Bajan immigration to get new holding cell

(Barbados Nation) Government is planning to construct a modern, state-of-the-art holding facility for the Immigration Department.

This comes in the wake of the Raul Garcia saga. Garcia, born in Cuba but raised in the United States, has been denied re-entry to those countries, leaving him a burden to Barbadian taxpayers in spite of being a free man.

Yesterday Prime Minister Freundel Stuart acknowledged that there was no non-punitive facility to accommodate people such as Garcia who is being kept in prison even though he has completed a 15-year drug trafficking sentence. He remains in a maximum security cell at HMP Dodds in St Philip.

“The way he’s being held forces Barbados to look at creating some kind of facility other than what we currently have at the Grantley Adams International Airport for people in that position,” the Prime Minister said.