SANTO DOMINGO, Dominican Republic – Every second Wednesday a chartered jet sets off from rural Louisiana loaded with handcuffed and shackled prisoners headed for this Caribbean capital.

Without fail, the city’s newspapers record the prisoners’ arrival: around 60 last week, more than 80 on the previous flight. To many people here, it is a mounting tally of the criminal invasion from America.

The prisoners are a mix of persons booted from their adopted country on immigration charges and, increasingly in recent years, of permanent legal residents expelled because they committed crimes – sometimes petty crimes, sometimes long ago. Most of the criminals being deported are from New York.

In the Dominican Republic, concern about the influx began to shift to alarm when the deportees’s numbers approached 2,000 a year in the late 1990s. The growth resulted from an increased focus of American immigration authorities on criminal aliens and from American laws adopted in 1996 that expanded the range of criminal offenses resulting in mandatory deportation of legal permanent residents. Now, with the total number of those deported to this painfully poor country since 1996 approaching the 25,000 mark, and with reports of an upsurge in violent crime across the Dominican Republic, the deportees are the focus of deepening fear and resentment.

“The perception is they’re people who have committed crimes, principally in New York, and who came back to commit crimes here,” said the national editor of the daily newspaper El Caribe, Ezequiel Abiu Lopez.

The Dominican Republic’s new attorney general, Francisco Dominguez Brito, expressed a concern, shared by many government officials, that the people returned here by the American government had brought to his country once-rare types of crime.

“Many of the deportees arrive with skills not common in the Dominican Republic,” Mr. Brito said, speaking in Spanish from his spacious office with views of the Caribbean Sea. “Those cases where there has been a planned kidnapping – many have been a deportee. Robberies, assaults with high levels of sophistication have also been deportees.”

In the attorney general’s less luxurious waiting room, an Uzi-toting guard in full military regalia put bluntly what is the public consensus: “The U.S. is sending its trash, and each year the crime goes up.”

This Caribbean country, explored and claimed by Christopher Columbus on his first voyage in 1492, has suffered one of the most turbulent histories among Latin American nations. And with its proximity to Puerto Rico, which is only 80 miles away, the Dominican Republic has long been a concern to America.

In the early 1870s, a serious debate took place in Congress about annexing the newly independent Dominican nation. In 1916, worried about a volatile nation with immense debts in the sea lanes to the Panama Canal, American troops invaded, occupying the country for eight years. In 1965, another period of American intervention was triggered by fears the Dominican Republic would follow the lead of Cuba and turn to communism.

It was during that period, after Rafael Trujillo’s dictatorship dissolved, opening the country to emigration, that the first major wave of Dominican immigration to America got under way. Since then the Dominican Republic has consistently ranked among the top 10 countries sending immigrants to America. Roughly 1 million Dominicans have gone to America, most of them legal residents and most of them in the New York area. The current population of the Dominican Republic is roughly the same as New York City’s, about 8 million.

The initial wave of immigration to America was mostly politically driven and middle-class, but in the 1980s and 1990s, as the economic divide between the countries widened, a large number of impoverished immigrants came for economic reasons. The deportees reflect those shifts, with essentially two groups: those who arrived as young children in the 1960s, grew up in New York, and consider themselves American in everything but naturalization, and those who are more recent immigrants, having gone to America in the past two decades as young men looking for economic opportunities.

Although the deportees tend to be lumped – and stigmatized – together by the public here, many of them are far from hardened criminals. Most of the Dominican deportees were legal residents of the United States who committed drug-related felonies, but individuals can be subject to mandatory deportation under the 1996 laws for crimes such as jumping a turnstile or shoplifting. A New Yorker who has been studying the issue since the mid-1990s, Nina Siulc, has found most are first time offenders who served less than three years in American prisons.

Like many others, Ms. Siulc said the deportees’ reputation for instigating violent crime in the Dominican Republic is unwarranted.

“Unlike other Latin American and Caribbean nations, there is no empirical evidence to support the link between deportees and crime in the Dominican Republic,” said Ms. Siulc, a Ph.D. candidate in anthropology at New York University.

Indeed, in the Dominican Republic, deportees in jail are outnumbered by incarcerated former police officers, she said. “I believe they provide a convenient scapegoat for the social problems that the government lacks the infrastructure and resources to confront,” Ms. Siulc said.

