Jensen La Vende

Se­nior Re­porter

jensen.lavende@guardian.co.tt

Home­land Se­cu­ri­ty Min­is­ter Roger Alexan­der says he will be speak­ing with At­tor­ney Gen­er­al John Je­re­mie to im­prove the leg­is­la­tion to mon­i­tor mi­grants who have been ar­rest­ed in this coun­try and grant­ed Or­ders of Su­per­vi­sion.

Alexan­der spoke with Guardian Me­dia af­ter vis­it­ing the Im­mi­gra­tion De­ten­tion Cen­tre (IDC) in Aripo yes­ter­day.

“I will go to my AG and fix what­ev­er law is nec­es­sary to pre­vent this type of sit­u­a­tion from ex­ist­ing. The coun­try wants to be safe. The coun­try wants to feel safe. And when you hear this type of thing, how could this be?”

Alexan­der added that af­ter mi­grants are ar­rest­ed and charged for of­fences, ex­clud­ing mur­der, and sent to the IDC, they are some­times giv­en Or­ders of Su­per­vi­sion, al­low­ing them to be re­leased and mon­i­tored. He lament­ed that the mon­i­tor­ing is not the best and that enough checks are not done.

“Some­one comes here from a dif­fer­ent coun­try, you didn’t know where he was from. Who is this man? Where did he go? Who is he go­ing to? So we have a lot of per­sons run­ning around this coun­try with Or­ders of Su­per­vi­sion, and we have no idea who these per­sons re­al­ly are.”

He added, “I don’t know if he is a se­r­i­al killer, a se­r­i­al rapist roam­ing about try­ing to es­cape his home­land for what­ev­er rea­son. And then an Or­der of Su­per­vi­sion was hand­ed to him. So now he is here, walk­ing in and around Trinidad and To­ba­go. That can­not be good man­age­ment, in terms of crime and all of that. It can­not be!”

Apart from that, Alexan­der said there are is­sues faced by IDC work­ers which he hopes to ad­dress. He said one is the roof at the fa­cil­i­ty.

“There seems to be an is­sue with the roof­ing area where per­sons would have made their es­cape be­fore. We in­tend to fix that to pre­vent such a thing from hap­pen­ing again. I un­der­stand that five per­sons es­caped; they held two or three of them and nev­er saw the rest.”

Alexan­der said there are oth­er is­sues he did not want to put in the pub­lic do­main, but there are some mi­nus­cule mat­ters, such as ve­hi­cles down for faulty brakes, tyres and oth­er easy-to-fix prob­lems that, when left unchecked, could be­come larg­er is­sues that he would want to ad­dress.

His vis­it came a month af­ter the Gov­ern­ment said it would be de­port­ing some 200 Venezue­lans at the IDC by the end of the year.

A memo signed by Videsh Ma­haraj, Per­ma­nent Sec­re­tary of Home­land Se­cu­ri­ty, in Oc­to­ber said all il­le­gal mi­grants would be housed to­geth­er be­fore be­ing de­port­ed.