In a news re­lease on Tues­day, which sup­port­ed com­ments she made at a con­sul­ta­tion on crim­i­nal jus­tice re­form in Barataria on Mon­day, Op­po­si­tion Leader Kam­la Per­sad-Bisses­sar stat­ed that "every day for the last year, there were re­ports of vi­o­lent crimes be­ing com­mit­ted by il­le­gal Venezue­lan mi­grants against our cit­i­zens."

"I will not stand idly by, as this cur­rent gov­ern­ment has done, and al­low more cit­i­zens like Mr Win­ston Thomas to be ter­rorised and mur­dered by il­le­gal Venezue­lan mi­grants," she added.

Tak­en lit­er­al­ly, these two sen­tences sug­gest that the vet­er­an politi­cian has ev­i­dence that for every one of the last 365 days, the T&T Po­lice Ser­vice has re­ceived re­ports of "vi­o­lent crimes be­ing com­mit­ted by Venezue­lan mi­grants against our cit­i­zens." This would sug­gest an epi­dem­ic of crim­i­nal­i­ty by cit­i­zens of T&T's near­est neigh­bour, most of whom have trav­elled to this coun­try to es­cape the de­pressed econ­o­my and un­sta­ble po­lit­i­cal sit­u­a­tion in their South Amer­i­can home­land.

Her state­ment amounts to hy­per­bol­ic and deroga­to­ry stig­ma­ti­sa­tion of a group of peo­ple, the ma­jor­i­ty of whom are hard-work­ing and law-abid­ing. The oth­er un­for­tu­nate point about the quo­ta­tion from Mrs Per­sad-Bisses­sar is her ref­er­ence to Win­ston Thomas, who she claims was "ter­rorised and mur­dered by il­le­gal Venezue­lan mi­grants."

She is quot­ed lat­er in her news re­lease as say­ing wit­ness­es said Mr Thomas was stabbed in his head by Span­ish-speak­ing sus­pects. She is stat­ing as a fact that Venezue­lans were re­spon­si­ble for this crime, when it may have been Span­ish-speak­ing peo­ple from any num­ber of coun­tries in this hemi­sphere.

Al­so, it is note­wor­thy that the Op­po­si­tion Leader did not call on the eye­wit­ness­es to this crime to as­sist the po­lice. In her news re­lease, how­ev­er, Mrs Per­sad-Bisses­sar did call on the Venezue­lan com­mu­ni­ty in T&T to as­sist the po­lice in fight­ing the crim­i­nal ac­tiv­i­ties of their fel­low cit­i­zens.

She is quot­ed as say­ing, "To­day I make it clear, if the Venezue­lan mi­grant com­mu­ni­ty do not get their act in or­der and de­sist from en­gag­ing in crim­i­nal con­duct, be­gin as­sist­ing the T&T Po­lice Ser­vice in iden­ti­fy­ing Venezue­lan crim­i­nals, and in­te­grate peace­ful­ly in­to our so­ci­ety, my in­com­ing gov­ern­ment will take ag­gres­sive ac­tion against ALL il­le­gal Venezue­lan mi­grants and de­port every one of them to their home­land by any means nec­es­sary."

The threat to take ag­gres­sive ac­tion against ALL il­le­gal Venezue­lan mi­grants if this com­mu­ni­ty does not as­sist the po­lice in iden­ti­fy­ing Venezue­lan crim­i­nals is lu­di­crous and ab­surd for two rea­sons: First­ly, it sug­gests that there are hun­dreds of Span­ish-speak­ing Trinida­di­an po­lice of­fi­cers, work­ing at sta­tions across the coun­try, who are ca­pa­ble of tak­ing ev­i­dence from Venezue­lans. Sec­ond­ly, since all Venezue­lans who have not been reg­is­tered and re­ceived work per­mit ex­emp­tions are here il­le­gal­ly, the leader of the Unit­ed Na­tion­al Con­gress may well be sug­gest­ing a whole­sale round­ing up and de­por­ta­tion of peo­ple who look Venezue­lan.

This sounds very sim­i­lar to rhetoric em­a­nat­ing from Don­ald Trump dur­ing his re­cent suc­cess­ful cam­paign to be­come the US pres­i­dent. A main plank of the Trump cam­paign was the mass de­por­ta­tion of il­le­gal im­mi­grants, and it would not be sur­pris­ing if Mrs Per­sad-Bisses­sar will one day soon claim—like Trump did about mi­grants in the US—that Venezue­lans are eat­ing the dogs and cats of T&T cit­i­zens.

It seems Mrs Per­sad-Bisses­sar is not sat­is­fied with tak­ing a page from Mr Trump's play­book. She wants the en­tire doc­u­ment. It may al­so be that she is try­ing to cre­ate a dis­tinc­tion be­tween her par­ty and the cur­rent ad­min­is­tra­tion, which has sought out al­lies in Cara­cas and in Wash­ing­ton, DC, with the out­go­ing Biden ad­min­is­tra­tion, in an at­tempt to se­cure cross-bor­der nat­ur­al gas from Venezuela. If she is, per­haps she is ex­pect­ing an in­vi­ta­tion to Mar-a-La­go, Mr Trump's Flori­da res­i­dence.