Some 8,000 reg­is­tra­tion cards have so far been pre­pared for Venezue­lan amnesty ap­pli­ca­tions —and while there is no in­ten­tion to ex­tend the pro­gramme past the June 2020 dead­line, there are funds in next year’s Bud­get if there’s go­ing to be an ex­ten­sion.

Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty Min­is­ter Stu­art Young in­di­cat­ed this in yes­ter­day’s Stand­ing Fi­nance Com­mit­tee scruti­ny of his Min­istry’s 2020 Bud­get ex­pen­di­ture and oth­er items.

Young said that of the 16,523 ap­pli­cants in the re­cent Venezue­lan amnesty reg­is­tra­tion ex­er­cise, he’s signed off on 10,000 ap­pli­ca­tions and 8,000 reg­is­tra­tion cards are be­ing pre­pared.

Reg­is­tra­tion al­lows them to work in T&T for a year. They have to re­port to the Min­istry at a six month pe­ri­od.

Young said 300 Venezue­lans have—so far—been found not to be ac­cept­able and will be de­port­ed, but haven’t yet been.

Dur­ing the ex­er­cise, the Gov­ern­ment was adamant the work pe­ri­od would on­ly be a year. The gov­ern­ment sub­se­quent­ly said it would look at the sit­u­a­tion but gave no com­mit­ment to ex­tend it. Yes­ter­day Young was asked by UNC’s Rod­ney Charles if the amnesty would be ex­tend­ed past a year and if cer­tain sums in the Bud­get would be for a sec­ond phase.

Young said that at “this stage” Gov­ern­ment has ab­solute­ly no in­ten­tion of a sec­ond phase, but there was $1.4 mil­lion in the Bud­get if there was go­ing to any ex­ten­sion and the sum was there for any costs as­so­ci­at­ed with this.

UNC MP Su­ruj Ram­bachan said he felt there were many more Venezue­lans in T&T than the num­ber who reg­is­tered. He asked if Im­mi­gra­tion of­fi­cers vis­it­ed job sites and ware­hous­es to check on bona fides. Young said mul­ti-agency forces and the counter-traf­fick­ing unit have been do­ing checks as there may be peo­ple be­ing tak­en ad­van­tage by lo­cals.

“I want the cus­tomers of such places to be on the front pages and then I’m go­ing af­ter the Big Fish at the top,” Young added.

Young al­so said a cen­tre was be­ing built to ac­com­mo­date fe­male youth of­fend­ers. He said the church fa­cil­i­tat­ing the St Jude’s Home for Girls no longer want­ed to have St Jude’s used for that ser­vice. There are 15 girls there.

Young said the con­tract for the “Jus­tice On Time” (JOT) pris­on­er trans­port arrange­ment was ne­go­ti­at­ed down­ward. He said he was con­cerned a lot of mon­ey was be­ing spent on the mat­ter so Gov­ern­ment was seek­ing to get its video con­fer­enc­ing fa­cil­i­ty es­tab­lished to fa­cil­i­tate han­dling of nine le­gal mat­ters.

While JOT was sig­nif­i­cant­ly cur­tailed, he said he didn’t know if it would be ter­mi­nat­ed com­plete­ly. He al­so as­sured UNC’s Rudy In­dars­ingh, he would mon­i­tor prison ve­hi­cles’ road­wor­thi­ness.

Young al­so ac­cept­ed a rec­om­men­da­tion from UNC MP Tim Gopeesingh to do a re­cruit­ment dri­ve for prison of­fi­cers around North, South, East and West and To­ba­go.

He said there are on­ly 3,022 of­fi­cers out of the 4,218 and while batch­es are done an­nu­al­ly, one couldn’t al­ways catch up since the at­tri­tion rate was 79 per cent.