by Linda Straker
- PM told audience of “DM with the PM” programme that there has been no increase in deportees
- If citizens of Grenada are deported they are entitled to live in Grenada
- Security forces will monitor deportees who engage or seek to engage in criminal activity in Grenada
Prime Minister Dickon Mitchell disclosed that there has not been an increase in deportees from the United States of America to Grenada since Donald Trump returned to the White House in January 2025.
During his campaign for the 2024 presidential election, Trump promised that there would be mass deportation of criminal migrants if he were elected as the 47th President of the USA. He won the election and was sworn into office in January 2025 and since then, there has been massive deportation of migrants to nations around the world.
Responding to a question which sought to find out the number of people who have been deported to the country since the swearing in of the Trump Administration, Prime Minister Mitchell told the audience of his weekly Tuesday “DM with the PM” programme that there has been no increase in deportees. “I actually don’t have the statistics on this. I can say, however, that based on my last conversation with the Minister for Foreign Affairs and the Immigration Department, we have seen no increase in the number of deportees since President Trump returned to the White House.”
“Any deportees will be the sort of normal standards processes that happened in the past and as a result of that, we don’t necessarily need to have a system in place to deal with it because we don’t envisage a large influx of deportees into Grenada,” he added.
“But if they are deported into Grenada and they are citizens of Grenada, they are entitled to live in Grenada. They would not have committed any crimes in Grenada, but obviously the security forces will monitor and make sure that we can keep an eye on things in the event any of the deportees engage or seek to engage in criminal activity in Grenada,” he said.
“So, I want to assure the caller that as Minister for National Security, that the police are quite vigilant; the immigration authorities are quite vigilant but there has not been any necessary uptake in deportees since Donald Trump came into office,” he said.
Between 2020 and 2024, data from the Royal Grenada Police Force (RGPF) revealed that 197 nationals returned to the country as deportees, with the highest number coming from the United Kingdom.
In February 2025, Foreign Affairs Minister Joseph Andall confirmed that Grenada received communications from the Trump Administration that several Grenadians were scheduled for deportation, but they did not provide a number. “We did get communication from them towards the end of January that they will probably be repatriating or deporting Grenadian citizens. They also spoke about the consequences of countries not wanting to receive their nationals,” he said.
