A joint team of officers from the Department of Immigration, Royal Bahamas Police Force and Royal Bahamas Defence Force raided The Farm shantytown in Abaco on Thursday morning, taking several residents into custody and confiscating their possessions.
The raid went down during the early morning hours to catch sleeping residents off-guard.
In addition to taking dozens of shantytown residents into custody and transporting them to Treasure Cay, officers also confiscated their food, clothing, generators and other items in the unregulated homes.
The persons will be processed in Treasure Cay to determine who has papers and who is here illegally.
It comes as the government attempts to shut down shantytowns across the country amid an ongoing legal battle with human rights groups which have accused the Minnis Administration of seeking to eradicate Haitian ethnic groups.
In 2018, the government warned that shantytowns will be demolished.
Residents in shantytowns on Abaco were given until July 2019 to relocate but the courts granted an injunction, giving them a reprieve.
A shantytown trial is currently before Supreme Court Justice Cheryl Grant-Thomspon.
“The Bahamas government embarked upon a policy to eradicate ethnically Haitian-Bahamian communities and to eliminate them 100 percent,” Attorney Fred Smith said during the trial.
Residents questioned why the government spent thousands of dollars transporting law enforcement officers to Abaco to conduct a raid instead of holding a similar exercise on New Providence first, at no cost to taxpayers.