Minister of National Security, the Hon. Wayne Munroe responded to comments made by former Prime Minister, the Rt. Hon. Hubert Ingraham on Thursday.
Mr. Ingraham was a speaker at a FNM rally on Wednesday where he spoke on topics such as fraudulent documents and immigration.
Munroe said, “so he is big on talk about immigration but his record shows releasing migrants from detention, not deporting anywhere near the migrants that we do.”
The national security minister went further stating, “Prime Minister Ingraham when there was an earthquake released migrants in detention. The record of this administration is when flights were canceled to Haiti because of unrest we didn’t release migrants from detention. We deported them on the Lawrence Major to Cap-Haitien which has a relative calm in it. So he released migrants, we deported migrants.”
According to the minister the current administration has deported more migrants than any other. He said of Mr. Ingraham, “where he added nothing to the Defence Force fleet to intercept migrants, the PLP was responsible for the Sandy Bottom Project that brought the fleet up. They then let the fleet run down. We have sent three of those vessels to the Netherlands for refit to put them back in the fight. We have bought fast interceptors. We joined the American Anti Cartel Coalition. None of this Prime Minister Ingraham did.”
On causes of fraudulent documents Mr. Ingraham lamented that the PLP government does not seem outraged enough by the sale and misuse of documents. Munroe said, “document forgery has always been going on. The difference is they never caught anybody doing it in numbers. They loosened the regulations for the passport office and that where fraud sprang up. Our record is we don’t become outraged in terms of throwing up our hands and being theatrical. We are methodical. We institute systems to identify you, we catch you, we prosecute you then we jail you. And our plan now in the second term is to increase the penalties on the public servants who do that.”
More than twenty persons were arrested, charged brought before the courts in connection with documents fraud.
