Guyana has been asked to provide travel documents for another 150 persons the US wants to deport which means that around 327 repatriates could be here within months.

This disclosure yesterday by Head of the Presidential Secretariat Dr Roger Luncheon is likely to stoke concerns among several jittery sections of society that the return of so many criminals would pose a severe threat to law enforcement.

When the issue first arose in September Stabroek News had reported a US Justice Department public affairs official as saying that the number to be deported was 327. Dr Luncheon had disputed this figure when the first list was received, but yesterday he conceded that the figure could very well reach 327.

Speaking with reporters at his weekly post-Cabinet press briefing, Dr Luncheon said that the new names were being subjected to the same process as the original 141 for whom travel documents had been requested. That process, he said, ensured that the mutual interests of Guyana and the United States of America were addressed. Dr Luncheon said too that as many as 100 deportees should be back in Guyana shortly.

Delays by Georgetown in the processing of the first 141 names resulted in the US banning the issuance of visas to government officials, employees and their immediate families.

Stabroek News understands that at the end of last week authorization had been given for the issue of travel documents for 58 of the original batch to be deported. This newspaper was also informed that one person from that batch had since died of an AIDS-related illness and that the US Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) had not provided passport pictures for 11 of them who had not been incarcerated and could no longer be found. An official told Stabroek News that the Guyana government had also wanted the US authorities to provide the medical histories of the persons being deported.

Meanwhile, other hitches have arisen as a result of the current anthrax scare in the US. This has delayed the delivery of the travel documents to jurisdictions outside Washington and New York. Guyana's ambassador to the United States of America, Dr Odeen Ishmael, told Stabroek News from Washington yesterday that he had recently been contacted by the INS office in Louisiana to inform him that documents sent to it had been received eight dates after they had been posted. Dr Ishmael expressed the hope that the other 25 documents he had recently sent would not be unduly delayed in the post.

Dr Ishmael was unaware of the additional list of 150 names presented by the US authorities. He said he had indicated to the US State Department that all the names should be sent through the Embassy in Washington DC so that he could ensure that they were transmitted to Guyana as promptly as possible.

As regards the arrangements being put in place for the deportees' return, Dr Luncheon said that the police would take the appropriate steps, based on information about the crimes for which they had been imprisoned in the US. However, he stressed that the deportees would have been convicted of no crimes in Guyana and the measures to be put in place were not intended to place any unacceptable stigma on them. He repeated that the government was seeking to perfect a Memorandum of Understanding with the US that would ensure that the deportees were not in any way disadvantaged by their forced removal from the US.

Also, he said that the Ministry of Labour, Human Services and Social Security was to be engaged in helping the less fortunate of the detainees maintain a minimum standard of living. Minister in that ministry, Bibi Shadick told Stabroek News yesterday that while no detailed plans had been made as yet, she did know that some recent deportees had been housed at the ministry's Night Shelter.

About the non-immigrant visa ban on government officials and their families, Dr Luncheon said that since it was imposed because none of the deportees had been returned, he would expect that once they began returning, the ban could be lifted.

The ban was imposed on October 10, after the US Justice Department warned on September 7 that it would advise the US State Department to apply the sanction if the government did not agree to accept the deportees within 30 days.

Following the initial warning, a task force comprising the home affairs and foreign affairs ministers and Dr Luncheon was set up to deal with the issue. President Bharrat Jagdeo last week acknowledged that a number of agencies had not acted in a timely manner in getting information to the Guyana mission in the US for travel documents to be issued for a number of persons whose nationality as Guyanese had been verified.

Government officials had indicated that the information provided by the US authorities on the persons they wanted to deport was at times insufficient to verify their nationality since some of them would have left here while still very young.

They said too that there was a concern that some of them, because of the length of time they would have left here, would have no ties to the society as all their relatives might have migrated.