Saint-Soi Souverin sat on a bench resting and thinking about his plight after being uprooted from his longtime home on the other side of the border in the Dominican Republic, far from the Haitian shelter where he is staying.

Dominican authorities deported the 35-year-old farm worker along with his wife and four children early this week, leaving Souverin to ponder what he will do in Haiti, a deeply poor country that he left at age 17 to find work in the relatively more prosperous Dominican Republic.