Jensen La Vende

Se­nior Re­porter

jensen.lavende@guardian.co.tt

Three sex of­fend­ers, one con­vict­ed mur­der­er, a con­vict­ed hu­man traf­fick­er and four peo­ple who com­mit­ted im­mi­gra­tion vi­o­la­tions are among the 21 Trinida­di­an na­tion­als who are be­ing de­port­ed from the Unit­ed States on Fri­day. The oth­ers were guilty of a host of mis­cel­la­neous of­fences.

De­fence Min­is­ter Wayne Sturge de­tailed the ma­jor of­fences com­mit­ted by the de­por­tees dur­ing an in­ter­view with Guardian Me­dia at his Tem­ple Court, Port-of-Spain of­fice yes­ter­day.

Asked if the sex of­fend­ers high­light­ed by the US au­thor­i­ties will need to reg­is­ter up­on their ar­rival here, Sturge ad­mit­ted that Gov­ern­ment will have to make an ad­just­ment to ex­ist­ing laws to deal with that is­sue.

“We’ll need an amend­ment for that and we’ll see what could be done in the in­ter­im but af­ter the dis­cus­sions (with US im­mi­gra­tion au­thor­i­ties), we re­alised that there are bits of leg­is­la­tion, some more than 10 years old, that need to be pro­claimed and there are bits of leg­is­la­tion in need of amend­ments.”

Last Sat­ur­day, the Home­land Se­cu­ri­ty Min­istry is­sued a press re­lease stat­ing that the re­turn­ing in­di­vid­u­als—17 men and four women—are cur­rent­ly in US im­mi­gra­tion cus­tody.

It said the US Im­mi­gra­tion and Cus­toms En­force­ment (ICE) had re­quest­ed a sin­gle char­ter flight to Port-of-Spain as an ef­fi­cient means to repa­tri­ate the group. This will be the sec­ond batch of de­por­tees af­ter 11 na­tion­als were de­port­ed on March 28.

Sturge yes­ter­day said he ex­pects an “avalanche” of de­por­tees giv­en what was go­ing on in the cur­rent ICE dri­ve in the US. As such, he said he had met with and will con­tin­ue to meet with lo­cal stake­hold­ers to fa­cil­i­tate the smooth tran­si­tion of the de­por­tees.

In Jan­u­ary, Giselle Chance, CEO of Vi­sion on Mis­sion, con­firmed that some 1,197 T&T na­tion­als are due to be de­port­ed from the US, which she said is cause for con­cern, par­tic­u­lar­ly as the NGO is al­most at full ca­pac­i­ty.

VOM is a non-gov­ern­men­tal or­ga­ni­za­tion (NGO) that pro­vides re­ha­bil­i­ta­tion, rein­te­gra­tion and re­set­tle­ment ser­vices to lo­cal pris­on­ers and de­por­tees.

Asked about Chance’s con­cern about the NGO’s abil­i­ty to house more de­port­ed na­tion­als, Sturge said that was an is­sue raised and so­lu­tions are be­ing draft­ed.

He said the Pi­paro Em­pow­er­ment Cen­tre, which was once owned by re­put­ed drug lord and con­vict­ed mur­der­er Nankissoon Boodram (Dole Chadee), is one venue be­ing con­sid­ered for hous­ing de­por­tees who may not have fam­i­lies who can ac­com­mo­date them up­on their re­turn.

“First of all, we’ll reach out to Min­is­ter of the Peo­ple, So­cial De­vel­op­ment and Fam­i­ly Ser­vices Van­dana Mo­hit, be­cause there are sev­er­al fa­cil­i­ties un­der the con­trol of her min­istry that we can utilise. There’s one fa­cil­i­ty where so­cial­ly dis­placed per­sons are be­ing kept, so we would seek to utilise that. We raised the is­sue of the premis­es of Dole Chadee, which was con­fis­cat­ed some time ago, but it is now in a state of dis­re­pair, and we may very well need to up­grade it and to use that.”

He added: “We are try­ing to an­tic­i­pate num­bers (that are com­ing back) and what we need to put in place in terms of in­fra­struc­ture be­cause we are near ca­pac­i­ty.”

Sturge said he hopes the US Em­bassy will as­sist in iden­ti­fy­ing who the de­por­tees are long in ad­vance of the ar­rivals, in­clu­sive of fin­ger­prints and DNA sam­ples, as well as their an­tecedents and pos­si­ble lo­cal con­nec­tions, to bet­ter help state of­fi­cials pre­pare for their re­turn.

“The first thing we have to do is an as­sess­ment and well, we did, in fact, reach out to our coun­ter­parts in the US Em­bassy. We’ve not re­ceived a re­sponse just yet, so that we can have as much in­for­ma­tion as pos­si­ble in ad­vance of their ar­rival and pos­si­bly to have them fin­ger­print­ed abroad and pos­si­bly even swabbed. We al­so try to as­cer­tain from them as much in­for­ma­tion in terms of con­tacts and so on.”

In a re­sponse to the de­por­ta­tions on Mon­day, for­mer Na­tion­al Op­er­a­tions Cen­tre ex­ec­u­tive di­rec­tor Garvin Heer­ah said the coun­try’s ex­ist­ing sys­tems are not equipped to ad­e­quate­ly ad­dress the full spec­trum of is­sues sur­round­ing the re­turn of de­por­tees. He added that a co­or­di­nat­ed, mul­ti-agency ap­proach—one that in­cludes im­mi­gra­tion, na­tion­al se­cu­ri­ty, health, so­cial ser­vices, po­lice, in­tel­li­gence and in­ter­na­tion­al li­ai­son was im­per­a­tive.