Ja­maica’s Prime Min­is­ter An­drew Hol­ness has is­sued a warn­ing to Ja­maicans be­ing de­port­ed from the Unit­ed States against car­ry­ing out any crim­i­nal act in the is­land.

Speak­ing in the west­ern parish of St James on Fri­day, the Prime Min­is­ter said that per­sons who re­turn with crim­i­nal in­tent, will meet the “judge or their mak­er”.

“Let me be clear to you, this is not the Ja­maica that you left 10 or 20 years ago. This is not the Ja­maica Con­stab­u­lary Force that you left 10 or 20 years ago. You will ei­ther meet a judge or your mak­er if you come back to Ja­maica and vi­o­late our laws or cre­ate hav­oc, we will not tol­er­ate that.”

He made that state­ment as ac­cord­ing to re­ports, over 5,000 Ja­maicas are sched­uled to be de­port­ed from the unit­ed States as the coun­try clamps down on il­le­gal im­mi­grants, based on or­ders is­sued by Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump.

The Prime Min­is­ter added that the Gov­ern­ment has been putting mea­sures in place to treat with se­cu­ri­ty is­sues.

“I would want to re­as­sure Ja­maicans that your gov­ern­ment has long been plan­ning and putting in place mea­sures to ad­dress any changes in po­lices in the Unit­ed States. The gov­ern­ment is al­ready putting in place en­hanced se­cu­ri­ty mea­sures to deal with those who we know have a crim­i­nal past or who have been in­ter­dict­ed or con­vict­ed and will be re­turned af­ter serv­ing their crim­i­nal penal­ties there . We will en­sure that they are ap­pro­pri­ate­ly mon­i­tored and that they are not con­tribut­ing to an in­crease in our crime or mur­der rate.”

Hol­ness, how­ev­er, stat­ed that while some per­sons set to be de­port­ed may have breached im­mi­gra­tion laws, they have oth­er­wise been law-abid­ing res­i­dents, and the coun­try is pre­pared to wel­come all hard-work­ing cit­i­zens who are re­turn­ing. —KINGSTON, Ja­maica (CMC)