Chester Sam­bra­no

Lead Ed­i­tor, News­gath­er­ing

chester.sam­bra­no@guardian.co.tt

The Min­istry of Home­land Se­cu­ri­ty con­firmed yes­ter­day that 21 T&T na­tion­als will be de­port­ed from the Unit­ed States fol­low­ing a for­mal re­quest from US Im­mi­gra­tion and Cus­toms En­force­ment (ICE).

The repa­tri­a­tions, sched­uled ten­ta­tive­ly for Fri­day, come amid height­ened im­mi­gra­tion en­force­ment un­der US Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump’s new de­por­ta­tion pol­i­cy.

The re­turn­ing in­di­vid­u­als—17 men and four women—are cur­rent­ly in US im­mi­gra­tion cus­tody. ICE has re­quest­ed the use of a sin­gle char­ter flight to Port-of-Spain, cit­ing the ef­fi­cien­cy of repa­tri­at­ing the group col­lec­tive­ly rather than via mul­ti­ple com­mer­cial flights.

Min­is­ter of Home­land Se­cu­ri­ty Roger Alexan­der said the gov­ern­ment is tak­ing a more com­pre­hen­sive ap­proach to man­ag­ing such re­turns, in­clud­ing post-ar­rival track­ing and le­gal over­sight.

“We have en­gaged a new sit­u­a­tion in­volv­ing the records of these par­tic­u­lar in­di­vid­u­als,” Alexan­der said.

“Not just that we know that they’re com­ing back to Trinidad, but we want to know where they are housed, by whom, where they are kept, their last phone (num­ber), ad­dress ... be­cause we re­alise that a lot of per­sons bring in their cul­ture that they may be fa­mil­iar with back to this coun­try, and we must now mon­i­tor.”

Alexan­der al­so em­pha­sised the need for stronger le­gal in­fra­struc­ture to man­age ar­rivals ef­fec­tive­ly and pro­tect na­tion­al in­ter­ests.

“On ar­riv­ing, we need some­where in the law to take your prints, your pho­to­graph. Yeah, we can­not take things for grant­ed any­more,” he said.

“Na­tion­al se­cu­ri­ty is a na­tion’s busi­ness. Home­land se­cu­ri­ty is a na­tion’s busi­ness. So we must find laws—and we have a bunch of at­tor­neys work­ing to­geth­er with the AG—to en­sure that we stand on le­gal foot­ing on every oc­ca­sion. That’s how we choose to go about this.”

This de­vel­op­ment comes amid sweep­ing changes to US im­mi­gra­tion pol­i­cy un­der Pres­i­dent Trump, who has re­vived ag­gres­sive de­por­ta­tion strate­gies. ICE now has broad­er au­thor­i­ty to re­move un­doc­u­ment­ed im­mi­grants, in­clud­ing long-term res­i­dents with no crim­i­nal records.

Alexan­der said the T&T gov­ern­ment is of­ten no­ti­fied on­ly af­ter in­di­vid­u­als are de­tained.

“Some per­sons left here as ear­ly as (age) three… It’s on­ly when the per­sons are de­tained or oth­er­wise we know for sure that they are cit­i­zens of this coun­try too.

“They (the US) have tak­en a stand with re­spect to the im­mi­gra­tion of per­sons and al­so send­ing per­sons back.”

Ef­forts are now un­der­way to im­prove co­or­di­na­tion with US agen­cies for ear­ly no­tice and thor­ough prepa­ra­tion.

“What we are try­ing to do is to work on the re­la­tion­ship where we know long be­fore that the in­ten­tion is to send back these per­sons,” Alexan­der said.

“So that we can put every­thing in place—not just a piece of pa­per at the air­port, but al­so to fur­ther in­ter­view these per­sons on ar­rival.”

The Min­istries of Home­land Se­cu­ri­ty and For­eign and Cari­com Af­fairs are li­ais­ing with US au­thor­i­ties to man­age the repa­tri­a­tion process, en­sure full le­gal com­pli­ance and to sup­port na­tion­al se­cu­ri­ty goals.