Five Caribbean na­tions—Saint Lu­cia, An­tigua and Bar­bu­da, Do­mini­ca, St. Kitts and Nevis, and Cu­ba—have been in­clud­ed in a pro­posed list of coun­tries fac­ing po­ten­tial trav­el re­stric­tions un­der the Trump ad­min­is­tra­tion.

Ac­cord­ing to The New York Times, the pro­pos­al de­vel­oped by diplo­mat­ic and se­cu­ri­ty of­fi­cials cat­e­goris­es coun­tries in­to three lev­els of re­stric­tions: a “red” list of 11 na­tions whose cit­i­zens would be flat­ly barred from en­ter­ing the Unit­ed States, in­clud­ing Cu­ba and Venezuela; an “or­ange” list of 10 coun­tries for which trav­el would be re­strict­ed but not cut off; and a “yel­low” list of 22 na­tions, in­clud­ing the four East­ern Caribbean na­tions, which would be giv­en 60 days to clear up per­ceived de­fi­cien­cies, with the threat of be­ing moved to one of the oth­er lists if they did not com­ply.

The rea­sons for the cat­e­gori­sa­tion of the coun­tries were not giv­en, but The New York Times re­port said con­cerns may in­clude in­ad­e­quate se­cu­ri­ty prac­tices for is­su­ing pass­ports, in­suf­fi­cient in­for­ma­tion-shar­ing on trav­ellers, or sell­ing of cit­i­zen­ship to peo­ple from banned coun­tries

All the Caribbean is­lands on the yel­low list have Cit­i­zen­ship by In­vest­ment pro­grammes which of­fer for­eign in­vestors the op­por­tu­ni­ty to ob­tain cit­i­zen­ship.

Cu­ba and Venezuela, mean­while, are long-stand­ing ad­ver­saries of US for­eign pol­i­cy.

The pro­posed re­stric­tions, if im­ple­ment­ed, would sig­nif­i­cant­ly ex­pand the trav­el bans im­posed dur­ing Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump’s first term. How­ev­er, the fi­nal de­ci­sion rests with the White House, and the list may be sub­ject to change, ac­cord­ing to The New York Times.

Dur­ing his first pres­i­den­cy, Trump’s trav­el bans faced le­gal chal­lenges, but a re­vised ver­sion ban­ning cit­i­zens from eight na­tions, six of them pre­dom­i­nant­ly Mus­lim, was up­held by the US Supreme Court. His suc­ces­sor, Joe Biden, re­voked the bans in 2021.

With Trump back in of­fice, his ad­min­is­tra­tion ar­gues that re­in­stat­ing the bans is nec­es­sary to pro­tect US cit­i­zens “from aliens who in­tend to com­mit ter­ror­ist at­tacks, threat­en our na­tion­al se­cu­ri­ty, es­pouse hate­ful ide­ol­o­gy or oth­er­wise ex­ploit the im­mi­gra­tion laws for malev­o­lent pur­pos­es.”