Activist Barred By Dominican Immigration Officials To Travel To US For Meeting With Human Rights Group

FILE - In this Aug. 12, 2013 file photo, a youth of Haitian descent holds a sign that reads in Spanish "I'm Dominican" during a protest demanding that President Danilo Medina stop the process to invalidate their birth certificates after authorities retained their ID cards, in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. The Dominican Republic's top court on Thursday, Sept. 26, 2013 stripped citizenship from thousands of people born to migrants who came illegally, a category that overwhelmingly includes Haitians brought in to work on farms. The decision cannot be appealed, and it affects all those born since 1929. (AP Photo/Ezequiel Abiu Lopez, File)

SANTO DOMINGO, Dominican Republic (AP) – Dominican immigration officers have barred a woman of Haitian descent who's fighting for Dominican citizenship from flying to the U.S. to meet with a human rights body.

A legal challenge by Juliana Deguis Pierre resulted in a Dominican constitutional court ruling last year that could let the government retroactively strip citizenship mostly from people of Haitian descent born in the Dominican Republic.

Pierre went to Santo Domingo's airport Sunday with lawyers headed for a U.S. meeting of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, which will discuss the citizenship issue at a Monday meeting in Washington.

Pierre showed immigration officers a special document provided to her by the U.S. State Department. But the Dominican officers decided it was not sufficient to allow her to travel on an international flight and said she needs a passport.