“Wrong and Ill-Advised”, TCI Minister vows Repatriations will continue despite UN plea

By Dana Malcolm 

Staff Writer 

#TurksandCaicos, May 10, 2023 – “I sympathise with the Haitian people but we are a small nation and we are being overrun as we speak, so I will continue to repatriate and to deport Haitians that are in my country illegally.”

That was the determined stance from Arlington ‘Chuck’ Musgrove, the Turks and Caicos’ Minister of Immigration in the face of yet another call from a United Nations Committee, for countries in the Americas to “suspend forced returns and adopt measures to protect Haitians on the move”

The call was made by experts at the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD) on April 28th, after 36,000 were deported from June to March, mostly from the Dominican Republic. They expressed fear at increasing reports of increasing xenophobia against Haitians as well. It is at least the second such plea from the UN in the past year.

The UN Committee did not specify what countries they were referring to. While the US state of Florida is also particularly susceptible to the influx of illegal migrants from the impoverished country, the closest and undoubtedly worst affected countries are The Dominican Republic, the Turks and Caicos Islands and The Bahamas.

What the UN would like to see are countries assessing the irregular migrants, case by case.  Each individual would then be able to be linked – if applicable – to protection needs in accordance with international refugee and human rights law. For TCI this would mean feeding, housing, and clothing more than 1600 migrants while the Government tried to determine their cases.

At this time, without this new request for slower processing before repatriation, it is costing the Turks and Caicos $2,200 per migrant for shelter and security.

“We spent over 3 million dollars repatriating Haitians to Haiti on these illegal sloops and these voyages are killing the people themselves,” Musgrove said of the cost to the TCI.

The bill for 2022/23 has already passed $5 million. “We cannot do more, I refuse to hear something like that from the UN,” he contended.

In fact, the bill, according to Althea Been, the Permanent Secretary of the ministry,  is $6.3 million; she was reporting on May 3 to the Appropriations’ Committee of the House of Assembly.

Increasingly, bloody wars between criminal gangs, an undermanned and outgunned police force and crumbling democratic systems, have worsened the humanitarian crises in the country, which sits north of the TCI; about 30 minutes away by flight.

Dozens of people are killed weekly in Haiti and the UN says almost half its residents are at risk of starvation as larger wealthier countries hem and haw about how much aid they are willing to send.

As reported by Magnetic Media previously “The entire state of Florida is 170,312 kilometres squared, about 12 times the size of the Bahamas which sits at 13,880 km².  The Bahamas in turn is just about 14 times larger than the Turks and Caicos.”

At least a hundred Haitians arrive on each fast boat, the latest intercepted on April 25th was carrying 240.

In fact, if the Turks and Caicos had not deported the migrants who arrived in the country in only three weeks this January, the population would have grown 0.55 percent. Former Governor Nigel Dakin said: “This is, pro-rata, the equivalent of 360,000 crossing the English Channel, or 1.6 million attempting to cross the US’s southern border, over nine days.”

Musgrove described the calls as ‘ill advised’: “Until the UN can really come together and ask those countries who can afford it like the US and France– for help with Haiti, then they cannot ask small countries like the Turks and Caicos and The Bahamas to stop repatriating Haitians. That is wrong and ill-advised from the UN.”