At any other time, the marquee names would have been talking about literature. Junot Diaz, hands-down the most critically acclaimed Dominican-American author, sharing a table with Edwidge Danticat, the most critically acclaimed Haitian-American author.

But they were not here to talk about books. They were here to speak out against the impending refugee crisis that has reached a fever pitch on the island where they were both born.

“There is a state of terror in the Dominican Republic,” Diaz told an overflowing crowd of attendees gathered in Miami’s Little Haiti neighborhood at a panel hosted by Miami Workers Center, a local activist group.

All last week, Diaz explained, he was in Santo Domingo, where he witnessed the beginning of the Dominican government’s implementation of a policy that could potentially deport hundreds of thousands of Dominicans of Haitian heritage across the border, to a country they have never known.