Latest update January 17th, 2025 6:30 AM
Guyana fourth on deportees to C’bean list
– 209 persons sent home, 140 have criminal records
Guyana is fourth on the list of Caribbean countries in terms of the number of deportees from the US.
Some 209 deportees, 140 of whom were considered criminal aliens, have been deported over the past nine months — between October 2007 and July 14 last. The other 69 were tagged non-criminal.
According to a report on the Caribworldnews website, deportees to the CARICOM region have topped 3,000 so far for this fiscal year.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement figures show that 3,292 CARICOM nationals were deported from the U.S. within that period.
Haiti was forced to receive the highest number – a total of 1,185, while 1,157 deportees were sent to Jamaica over the nine-month period.
Of that number, a whopping 967 were considered `criminal aliens,` meaning that they had committed a crime and had served time, while only 190 were deemed `non-criminal,` a category often used to describe overstays and those caught sneaking into the U.S. illegally.
This contrasted with the Haitian deportee count, where 842 were non-criminals, compared to only 343 criminal aliens.
The oil-rich nation of Trinidad and Tobago received the third highest number of deportees for any CARICOM nation, with US-ICE figures putting the total at 311. Of that number, 228 were considered criminal deportees, compared to 83 who were dubbed as non-criminal.
Belize was the only other CARICOM nation to receive `triple digit` deportees. US-ICE records show the nation received 129 deportees in recent months, 65 of whom were non-criminal, and 64 criminal.
The Bahamas and other CARICOM nations` deportee total ranked in the double and single digits for this period. The tourist-dependent islands of the Bahamas, which have seen a spike in crime like many other CARICOM nations, received 91 deportees in recent months, US-ICE records show, but 74 were criminal, compared to only 17 who were non-criminal.
Other nations received far less. Dominica and Barbados received 34 and 33 respectively, while Antigua and Barbuda received 28. Twenty-seven were returned to St. Lucia and 22 to St. Vincent and the Grenadines.
With the exception of St. Vincent, the number of criminal deportees received, compared to non-criminal, was larger for all four nations.
Barbados`s criminal deportee total for the past eight months was 32 of the 33 returned, while Dominica was forced to grapple with 17 criminal aliens. Twenty-two of the 28 deportees Antigua and Barbuda received were criminal returnees, while 15 of St. Lucia`s 27 also were dubbed criminal.
Grenada was forced to accept 15 deportees, 10 of whom were dubbed criminal aliens, while St. Kitts received 10, six of whom were criminal.
Nine nationals were sent back to Suriname, while the BVI got eight. The Turks and Caicos and Bermuda saw seven each, while five were sent back to the Cayman Islands. Of that number, the majority were criminal deportees.
Montserrat received three, all criminal deportees, while Anguilla received the lowest number – two — both of whom were criminal deportees.
Deportation has become a key issue for countries in the Caribbean since the 1996 immigration laws changed and made green card holders who commit crimes, even petty ones, deportable.
At the 2007 conference on the Caribbean, held in Washington, DC, leaders of the CARICOM countries raised the topic of deportation in their meetings with both President Bush and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.
One of their consistent concerns was the need to receive more information on deportees, including more detailed criminal records.
In response, the US-ICE offered to provide to CARICOM members the computer hardware and software of the TD system.
CARICOM also has requested the US assistance with resettlement and reintegration. The United Nations Development Programme currently funds a million-dollar International Organisation for Migration project in Haiti to provide deportee reintegration services, including counselling, vocational training, skills development, and micro-credit lending.
The US State Department says it hopes to use this programme as a model for reintegration programmes in other CARICOM countries in the future.
Meanwhile, overall, for the same period, 243,574 migrants were deported globally by US-ICE.
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