So far this year, the Turks and Caicos Islands have seen a significant reduction in the number of migrants intercepted attempting to enter the country illegally from Haiti.

Mat Newton, Deputy Commissioner of Police, during a press conference at the police headquarters, revealed that last year, the country saw 4,016 irregular migrants intercepted from Haiti and that this year, for 6 first months there were 865 (727 men, 138 women including 8 minors) in total during 10 separate interceptions.

Newton noted, "It is fair to say that there will be some vessels that get through, but I think the headline here is we are being incredibly more successful in interdicting these irregular migrants. Secondly, the OPBAT partnership which many of you would be familiar with is more successful in terms of sharing intelligence and having to prove situational awareness and there’s better coordination across the OPBAT partnership to make sure that we’re deploying all our air and marine assets effectively."

Newton also confirmed that infrastructure work on the new maritime radar has begun and it will be ready for deployment within the next four weeks. He said the radar, funded by the Foreign Commonwealth Development Office, will increase the ability to detect migrant boats...

Finally, he said "The investigations into the facilitators have been particularly effective over the last three months, working in collaboration with the border force. We’ve got a number of individuals now who are remanded into custody with some fairly serious charges and we will target those facilitating this."

"We do believe that there is some measure of transnational organised criminality taking place in this context as well. We are digging deeper to see if we can identify those persons who are piggybacking on human smuggling as far as I am concerned for personal gains. We are really trying to identify this and bring those persons to justice," he said.

S/ HaitiLibre