The United States Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and CARICOM IMPACS, the Caribbean Community’s implementation agency for crime and security, signed a Memorandum of Cooperation (MoC) at the Saint Kitts and Nevis embassy in Washington on July 10 to share biometric data across the region.
Its framework reaches into the five Eastern Caribbean citizenship by investment (CBI) programs, and DHS ties the deal to the same concerns that drove this year’s US travel restrictions.
Rob Law, DHS Under Secretary for Strategy, Policy, and Plans, said the signing “marks DHS’s first multilateral biometric information-sharing arrangement.” It “will strengthen cooperation between DHS and CARICOM IMPACS on border security and immigration vetting,” he said.
Under the agreement, automated queries and data exchanges will screen, vet, and investigate people who “may pose security or immigration risks to the United States and CARICOM Member States,” according to the department. Both governments aim to have the Biometric Data Sharing Partnership (BDSP) operational by the end of the year.
Where the CBI programs come in
DHS singled out citizenship by investment. The arrangement “addresses the Eastern Caribbean’s Citizenship-by-Investment (CBI) programs,” it said, pointing to Presidential Proclamation 10998, the December 16, 2025 order that restricts entry for nationals of dozens of countries.
Proclamation 10998 holds that “purchased citizenship can be used to bypass travel restrictions or conceal identity and assets,” and it imposed visa curbs on CBI nationals on that basis.
Data shared through the partnership “strengthens vetting practices and addresses some of the risks identified in the Proclamation,” DHS said, “while leaving visa and 212(f) authorities unchanged.” Section 212(f) is the presidential power to suspend entry, the legal engine behind the travel bans.
Only Antigua and Barbuda and Dominica appear in the proclamation, which placed both under partial US visa restrictions from January; Grenada, Saint Kitts and Nevis, and Saint Lucia escaped it. All five programs fall under the new MoC, yet the biometric cooperation does nothing to loosen the curbs already sitting on the two named islands.
CARICOM IMPACS casts the same deal in warmer language, describing “critical security upgrades” for the five programs and a means to “protect the integrity of economic migration” before citizenship is granted. Its executive director, Lieutenant Colonel Michael Jones, called the MoC “a real, shared commitment to locking down our borders,” and said biometrics “provide a definitive means of establishing identity.”
Through its Joint Regional Communications Centre in Barbados, the agency already channels CBI applicant data, so the MoC deepens an existing role rather than inventing one.
The agency expects the biometric capability to feed the planned Eastern Caribbean Citizenship by Investment Regulatory Authority (ECCIRA), the common regulator the five states are building to harmonize compliance.
Washington’s move parallels pressure from Brussels, where the European Commission now treats running a CBI program as sufficient grounds to suspend visa-free travel and has set a 2028 deadline for Antigua to end its program. This pact answers the vetting critique without easing the US visa curbs already in place on Antigua and Dominica.
