Just over a week in­to his sec­ond term, Unit­ed States pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump has al­ready ini­ti­at­ed ac­tions that are like­ly to cause se­ri­ous reper­cus­sions across the Caribbean.

The ex­tent to which he views this re­gion through the lens­es of il­le­gal im­mi­gra­tion and crime and vi­o­lence, is seen in the crack­down on un­doc­u­ment­ed mi­grants, trig­gered by the flur­ry of im­mi­gra­tion-re­lat­ed ex­ec­u­tive or­ders he signed with­in hours of tak­ing the oath of of­fice.

Pres­i­dent Trump’s will­ing­ness to de­port not on­ly unau­tho­rised im­mi­grants but those with tem­po­rary le­gal sta­tus and even some le­gal per­ma­nent res­i­dents who are ben­e­fi­cia­ries of pro­grammes such as De­ferred Ac­tion for Child­hood Ar­rivals (DA­CA) and Tem­po­rary Pro­tect­ed Sta­tus (TPS), will af­fect T&T and oth­er Caribbean na­tions that are ill-pre­pared to ab­sorb large num­bers of re­turn­ing mi­grants.

It will al­so im­pact the flow of re­mit­tances that have been a life­line for many fam­i­lies, as the num­ber of senders and the amount of mon­ey flow­ing to the re­gion could be dras­ti­cal­ly re­duced.

The main con­cern in T&T since Trump’s elec­tion vic­to­ry last No­vem­ber has been the fu­ture of the Drag­on gas deal. The two-year Of­fice of For­eign As­sets Con­trol (OFAC) waiv­er grant­ed by the US Trea­sury De­part­ment in De­cem­ber 2023 for ex­ploita­tion of the oil field was grant­ed by the Biden ad­min­is­tra­tion but could be re­voked by the Trump regime.

New­ly ap­point­ed Sec­re­tary of State Mar­co Ru­bio’s stance on the is­sue is well known. He has ac­cused the Biden ad­min­is­tra­tion of grant­i­ng mil­lions of dol­lars to Venezuela’s Nico­las Maduro regime through oil li­cences.

Drag­on gas was ex­pect­ed to give a des­per­ate­ly need­ed boost to lo­cal oil and gas pro­duc­tion on which the T&T econ­o­my is so heav­i­ly de­pen­dent, but which is now un­der threat.

An even big­ger is­sue at stake for the Caribbean is the gun vi­o­lence that has es­ca­lat­ed in­to an ur­gent re­gion­al cri­sis.

Easy ac­cess to firearms has trans­formed Latin Amer­i­ca and the Caribbean in­to the most vi­o­lent re­gion in the world—the world’s av­er­age is 5.8 homi­cides per 100,000 peo­ple but the re­gion has more than dou­ble the glob­al av­er­age with 15 mur­ders per 100,000.

Firearms traf­ficked in­to the Caribbean main­ly from the US are in­volved in al­most 90 per cent of homi­cides in the re­gion.

The sit­u­a­tion, seen as a threat to democ­ra­cy and sta­bil­i­ty across the re­gion, led to the con­ven­ing of a Cari­com meet­ing in Port-of-Spain in April 2023 to ad­dress crime and vi­o­lence as a pub­lic health is­sue. Re­gion­al lead­ers sub­se­quent­ly is­sued a de­c­la­ra­tion which, among oth­er things, called on the US to join the Caribbean in its “war on guns.”

How­ev­er, the new Trump ad­min­is­tra­tion is un­like­ly to give this crit­i­cal is­sue the at­ten­tion and co­op­er­a­tion it de­serves.

There will al­so be reper­cus­sions from this sec­ond Trump ad­min­is­tra­tion’s de­ci­sion to with­draw the US from the Paris Cli­mate Ac­cord. Small is­land de­vel­op­ing states (SIDS) of the Caribbean, al­ready ex­pe­ri­enc­ing the de­struc­tion wrought by cli­mate change, now face an in­creased like­li­hood of dis­place­ment and mi­gra­tion as a re­sult of en­vi­ron­men­tal dis­as­ters.

With so many strong sig­nals of pol­i­cy di­rec­tions from Trump and his Cab­i­net that might not be favourable to us, the re­gion’s lead­ers must, there­fore, ur­gent­ly join forces to in­crease re­silience to ex­ter­nal po­lit­i­cal and eco­nom­ic shocks and pri­ori­tise poli­cies that pro­tect cit­i­zens’ wel­fare.