retroactively back to 1930. This left tens of thousands of Dominican-born people of Haitian descent essentially stateless.

On June 17, as many as 500,000 of those stateless people could be sent to Haiti.

International outrage over the ruling persuaded the Dominican government to pass a law in 2014 that allows for people that were born to undocumented foreign parents, but whose birth had never been registered in the Dominican Republic, to make requests for residency permits as foreigners.

On Monday, as reported by Associated Press, throngs of non-citizens stood in overflowing lines across the Dominican Republic in desperate attempts to garner legal residency.

As reported in the Guardian, authorities in the Dominican Republic have reportedly lined up a fleet of buses and placed processing centers along the border with Haiti. This has led to public fears of mass roundups of Dominicans of Haitian descent.

Interior Minister Ramon Fadul has stated that around 250,000 people have started the application process but that only 10,000 had met all the requirements for legal residency. A mere 300 people have actually been able to receive permits.

According to Fadul, who has denied that there will be mass roundup, anyone who fails to register will face deportation.

Contrary to what Fadul has said, Major General Rubén Darío Paulino, the director of migration for the Dominican Republic, has expressed to the local media that 2,000 police and military officers and 150 inspectors had already received special training for deportations.

The fear of being deported to Haiti is great, as economically the country is deemed to be one of the poorest nations in the western hemisphere, and is still suffering from the devastating earthquake that hit back in 2010.