Bavi­ta Gopaulchan

Gov­ern­ment will ex­tend the reg­is­tra­tion of Venezue­lan mi­grants for an­oth­er six months be­gin­ning Mon­day, Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty Min­is­ter Stu­art Young said at a me­dia con­fer­ence yes­ter­day.

He said the ex­er­cise will run from March 8-26, 2021 and is aimed at up­dat­ing in­for­ma­tion on the over 16,000 Venezue­lan mi­grants who were reg­is­tered in 2019. Young said once these na­tion­als are processed and ap­proved, they will be al­lowed to stay in the coun­try for an ad­di­tion­al six months.

Asked by the me­dia whether Gov­ern­ment will con­sid­er grant­i­ng a longer ex­ten­sion, giv­en that T&T’s bor­ders re­main closed, Young said, “At this time, this is the Gov­ern­ment’s pol­i­cy, we are do­ing it in a six-month cy­cle. I do not pre­dict the fu­ture, so it may be in the fu­ture we may take a dif­fer­ent de­ci­sion but at this stage, we still con­tin­ue to main­tain a six-month cy­cle.”

Young em­pha­sised that Venezue­lans who are not cur­rent­ly reg­is­tered will not be al­lowed to do so in the up­com­ing ex­er­cise.

“What we are re­quir­ing per­sons to do is down­load their forms. The forms, 17A, from our web­site, the Min­istry of Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty web­site, all that in­for­ma­tion will be pro­vid­ed. You have to fill out the forms and there are re­quire­ments to pro­vide cer­tain in­for­ma­tion, copies of cer­tain doc­u­ments, et cetera and you are to drop these off in drop box­es,” Young ex­plained.

He said drop box­es will be pro­vid­ed at var­i­ous lo­ca­tions and all in­for­ma­tion about the process will be avail­able on the min­istry’s web­site and so­cial me­dia pages.

Be­tween May 31 to June 14, 2019, the Gov­ern­ment al­lowed Venezue­lans, who came to T&T ei­ther legal­ly or il­le­gal­ly due to the eco­nom­ic cri­sis in their coun­try, to reg­is­ter to be al­lowed to work here for up to a year. How­ev­er, due to COVID-19 re­stric­tions and bor­der clo­sure over the last year, var­i­ous ex­ten­sions were grant­ed to them.

Ac­cord­ing to Young, in the last few weeks, he has had to sign off on the can­cel­la­tion of sev­er­al reg­is­tra­tion cards. In some cas­es, he said Venezue­lan na­tion­als want­ed to re­turn to their home coun­try while oth­ers had to be de­port­ed in light of crim­i­nal of­fences.

“I would have per­son­al­ly can­celled just un­der about 50 reg­is­tra­tion cards,” Young said.

In the last six months, Young said there were over 250 repa­tri­a­tion ex­er­cis­es, not in­clud­ing the 96 Venezue­lans who re­turned to their coun­try last week via the Venezue­lan state air­line Con­vi­asa.

Asked to pro­vide an up­date on the reg­u­lar­i­sa­tion of the use of pep­per spray mean­while, Young said the de­ci­sion to al­low the use of pep­per spray by the pub­lic was an­nounced last month in light of na­tion­wide calls by women fol­low­ing the dis­ap­pear­ance and killing of An­drea Bharatt. He said the nec­es­sary amend­ments to the leg­is­la­tion were yet to be tak­en be­fore the Cab­i­net by the At­tor­ney Gen­er­al.

“I don’t know if it will come be­fore us this week or hope­ful­ly next week,” he stat­ed.