Since his in­au­gu­ra­tion on Mon­day, US pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump has re­it­er­at­ed many of the cam­paign promis­es that re­sult­ed in his suc­cess at the elec­tions last No­vem­ber, as the leader of the Re­pub­li­can par­ty, which won both the Con­gress and the Sen­ate.

Mr Trump’s in­flu­ence over the levers of gov­er­nance in the US—along­side the size, scope and scale of the Amer­i­can econ­o­my—means that tech­nocrats and pol­i­cy­mak­ers through­out the world are pay­ing very close at­ten­tion to the words be­ing ut­tered by the re-elect­ed US leader.

There are two main ar­eas of con­cern for us here in the Caribbean in gen­er­al, and T&T in par­tic­u­lar.

One of Mr Trump’s ma­jor cam­paign promis­es was a crack­down on il­le­gal mi­gra­tion to the US. In his in­au­gur­al ad­dress on Mon­day, he vowed that “all il­le­gal en­try will be halt­ed” and that US law en­force­ment would de­port mil­lions of “crim­i­nal aliens.”

T&T’s ex­pe­ri­ence with the de­por­ta­tion of its na­tion­als from the US has not been a salu­tary one for ei­ther the de­por­tees or the lo­cal au­thor­i­ties.

While many of those de­port­ed in the past were held in the US for rel­a­tive­ly mi­nor of­fences, quite a few have been hard­ened crim­i­nals. The de­por­ta­tion of hard­core crim­i­nals from big cities in the US to a T&T they bare­ly know, to which they have no fam­i­ly con­nec­tions, or means of earn­ing a liveli­hood, is a sure recipe for a con­tin­u­a­tion of the crim­i­nal scourge that has de­mor­alised this coun­try.

It be­hooves the ad­min­is­tra­tion in T&T to pre­pare for an in­flux of de­por­tees, by li­ais­ing with the NGOs with ex­pe­ri­ence in this area and de­vis­ing the ap­pro­pri­ate so­cial in­ter­ven­tions to ad­dress this is­sue pre-emp­tive­ly.

The oth­er ma­jor is­sue is Mr Trump’s en­er­gy poli­cies. Giv­en the length of time it takes to de­vel­op en­er­gy re­sources, his pledge to fa­cil­i­tate com­pa­nies to “drill ba­by, drill,” is un­like­ly to re­sult in an im­me­di­ate flood of Amer­i­can oil and nat­ur­al gas on world mar­kets. When it hap­pens, how­ev­er, in­creased pro­duc­tion of US oil may ac­tu­al­ly re­sult in low­er fu­el prices in T&T.

Nat­ur­al gas is a linked but dif­fer­ent is­sue. It is the foun­da­tion of the T&T econ­o­my and helps fa­cil­i­tate the stan­dard of liv­ing to which cit­i­zens of this coun­try have be­come ac­cus­tomed. This coun­try has ab­solute­ly no in­flu­ence over the pro­duc­tion of nat­ur­al gas any­where ex­cept here.

The threat of a fu­ture sharp in­crease in Amer­i­can shale gas, or gas from the Gulf of Mex­i­co (which is be­ing changed to Gulf of Amer­i­ca by an­oth­er Trump de­cree), must push pol­i­cy­mak­ers here to firm up new re­la­tion­ships with coun­tries in this hemi­sphere that are seek­ing to make the tran­si­tion away from oil to nat­ur­al gas.

A more im­mi­nent threat to T&T is the hos­til­i­ty of key mem­bers of the new ad­min­is­tra­tion in Wash­ing­ton, DC, to the regime in Cara­cas.

As a col­lat­er­al at­tack on the ad­min­is­tra­tion of Venezuela Pres­i­dent Maduro, T&T of­fi­cials should not rule out the pos­si­bil­i­ty that the OFAC li­cences for the de­vel­op­ment of the Drag­on and Cocuina nat­ur­al gas fields could be can­celled. Get­ting those ex­emp­tions from the Joe Biden ad­min­is­tra­tion was a sig­nif­i­cant feat of diplo­ma­cy by Prime Min­is­ter Dr Kei­th Row­ley and En­er­gy Min­is­ter Stu­art Young.

Con­vinc­ing the Trump ad­min­is­tra­tion that it is in its in­ter­est to ex­tend those OFAC li­cences to fa­cil­i­tate re­gion­al en­er­gy se­cu­ri­ty, is the ur­gent ne­ces­si­ty of 2025. To achieve this, the Gov­ern­ment here must reach out im­me­di­ate­ly to peo­ple in the Trump or­bit to ad­dress this is­sue.