The Tribune

By AVA TURNQUEST

Tribune Chief Reporter

aturnquest@tribunemedia.net

ATTORNEY General Carl Bethel yesterday discouraged ethnic profiling and sweeping apprehensions as he remarked on the government’s difficulty in defending its position in court on immigration matters.

Mr Bethel underscored the Minnis administration’s holistic approach to the “influx of undocumented migrants” as a guest on “Z Live” with host Zhivargo Laing, noting “the government loves to make private sector lawyers rich.”

He flagged the importance of upcoming legislation regulating the Carmichael Road Detention Centre, and increasing penalties for persons who hire illegal immigrants.

“It’s a holistic approach,” he said, “we’re not simply knee-jerking and saying ‘oh increases in penalties, that’s it’ we feel good and pat ourselves on the back.

“It’s combined also with trying to set up legal frameworks to avoid any abuses or potential abuses of entitlements, constitutional rights etc. I had reason to say recently that the government loves to make private sector lawyers rich because it seems that successive governments keep doing the same things, in the same way. They (private lawyers) take a judicial review matter and go and make millions off the government in freeing people who really ought never to have been detained, or if detained they ought to have been processed and released and this goes on all the time.

“So the idea is to have a holistic, sustainable, and we think because it will be consistent and persistent and cover a range of areas, we think it will be a successful programme.”

When asked by Mr Laing about societal expectations for tangible results, which were often equated to the volume of migrant apprehensions and deportations, Mr Bethel suggested it was time to move away from “crack-downs” in lieu of a more sustainable approach.

Mr Bethel said: “You can’t rake and scrape every person who sounds foreign, looks foreign, doesn’t have they’re papers and lock them away. You must just to avoid the legal problems that the government gets itself into, go through the process of properly analysing and screening and separating those who have some entitlement, those who have a work permit, from those who are plainly undocumented.”

He continued: “At the end of the day though the best defence we’re going to have against this continued onslaught of undocumented economic migrants is going to be if we are able to show the good faith of a government prepared to give right where it’s due.

“What we really have to do is get rid of the underground railroad, we have to get rid of the facilitators within the community, people who facilitate the continued influx of the undocumented. To do that you have to build a consensus with those who are entitled to be here.”

Supreme Court Justice Gregory Hilton is expected to deliver his ruling today on more than a dozen habeas corpus applications brought against the government in recent months.

Notable cases include deportee Jean Rony Jean-Charles and the fate of a pregnant wife of a Bahamian man facing deportation.

Those persons are being defended by QCs Fred Smith and Damian Gomez, and their respective juniors Crispin Hall and Nicholas Mitchell Jr.

Last year, Jamaican Matthew Sewell, who spent nine years in and out of prison and the Carmichael Road Detention Centre without trial, was awarded a $125,000 settlement in Supreme Court.