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President optimistic that US will assist in resettling deportees

Apr 25, 2009 News

Head of State, Bharrat Jagdeo, says that he does not believe that the deportee policy involving criminals from the United States will be changed when the issue is raised at the Caricom (Caribbean Community) leaders meeting with President Barrack Obama later this year.

Jagdeo said that he was optimistic that what would be forthcoming from this new administration would be more information about the deportees. He said that he was also optimistic that Caricom countries could get assistance with the resettlement.
“Outside of that I don’t see them stopping.”
President Jagdeo is on record as stating that the country’s ratio of police to hard-core criminals was less than four to one.

He is also on record as stating that many of the deportees have honed their criminal skills in the US and were returning almost invariably penniless, to what was effectively a strange land.
The President has been calling on several countries to review their deportation policy given its effect on countries such as Guyana.

In 2003, the United States deported 379 Guyanese and of these individuals, 38 were refused entry at the border; and 135 had been convicted for drug-related and other serious offences.
President Jagdeo has always expressed concerns about the return of criminal deportees, many of whom the police believe have introduced new levels of violence in the commission of crimes such as kidnapping, which has seen an alarming increase in recent years.

“They lecture us on drugs and want us to fight drug trafficking more but when you look at the list of people that get sent back, often it is a long list of drug traffickers.”
According to a report by the United Nations High Commission on refugees, the issue of criminal deportees has been a source of tension between the United States and Guyana. Guyana’s refusal to accept criminal deportees had even led the United States to ban the issuance of visas to Guyanese government officials and their families in late 2001.
That ban was lifted once Guyana agreed to accept 100 deportees in 2004.

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