GAIL ALEXAN­DER

Prime Min­is­ter Kei­th Row­ley has point­ed out that TT's bor­ders have been closed even to TT cit­i­zens dur­ing the COVID pan­dem­ic, and TT would re­sist all ef­forts by oth­ers who are “hell bent on forc­ing open this coun­try's bor­ders through il­le­gal im­mi­gra­tion”.

In a state­ment at 7:14 this morn­ing, he added:

"Un­der the rubric of 'hu­man­i­tar­i­an' this in­ter­pre­ta­tion, if ac­cept­ed, will ef­fec­tive­ly prise open our bor­ders to every eco­nom­ic mi­grant, gun run­ner, drug deal­er, hu­man traf­fick­er and South Amer­i­can gang leader/mem­bers. All they will be re­quired to do is make the 7 mile boat trip and claim to be “refugees”.

Row­ley spoke ear­ly, fol­low­ing the chal­lenge fac­ing TT—and crit­i­cism from some Venezue­lan Op­po­si­tion politi­cians—af­ter a boat­load of il­le­gal Venezue­lans in­clud­ing ba­bies and chil­dren en­tered TT.  Af­ter be­ing de­port­ed, they re­turned this week.

Row­ley said:

“Why should we be sur­prised? The Or­gan­i­sa­tion of Amer­i­can States (OAS) un­der its mis­guid­ed Pres­i­dent Al­ma­gro has been al­most sin­gle­hand­ed­ly re­spon­si­ble for trig­ger­ing and fu­elling the cur­rent Venezue­lan sit­u­a­tion and these pub­lic of­fi­cials have vir­tu­al­ly de­clared war on Trinidad and To­ba­go for hav­ing the temer­i­ty to have not joined El­liot Abrams and Pres­i­dent Trump in forc­ing vi­o­lent regime change in Venezuela. “

“Trinidad and To­ba­go is cur­rent­ly un­der the lat­est as­sault, us­ing name­less, face­less peo­ple armed with in­no­cent chil­dren, to try and force us to ac­cept their un­der­stand­ing of ‘refugee sta­tus and in­ter­na­tion­al treaty’ where a lit­tle is­land na­tion of 1.3 mil­lion peo­ple must be ex­pect­ed to main­tain open bor­ders to a next door neigh­bour of 34 mil­lion peo­ple even dur­ing a pan­dem­ic. “

Row­ley added, “This is a mat­ter, not for the OAS, but for the peo­ple of Trinidad and To­ba­go.”

“Cur­rent­ly we have closed our bor­ders even to our own cit­i­zens in this pan­dem­ic and would re­sist all ef­forts by oth­ers who are hell bent on forc­ing open our bor­ders through il­le­gal im­mi­gra­tion.

Un­der the rubric of “hu­man­i­tar­i­an” this in­ter­pre­ta­tion, if ac­cept­ed, will ef­fec­tive­ly prise open our bor­ders to every eco­nom­ic mi­grant, gun run­ner, drug deal­er, hu­man traf­fick­er and South Amer­i­can gang leader/mem­bers. All they will be re­quired to do is make the 7 mile boat trip and claim to be “refugees”.

We staunch­ly sup­port the work of the Unit­ed Na­tions but this threat and the per­sis­tent dis­re­gard for the out­stand­ing hu­man­i­tar­i­an ef­forts ex­tend­ed by the peo­ple of Trinidad and To­ba­go, do not con­form with the spir­it and pur­pose of the UN­HCR.

It is our lit­tle is­land na­tion which fa­cil­i­tat­ed the reg­is­tra­tion of 16,000 Venezue­lan mi­grants and even as we our­selves are strug­gling to cope with our own dif­fi­cul­ties we have af­ford­ed them com­fort, aid and op­por­tu­ni­ty.

If af­ter all that, our na­tion’s im­age is to be tar­nished through the fa­cil­i­ta­tion of il­le­gal pen­e­tra­tion of our bor­ders then cer­tain­ly, that will be the un­kind­est cut of all.

I call on all the peo­ple of Trinidad and To­ba­go to con­tin­ue to be the hu­mane and car­ing peo­ple that we have demon­strat­ed that we are, as we do not de­mo­nize our mi­grant neigh­bours but we all con­tin­ue to be pro­tect­ed by the laws of Trinidad and To­ba­go.”