Amid unconfirmed reports that 5,120 Jamaicans with questionable antecedents are targeted for removal in raids by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the Jamaican Government has indicated the National Security Council is fine-tuning its response while at the same time assuring that there is ongoing dialogue between the Administration and its American counterparts.

Speaking at the weekly post-Cabinet press briefing at Jamaica House in St Andrew on Wednesday, Information Minister Senator Dr Dana Morris Dixon, in responding to media queries about the freezing of aid and deportations which have heralded the return of American President Donald Trump to office, said the dialogue has started.

“The National Security Council met last week Thursday and they were looking at these matters, so we have not been ignorant of them. We have been looking at them, we have been assessing them, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs has been in constant dialogue with our US partners and the minister [Senator Kamina Johnson Smith] will be giving further updates in very short order in relation to this,” Morris Dixon stated.

“Please rest assured that, up to the level of the National Security Council, we have been looking at these matters and developing positions in relation to our response to them and members of the media will definitely be the first to hear in relation to our responses to what is happening on those fronts,” she added.

Trump began his second term on January 20 with a flood of executive actions aimed at revamping US immigration. His Administration quickly moved to ramp up deportations by, among other things, relaxing rules governing enforcement actions at “sensitive” locations such as schools, churches and workplaces.

On January 28 White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, answering questions about ICE deportations during the first press briefing of Trump’s second term, said “the president has said countless times that he is focused on launching the largest mass deportation operation in American history of illegal criminals and if you are an individual, a foreign national who illegally enters the United States of America, you are, by definition, a criminal and therefore you are subject to deportation”.

“The president has also said two things can be true at the same time, we want to deport illegal criminals, illegal immigrants from this country but the president has said, of course, the illegal criminal drug dealers, the rapists, the murderers, the individuals who have committed heinous acts on the interior of our country and who have terrorised law-abiding American citizens absolutely, those should be the priority of ICE, but that doesn’t mean that the other illegal criminals entering our nation’s borders are off the table,” she declared.

On Wednesday, managing director of Caribbean Immigrant Services Irwine Clare, a Jamaican residing in the US, while being sceptical about the tactics and figures attributed to ICE for the removals, said at this point there is need for decisive action from Jamaica’s Government on several fronts.

“What kinda concerns me — and I hope that behind the scenes the governments in Jamaica and the Caribbean are making plans for any eventualities, unless they don’t believe the president — is that even if they are to say 5,000 Jamaicans are coming back, just 500 Jamaicans alone being deported to Jamaica right now will cause havoc and the ones who will be coming back are not necessarily the guys who will be going to church on Sundays or Saturdays, so I don’t know. I can only hope that they are, behind the scenes, negotiating with your amiable minister of foreign affairs and also how is the Ministry of Foreign Affairs reaching out to diaspora groups to see what kind of partnerships and opportunities there may be,” Clare told the Jamaica Observer.

Noting that the removal figures might be hyped up to create fear, he said a major concern among targeted communities there at this time was “the additional places they have planned to make raids”.

“Schools, hospitals, places of worship; I don’t know if any of those places yet can confirm, there are a lot of stories out there but the biggest part of my concern is addressing those persons who reach out on an individual basis saying to us, these are my conditionalities, how do I prepare myself, how do I safeguard, what do I do? Those are the issues we are dealing with right now,” Clare told the Observer.

“I see 93,000, I see 5,000 [removal numbers being quoted]. Remember now, that legacy media like yourself is relegated, because everybody with a phone out there and have their stuff out there breaking news and all of that, many a times adding to the fear and the confusion and causing more havoc than there really is. So what I would really like to say to my brothers and sisters out there in Jamaica, reach out to your family members. Do a wellness check on your loved ones, because I am quite certain, even from a selfish perspective, to make sure you are still going to get your remittance,” Clare stated.

“The other people we should be putting pressure on is our embassy and our consulate because they are the ones the United States will officially make contact with to say ‘Tom Brown from Jamaica is being deported’. That is the official medium. So I don’t know if the consulate or the embassy have been beefing up staff to deal with it,” he added.

Said Clare, “I don’t know what Jamaica is doing or what the Caribbean is doing, but they should be now having more people on hand to make sure that our citizens’ rights are being protected, even by Geneva Convention standards, and at the same time I am quite sure that there are organisations and Jamaican lawyers availing them of suggestions where legal immigration processes can be had.”

In the meantime, Clare has branded the Trump Administration’s offer to federal workers the chance to take a “deferred resignation” — which would mean they agree now to resign but get paid through September — as pure trouble.

“There is going to be a lot of pushback on that… it is part of the intimidation process because you must remember that part of the mandate is to reduce the federal workforce in order to bring in their lackeys. I have heard of a person who most of their staff have been placed elsewhere and now their workload is doubled, it is part of the whole intimidation process and I think there will be pushbacks, there are already people I know who have gone on to [contemplate] lawsuits, and so on,” he told the Observer.