No serious effort at deportation

THE EDITOR: Four years to deport people to their homeland is totally unacceptable. It has been postulated that many illegal immigrants may not have any or appropriate travel documents. Does it really take so long to get the various embassies and institutions to get these documents in order?

It seems, therefore, that if this is indeed the case for public officials here and abroad to get their acts together, can you imagine getting anything serious done for international relations and trade matters, for example?

It begs the question: what serious efforts have been made to deport these people? Our immigration laws are quite clear on procedure. It seems no real focus has been placed on this matter and yes, the taxpayers are the ones who bear these bills.

There is also an issue whereby these illegal immigrants usually state they did not commit any crime in TT. Really? Isn’t a crime when you break a law? Did they not break our immigration laws? Yes, they may not have committed any crime of violence like murder, robbery etc but they broke our laws. However, the punishment is deportation and this we must do promptly.

Our current deportation backlog points to a much larger problem of the criminal justice system where there are long delays in investigations, trials, sentencing etc. Just look at the Remand Yard situation and you will see great similarities with some people are awaiting trials for over ten years. We need systemic changes to how things are done otherwise we will be spinning top in mud, as they say.

IAN RAMDHANIE

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