Gail Alexan­der

San­ta dropped an ear­ly Christ­mas present for Prime Min­is­ter Dr Kei­th Row­ley a few days ago—his daugh­ter Dr Sonel Row­ley-Stew­art re­turned from New York.

This was con­firmed to the T&T Guardian last Sat­ur­day. This, af­ter Op­po­si­tion Unit­ed Na­tion­al Con­gress sources first spoke of the sit­u­a­tion.

Row­ley-Stew­art, who re­turned last week from New York, is said to be in quar­an­tine but a lo­ca­tion hasn’t been dis­closed.

Health Min­is­ter Ter­rence Deyals­ingh, when asked about quar­an­tine for Row­ley-Stew­art said, “My pol­i­cy is that I don’t give out in­for­ma­tion on any­one.”

Dur­ing the COVID- 19 lock­down, in speak­ing about the pain of fam­i­lies sep­a­rat­ed, Row­ley had sev­er­al times ex­pressed wor­ry that his daugh­ter was lo­cat­ed in New York’s—COVID-19 Ground Ze­ro area. He first ad­mit­ted to be­ing a trou­bled par­ent in March when the pan­dem­ic rolled world­wide.

His daugh­ter and her hus­band Stephan were in New York at that time, when New York had more than half of the US’ ini­tial 35,000 COVID cas­es.

Dr Row­ley-Stew­art is a child psy­chol­o­gist and her hus­band works with in­ter­na­tion­al in­vest­ment bankers Gold­man Sachs.

Row­ley had said then that even if his daugh­ter had want­ed to re­turn home she couldn’t, as T&T had closed its bor­ders. At that time when bor­ders were first sealed, he’d said there was no win­dow for ex­emp­tion, as no­body would be giv­en a pass based on who they were, where they came from or “pulling strings.”

As T&T con­tin­ued to man­age the COVID pan­dem­ic, ex­emp­tions were sub­se­quent­ly giv­en un­der strict cri­te­ria, in­clud­ing quar­an­ti­ning for ar­rivals, and ex­emp­tions con­tin­ue.

On De­cem­ber 4, Row­ley re­vealed that his daugh­ter had ap­plied for an ex­emp­tion to re­turn and he was hop­ing she’d have been among those na­tion­als al­lowed to re­turn dur­ing the hol­i­day pe­ri­od. At that time, he’d said his daugh­ter was in the process of ful­fill­ing the re­main­ing re­quire­ments of the ex­emp­tion ap­pli­ca­tion process. He’d said while it was his wish to have her spend the Christ­mas hol­i­day with the fam­i­ly, he’d not­ed it was in the hands of Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty Min­is­ter Stu­art Young.

At that time, Young had said as at De­cem­ber 4, a to­tal of 15,471 ap­pli­ca­tions had been re­ceived from peo­ple seek­ing re­turn. Ex­emp­tions grant­ed to peo­ple to re-en­ter T&T up to De­cem­ber 4 were 8,500. He said in­creased repa­tri­a­tions were be­ing done in re­cent weeks and ad­di­tion­al flights added to cer­tain routes. Spe­cial arrange­ments were al­so made re­gard­ing sea­son­al work­ers who’d gone to Cana­da, he not­ed.

Some Peo­ple’s Na­tion­al Move­ment sources said yes­ter­day that the ap­pro­pri­ate process­es—con­cern­ing ex­emp­tion ap­pli­ca­tions etc —were in­volved for Sonel Row­ley-Stew­art’s re­turn. Young didn’t re­ply to queries yes­ter­day on the cur­rent num­ber of ex­emp­tions grant­ed. Sources said it had gone past the last 8,500 fig­ure.

Last week the Min­istry of Health an­nounced that at least three repa­tri­a­tion flights from the US, in­clud­ing New York and Mi­a­mi, Bar­ba­dos and Cana­da were due in be­fore Christ­mas Day.