A sociologist at John Jay College, David Brotherton, reached similar conclusions in a yearlong study on the deportee phenomenon in Santo Domingo. He described the deportees as generally “small-time deviants” and mostly nonviolent, rather than, say, major narcotics traffickers.

The “vast majority are going straight and don’t want to go back to prison,” Mr. Brotherton said, adding, “The successful cartel leaders are not getting caught.”

Nevertheless, the Dominican authorities have taken measures that reflect fears the deportees will fuel crime. Two years ago they created a Department of Deportees in an attempt to stop the former American criminals from running loose. Now, the first stop for each criminal deportee upon arrival is the back lot of the Police Palace. There, in a windowless office between the Department of Homicides and the jail, each deportee must give information to be entered into a national criminal database widely accessible to bank employees, credit agencies, and some employers.

For a deportee to be released from police custody, a family member must sign for him, taking responsibility for his behavior. Since many of the deportees moved to America as young children and have no close relatives remaining in the Dominican Republic, often parents will fly down from the United States to claim progeny at the police department and help the deportee get oriented in the now-unfamiliar land. For the next six months the deportee is required to check in once a month with the office of psychology, to receive a letter of good conduct required for a job.

“In this society they believe that all deportees are dangerous criminals,” said an official at the Department of Deportees, who requested anonymity. He said, however, that while most are drug offenders, others returned were traffic violators, shoplifters, and even one man who they are convinced is Puerto Rican but whom the United States won’t take back.

The American government and the authorities here cooperate in some areas, such as drug interdiction, but after the deportees have arrived here Washington has a hands-off policy toward them.

“Once that person hits that soil of that particular country, that’s where our responsibility ends,” said a spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security, Ernestine Fobbs. “We delivered the person to that par ticular country and we have no authority there.”

Deportees face considerable prejudice. Sometimes they can find jobs as tour guides or telemarketers because of their fluency in English, but generally few employers are willing to hire them. Often the deportees say Dominican police extort them for money because of the assumption that they are being sent dollars by relatives in America. They are disparagingly labeled “Dominican-Yorks” or “gringos who have been rejected,” depending on how much time they have spent in America.

The attorney general, Mr. Brito, warned that the demonizing of the deportees as a class could prove as detrimental to the Dominican Republic as the sophisticated crime practices he said some deportees have imported. Many of the deportees arrive with minor infractions and nonviolent histories, he said, but the prejudice against all of them has created a potentially explosive underclass.

“They don’t go to jail here, but nonetheless they are serving a double time, one in the United States and here as well,” Mr. Brito said, explaining that it is more difficult for the deportees to obtain work and that the local population often treats them as public enemies.

The hostile reception, he said, may be “instigating them to commit crimes and to return to the United States illegally.”

A lawyer, Luis Mercedes, 42, has taken on the role of defender of the deportees. Mercedes is a deportee himself: He spent five days in America traveling with his softball team, a trip that ended with his serving six years in prison for, as he tells it, riding in a car with a friend who, unbeknownst to him, was in possession of cocaine.

The office where Mercedes receives deportees and offers advice is in an impoverished neighborhood where roosters stroll in the dirt streets and the drinking at the corner bar starts before noon. On the wall inside is a framed GED certificate from a Massachusetts jail.

On a recent afternoon, a man came by who was deported after a bizarre chain of events. Here is his story:

His name is Fabio de Jesus Hernandez. He is 45. He lived in South Florida for 12 years and has two children there, as well as four older ones here. He worked repairing boats. His visa had expired.

One day, when he went fishing, as he did every Sunday, his hook caught a pelican, near the wing. He was caught, charged with animal abuse, according to an official of the Department of Deportees, and paid a fine of $3,000.

That brush with the law led the American immigration authorities to him in the spring of 2003. They took him from his house at 2 a.m., kept him for three months at Krome Detention Center in Miami, and then sent him here.

Mercedes can do little for de Jesus but to listen as he talked about his hunger, his six children, and his having been reduced to sleeping in a home without walls because nobody will offer a job to a deportee.

“The first thing the country needs to do,” Mercedes said, “is not treat the deportees like criminals.”

The lawyer makes frequent trips to a prison outside the capital, La Victoria, where scores of deportees tell him they were unfairly targeted.

“Because delinquency has grown they think it’s because of the deportees,” Mercedes said. “But it’s not true. Not in all cases.”

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