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We must deal with deportee dilemma
Wednesday, January 18th 2006


Given the range of misdemeanours and felonies for which even West Indians legally living in the United States can be deported to their home countries, Caribbean governments and their populations have to be wary of wholesale condemnation, to say nothing of ostracisation of so-called deportees.

Moreover, in the absence of up-to-date and reliable statistics, one also has to be careful about blaming these deportees for the rise in crime as citizens look for easy explanations for that increase. In this regard, we remember a sharp difference of opinion three years ago when Prime Minister Patrick Manning formed the view that deportees were responsible for much of the crime in Trinidad and Tobago.

As head of the National Security Council, one has to assume that Mr Manning knew of what he spoke, although American Ambassador Roy Austin denied this to be so. What was not in contention, however, was that the number of deportees rose from 50 in 1996 to an average of 213 between 1996 and 2001, with the number on record as at November 2002 being 202, and as at December 2003, 273.

Recognising, presumably, that we would be guilty of an innocence bordering on irresponsibility were we not to have in place some preemptive system of keeping an eye on, if not actually tracking, major offenders who constitute a threat to our small and so-vulnerable societies, the then Social Development Minister Mustapha Abdul Hamid said in 2004 that consideration would have been given to draft legislation that would facilitate the establishment of an adequate monitoring system for deportees, make mandatory the interviewing of deportees by police and social work staff and allow for foreign criminal records to be admissible in local courts.


Last year the then acting Social Development Minister Christine Sahadeo assured that there was a Cabinet-appointed committee "dealing with the issue of deportees" and "it is not true that they are coming in and not being attended to because the system is in place", although she went on to concede that there was a shortage of social workers in the country. Given that reality, the Government should update the population about the actual status quo where deportees are concerned, particularly in light of a recent report that a Trinidadian man convicted of sex crimes in the United States was among 16 foreigners arrested last week by federal agents as part of the tellingly named "Operation Predator" launched by America's immigration authorities.

He is certain to be deported back here as was another Trinidadian, last May, after he had completed a jail sentence for sexually abusing a ten-year-old girl. A senior police officer told this newspaper on Wednesday that there is no way to track returning sex offenders in Trinidad and Tobago so a question arises as to the thoroughness of the system of "dealing with the issue of deportees in the country". Given that this is not a totalitarian dictatorship, we cannot pretend that the problem is not real. So, too, however, are the enduring dangers.