TTPS: No permission granted for Wednesday’s planned Kaia Sealy protest

The Trinidad and To­ba­go Po­lice Ser­vice (TTPS) has moved to shut down a planned protest ex­pect­ed to take place on Wednes­day in sup­port of Ka­ia Sealy out­side the of­fice of the Di­rec­tor of Pub­lic Pros­e­cu­tions (DPP), say­ing no per­mis­sion has been re­quest­ed or grant­ed for the event.

In a state­ment, the TTPS said it was aware of the planned demon­stra­tion cir­cu­lat­ing for Wednes­day 27 May 2026 but stressed that or­gan­is­ers had not sought ap­proval.

The TTPS al­so point­ed to the on­go­ing State of Emer­gency, say­ing emer­gency pow­ers re­main in ef­fect and gath­er­ings can be pro­hib­it­ed where there is a threat to pub­lic or­der or safe­ty.

The Po­lice Ser­vice warned that any at­tempt to as­sem­ble with­out au­tho­ri­sa­tion dur­ing the SOE would be treat­ed as a vi­o­la­tion of the law and could re­sult in dis­per­sal, ar­rests, and pros­e­cu­tion.

It said un­der Sec­tion 11 of the Emer­gency Pow­ers Reg­u­la­tions, no per­son shall “en­deav­our, whether oral­ly or oth­er­wise, to in­flu­ence pub­lic opin­ion in a man­ner like­ly to be prej­u­di­cial to pub­lic safe­ty.”

The planned protest had been pro­mot­ed on so­cial me­dia by ac­tivist Alyssa Phillip dur­ing a live broad­cast on Sun­day, where she en­cour­aged sup­port­ers to at­tend the DPP’s of­fice in Port of Spain at 4 pm on Wednes­day.

Dur­ing the live, Phillip said she had al­ready no­ti­fied au­thor­i­ties about the demon­stra­tion.

“I al­ready sent them the no­tice, al­lyuh we need to beat the iron while it is hot,” she said.

She al­so urged sup­port­ers to main­tain mo­men­tum fol­low­ing Sun­day’s protest.

“The protest to­day went re­al­ly well. I would go as far as say­ing it is prob­a­bly the best protest we have had thus far. I am re­al­ly grate­ful for every­one who showed up… I am ask­ing the ones who showed up and the ones who didn’t have the op­por­tu­ni­ty to show up to show up on Wednes­day in front of the DPP’s of­fice.”

The TTPS has re­it­er­at­ed that any gath­er­ings must com­ply with emer­gency reg­u­la­tions cur­rent­ly in force.