Gail Alexan­der

Gov­ern­ment is ar­rang­ing to send a Caribbean Air­lines plane in June for T&T stu­dents at UWI’s Bar­ba­dos and Ja­maica cam­pus­es if they wish to come home, but they’ll first have to be quar­an­tined over­seas and al­so again in T&T when they re­turn.

Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty Min­is­ter Stu­art Young re­vealed the plan at yes­ter­day’s dai­ly me­dia brief­ing.

He said he spoke to UWI, St Au­gus­tine yes­ter­day morn­ing and Gov­ern­ment is deal­ing with the prin­ci­pals of UWI in Ja­maica and Bar­ba­dos cam­pus­es on the is­sue. The prin­ci­pals will co-or­di­nate the ef­fort.

Young said talks were to be held with the Bar­ba­di­an prime min­is­ter.

The plan is for Gov­ern­ment to send a CAL plane to both is­lands in the first week of June to bring stu­dents home if they wish. But he said this is on con­di­tion that they’ll first have to be quar­an­tined where they are.

That will be for two weeks and al­so when they re­turn here, they’ll have to en­ter state quar­an­tine for two weeks.

Say­ing it was strict­ly up to stu­dents if they want to ac­cept this of­fer, Young said when Gov­ern­ment ini­tial­ly tried to do the arrange­ment ear­li­er, some stu­dents said they want­ed to re­main where they are due to their ex­ams.

“It’s a per­son­al de­ci­sion by stu­dents be­cause you’ll be asked to quar­an­tine where you are at over­seas and then when you re­turn, you’ll be put in state quar­an­tine.”

Young al­so said Gov­ern­ment con­tin­ues to re­ceive hun­dreds of ap­pli­ca­tions from peo­ple seek­ing ex­emp­tion from the closed-bor­der pol­i­cy to re­turn home. This in­cludes peo­ple in Rus­sia, Ire­land, In­dia, Sau­di Ara­bia, Ger­many, the US, UK and oth­er Cari­com states.

Young said the bor­der clo­sure done since March 23 was need­ed since T&T’s 116 COVID cas­es arose from the im­por­ta­tion of the virus. He said ex­emp­tions are man­aged care­ful­ly so that when a group re­turns, they en­ter state quar­an­tine for ob­ser­va­tion,” adding, “but we have lim­it­ed fa­cil­i­ties for this.”

He al­so ac­knowl­edged there over 300 cruise ship work­ers “out­side”. But Young said the bom­bard­ment of ac­cu­sa­tions that he was “pre­vent­ing” them from re­turn­ing isn’t true.

“There will be more in­for­ma­tion on this as­pect as we go for­ward,” he said.

He said one per­son had called him from Ire­land about an ex­pired T&T pass­port.

He said his min­istry will do what’s nec­es­sary at Im­mi­gra­tion to fa­cil­i­tate such is­sues.

Young added that most coun­tries don’t al­low trav­ellers in if they have few­er than six months on their pass­port. But he said when bor­ders re­open, T&T’s em­bassies and con­sulates over­seas will re­sume busi­ness (to deal with pass­ports) and Gov­ern­ment may be able to is­sue emer­gency trav­el doc­u­ments to work with oth­er coun­tries or air­lines to say a pass­port ex­ten­sion is grant­ed. “We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it,” Young said.

Re­gard­ing those in Venezuela who ap­plied to re­turn and have been call­ing on Gov­ern­ment to do cer­tain things, Young said the process is that Gov­ern­ment grants ap­proval for their en­try and that was done.

“There’s noth­ing for Gov­ern­ment to do at this time. The na­tion­als in Venezuela will have to make their own arrange­ments to re­turn and tell us of it. The same ap­plied with oth­ers in Suri­name. We’ve done our part.“