The Tribune

THE Immigration department must hate the sight of Fred Smith QC almost as much as they hate the prospect of doing their jobs properly. If they did the latter, they wouldn’t need to see nearly so much of the former.

This week brought the alarming sight of a man being detained by Immigration officers who bundled him into the trunk of a car.

This couldn’t possibly be a legitimate operation by trained professionals, could it? Surely appropriate methods would be used to identify a suspect and then detain him in ways that couldn’t be called cruel?

The truth is sadly disappointing. Yes, says the Immigration Department, this was an Immigration operation – with the man “cautioned and arrested after he was unable to provide the officers with identification showing his legal status in The Bahamas”.

As for bundling the man into the trunk of the car, that hardly needs this column to point out how inappropriate that is. Do Immigration officers not have the right equipment? Are they short of vehicles they can use to detain individuals in a manner that doesn’t risk a suspect’s injury or look like a method that might be used by a drugs gang?

A court challenge, we are sure, will follow soon, and Fred Smith is already up for the fight. As he says, the response from the department completely misses the point. It also raises questions about the training and internal discipline procedures in the department.

Once more, Mr Smith has pointed out the illegal nature of random searches, and the lack of an offence of not being able to provide identification. There is no requirement to carry an identification, he insists, and one cannot help but notice that such “random” searches tend to target certain areas and sections of the community rather than others.

But let’s not just take Mr Smith’s word for it – after all, why settle there when the Attorney General himself, Carl Bethel, also spoke out against such moves.

Last year, he said the government couldn’t keep doing this, that you can’t just keep grabbing people who don’t have their papers and lock them up.

He said: “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.”

Imagine that. The Attorney General of all people telling the Immigration Department to cut it out because all it does is end up causing problems in court – and yet the department’s officers keep doing it. More than that, the department sends out a statement, blandly saying that it was all part of an island-wide exercise. So such actions are coming from the top of the department.

When the Attorney General says you’re getting the government in trouble with the law and you keep doing the same thing, then somewhere there is a staggering absence of leadership.

Beyond that, however, beyond the question that will face the courts of whether or not the detention was appropriate, what went through the minds of the Immigration officers who thought the best way to treat a detainee was drag him off the street and to shut them inside the trunk of a car?

More than that, they must make sure they have the right sense of humanity to stop treating people this way.