The Unit­ed States says there is no list of a draft trav­el ban af­ter some Caribbean Com­mu­ni­ty (CARI­COM) coun­tries had pub­licly called on Wash­ing­ton to con­firm or de­ny such list ex­ist­ed.

“Well, first of all, there is no list. What peo­ple are look­ing at over these last sev­er­al days is not a list that ex­ists here that is be­ing act­ed on. There is a re­view, as we know through the pres­i­dent’s ex­ec­u­tive or­der, for us to look at the na­ture of what’s gonna help keep Amer­i­ca safer when deal­ing with the is­sue of visas and who’s al­lowed in­to the coun­try,” said US De­part­ment of State spokesper­son, Tam­my Bruce.

“But what has been tout­ed as some­thing as an item through the State De­part­ment just sim­ply isn’t the case,” she added.

Over the last week­end, the New York Times news­pa­per re­port­ed that six Caribbean coun­tries, name­ly St. Lu­cia, An­tigua and Bar­bu­da, Do­mini­ca, St. Kitts-Nevis, Cu­ba, and Haiti, have been in­clud­ed in a pro­posed list of coun­tries fac­ing po­ten­tial trav­el re­stric­tions un­der the Trump ad­min­is­tra­tion.

Ac­cord­ing to news­pa­per, 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, which in­cludes Haiti, 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.

An­tigua and Bar­bu­da for­mal­ly re­quest­ed clar­i­fi­ca­tion from the Unit­ed States and in a diplo­mat­ic note sent to the US State De­part­ment last Sat­ur­day, the An­tigua and Bar­bu­da Em­bassy in the US ex­pressed deep con­cern over the  March 15 ar­ti­cle in The New York Times.

“The Em­bassy ex­press­es its deep con­cern about these re­ports and re­spect­ful­ly re­quests clar­i­fi­ca­tion re­gard­ing whether the De­part­ment of State has, in fact, drawn up such a list nam­ing An­tigua and Bar­bu­da,” stat­ed the diplo­mat­ic note ob­tained by the Caribbean Me­dia Cor­po­ra­tion (CMC).

“The Gov­ern­ment of An­tigua and Bar­bu­da has re­ceived no pri­or no­tice from any branch of the US Gov­ern­ment re­gard­ing this mat­ter, and thus, would be grate­ful for any of­fi­cial in­for­ma­tion the De­part­ment of State can pro­vide,” it added.

The gov­ern­ments of the oth­er Caribbean coun­tries al­so ex­pressed sim­i­lar con­cerns with Cas­tries say­ing that it had re­ceived no of­fi­cial com­mu­ni­ca­tion from the US, while St Kitts and Nevis and Do­mini­ca said they were al­so seek­ing clar­i­fi­ca­tion.

Bas­seterre said that since Au­gust 2022, it has main­tained an open di­a­logue with the US gov­ern­ment, par­tic­u­lar­ly re­gard­ing re­forms to its Cit­i­zen­ship by In­vest­ment (CBI) pro­gramme, through which for­eign in­vestors re­ceive cit­i­zen­ship of the Twin Is­land Fed­er­a­tion in re­turn for mak­ing a sub­stan­tial in­vest­ment in the so­cio-eco­nom­ic de­vel­op­ment of the coun­try.

St. Lu­cia,  An­tigua and Bar­bu­da and Do­mini­ca al­so have a sim­i­lar CBI pro­gramme and the four coun­tries re­cent­ly an­nounced clos­er col­lab­o­ra­tion among them­selves and the Unit­ed States to en­sure the pro­gramme is not abused by crim­i­nals and oth­er un­de­sir­able in­vestors.

An­tigua and Bar­bu­da al­so in­di­cat­ed that all ap­pli­cants un­der­go rig­or­ous vet­ting by recog­nised in­ter­na­tion­al agen­cies, in­clud­ing IN­TER­POL, to en­sure that no one with a crim­i­nal back­ground or cur­rent charges, in­clud­ing ter­ror­ism, is con­sid­ered.

WASH­ING­TON, Mar 18, CMC

CMC/ah/ir/2026