Gail Alexan­der

Il­le­gal en­try in­to T&T is be­ing made more dif­fi­cult as the Gov­ern­ment steps up bor­der se­cu­ri­ty on land and sea.

Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty Min­is­ter Ed­mund Dil­lon yes­ter­day con­firmed moves to step up bor­der se­cu­ri­ty fol­low­ing Wednes­day's ex­er­cise by po­lice and im­mi­gra­tion in which 30 peo­ple were ques­tioned and 24 de­tained.

Dur­ing the ex­er­cise, au­thor­i­ties check­ing ve­hi­cles along the Pri­or­i­ty Bus Route asked com­muters for iden­ti­fi­ca­tion. The 24 peo­ple who were de­tained were placed at the De­ten­tion Cen­tre.

The Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty Min­istry yes­ter­day con­firmed that the ex­er­cise was the lat­est phase of op­er­a­tions to deal with il­le­gal im­mi­grants. It said those de­tained in Wednes­day's ex­er­cise in­clud­ed four Ja­maicans, one Do­mini­can Re­pub­lic na­tion­al, two Cubans, one Grena­di­an, ten Guyanese, one Niger­ian, three Chi­nese, one Vin­cent­ian and one per­son from Sier­ra Leone.

In Feb­ru­ary 2015, then Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty Min­is­ter Gary Grif­fith, in an­nounc­ing a "crack­down on il­le­gals," es­ti­mat­ed that there were 110,000 il­le­gal im­mi­grants from 16 coun­tries liv­ing in T&T.

He said they would have been giv­en the op­por­tu­ni­ty to reg­u­larise their sta­tus and if non-com­pli­ant would be lo­cat­ed and re­turned to their home­land. He added that there were many il­le­gal im­mi­grants in T&T con­tribut­ing heav­i­ly to crime and gang ac­tiv­i­ty and if these un­de­sir­ables were re­moved it would have a pos­i­tive im­pact on the an­ti-crime fight.

Yes­ter­day, Dil­lon said mar­itime bor­ders–prime points for il­le­gal en­try–were be­ing tight­ened, as were en­try points on land in his gov­ern­ment's height­ened ef­forts to deal with crime and gang war­fare.

Dil­lon is plan­ning vis­its to var­i­ous ar­eas and agen­cies in com­ing weeks to re­in­force those plans.

Dil­lon said he would vis­it the De­ten­tion Cen­tre soon since it was in a "ter­ri­ble" state.

He said he has called for cer­tain re­arrange­ments to be done at the cen­tre and for the process­es re­gard­ing Cari­com na­tion­als to be ex­pe­dit­ed when such in­di­vid­u­als have to be re­turned to their home­land.

He said dis­cus­sions had been held with the Ja­maican high com­mis­sion­er on such mat­ters.

The min­is­ter said halt­ing il­le­gal ac­cess to T&T was al­so geared to­wards clamp­ing down on for­eign cul­prits in­volved in ter­ror­ist ac­tiv­i­ties en­ter­ing T&T.

At­tor­ney Gen­er­al Faris Al-Rawi, mean­while, told the T&T Guardian that the Gov­ern­ment was us­ing a mul­ti-pronged ap­proach to deal­ing with re­turn­ing T&T-born ter­ror­ist fight­ers–those who had served with ISIS in the Mid­dle East–and this would in­volve op­er­a­tional­is­ing ex­ist­ing law plus co-op­er­a­tion with in­ter­na­tion­al par­ties.

That is cur­rent­ly be­ing fi­nalised at var­i­ous lev­els of the Gov­ern­ment.

"A spe­cial An­ti-Ter­ror­ism Unit has al­so been es­tab­lished in the At­tor­ney Gen­er­al's of­fice to han­dle such mat­ters," Al-Rawi said.

"We've re­tooled arrange­ments which had ex­ist­ed in the AG's of­fice, but hadn't been used. The past ad­min­is­tra­tion, which had co-spon­sored the Unit­ed Na­tions an­ti-ter­ror­ism res­o­lu­tion, how­ev­er, didn't op­er­a­tionalise what they were do­ing."

Al-Rawi al­so said au­thor­i­ties who mount­ed a sur­prise search in the Port-of-Spain prison be­tween Wednes­day night and ear­ly Thurs­day morn­ing found 28 new high-tech cell phones.