Guyana’s anti-narcotics and customs unit (CANU) announced on Saturday the arrest of 27 Haitian immigrants and a Cuban who illegally emigrated from Lethem, a city in the South American country, to Brazil.
The arrest of these illegal immigrants was made this Saturday morning by the agents of the Federal Police of Brazil through a memorandum of understanding between the two security forces that they recently signed.
According to CANU, “in what could be described as an example of cooperation at the border crossing”, a group of taxi drivers waiting to pick up and transport undocumented immigrants was also arrested by Brazilian authorities.
“It is suspected that these undocumented immigrants are eager to try to use other routes to enter the country, the information we obtained and passed on to our Brazilian counterparts, who alerted the security forces in the area,” said CANU.
CANU explained that an unknown number of Haitians arrived in Lethem last week and were initially denied entry to Brazil.
On February 18, the Brazilian government of Jair Bolsonaro authorized the use of the Armed Forces on the border between Brazil and Peru, where the number of foreign migrants increased, most Haitians prevented from entering the neighboring country by the coronavirus pandemic.
The measure aims to help limit the arrival of migrants in the small border town of Assis, where at least 500 foreigners are stranded, mostly Haitians, from different regions of Brazil.
The municipality of Assis, located in the state of Acre and with about 8,000 inhabitants, is on the verge of collapse, as it does not have the necessary logistics to assist migrants, nor to detain crowds and prevent the spread of covid-19, in a at a time when the new Brazilian variant of the virus, which is more contagious, has spread to different regions of the country.
According to a decree of the Brazilian Ministry of Justice and Public Security, the National Forces will support local authorities “in the activities of exceptional and temporary blocking of the entry of foreigners in the country, in an episodic and planned manner.”