Too of­ten, when law en­force­ment of­fi­cers de­tain il­le­gal mi­grants, most­ly Venezue­lans, they’re faced with a bar­rage of crit­i­cism from ac­tivists and at­tor­neys who rep­re­sent the de­tainees.

The com­plaints are al­most al­ways of per­ceived hu­man rights breach­es.

This was the case, once again, on Mon­day morn­ing as po­lice moved in­to a bar on the West­ern Main Road in St James, and round­ed up 191 Venezue­lan na­tion­als who were par­ty­ing there, tak­ing them to the Ch­aguara­mas he­li­port for pro­cess­ing.

As of yes­ter­day, many of those held in the lat­est raid were re­leased af­ter be­ing processed and found to be re­sid­ing here with prop­er doc­u­men­ta­tion.

But not with­out a sig­nif­i­cant de­gree of pub­lic com­ment and con­jec­ture, most of which has formed the ba­sis of a wor­ry­ing nar­ra­tive with re­spect to T&T’s treat­ment of na­tion­als from its clos­est Span­ish-speak­ing neigh­bour.

That nar­ra­tive not on­ly sug­gests that our au­thor­i­ties have failed to pro­tect the rights of those who had come to T&T seek­ing asy­lum from a bru­tal regime, but that our law en­forcers have been over­look­ing the fact that some pos­sessed Unit­ed Na­tions High Com­mis­sion­er for Refugees (UN­HCR) cards that al­lowed them res­i­dence here.

On Mon­day, lo­cal ac­tivist Yese­nia Gon­za­lez went fur­ther, telling the po­lice that with the high mur­der rate in the coun­try, their fo­cus on Venezue­lans was mis­placed, sug­gest­ing that every Venezue­lan na­tion­al now re­sid­ing in T&T has an un­fet­tered right to be here and that any de­ten­tion or de­por­ta­tion is egre­gious and in­hu­mane.

It is this kind of ar­gu­ment that if left unchecked could do un­told harm to T&T’s glob­al rep­u­ta­tion.

Yes, there is no ques­tion that this coun­try has some im­prove­ments to make in terms of its treat­ment of Venezue­lans.

Xeno­pho­bia to­wards this mi­grant group is ram­pant, and there have been way too many re­ports of sex­u­al traf­fick­ing and as­sault against fe­male Venezue­lans.

Fur­ther­more, the Gov­ern­ment is yet to in­cor­po­rate the Refugee Con­ven­tion, open­ing it up to ac­cu­sa­tions from Refugees In­ter­na­tion­al that it is breach­ing the non-re­foule­ment prin­ci­ple.

How­ev­er, we re­main a sov­er­eign coun­try de­cid­ing for our­selves the ex­tent to which oth­ers will be grant­ed un­fet­tered ac­cess in­to our bor­ders giv­en the lim­it­ed re­sources avail­able to us.

The truth is T&T has been do­ing far more than oth­er na­tions in sup­port of Venezue­lans.

In fact, UN­HCR da­ta has con­firmed that T&T has the high­est per capi­ta in­take of Venezue­lan mi­grants in the world.

As of De­cem­ber 2022, there were ap­prox­i­mate­ly 35,300 Venezue­lan refugees and asy­lum seek­ers reg­is­tered with the Gov­ern­ment or hu­man­i­tar­i­an or­gan­i­sa­tions.

Fur­ther­more, as of Jan­u­ary 2023, an ad­di­tion­al 9,200 Venezue­lans had ob­tained reg­u­lar­i­sa­tion of their mi­gra­tion sta­tus, while 4,000 were still wait­ing.

T&T is a ben­e­fi­cia­ry of fund­ing from the Unit­ed States and the Unit­ed Na­tions to as­sist mi­grants who fled Venezuela in 2019 amid the eco­nom­ic and hu­man­i­tar­i­an cri­sis and has been us­ing these re­sources, main­ly through the Liv­ing Wa­ter Com­mu­ni­ty, to ben­e­fit mi­grants.

With the reg­is­tra­tion pro­gramme es­tab­lished in 2019 on­ly cov­er­ing Venezue­lans with an ir­reg­u­lar sta­tus un­til the end of that year, many Venezue­lans en­tered the coun­try post-2019 ir­reg­u­lar­ly and are not reg­is­tered.

Those Venezue­lans cur­rent­ly re­side here il­le­gal­ly and are sub­ject to the laws of the land where il­le­gal en­try is con­cerned.

This in­cludes de­ten­tion and de­por­ta­tion where nec­es­sary.