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Arms trafficking in the Caribbean has soared in recent years, with many states now ranking firearms trafficking as the number one public safety and security threat. As new methods of arming individuals and gangs emerge across the Caribbean, gun violence continues to rise throughout the region. While armed gangs in Haiti currently possess superior firepower to the police, most countries are trying to get a handle on the problem before it becomes that bad. Some outdated narratives, particularly about South American arms, still color thinking about firearms in the region, but the reality is becoming increasingly complex in the directional flow, trafficking methods, and the actors involved. The undebatable truth is that the majority of the region’s firearms are coming from the United States.
While south-to-north drug flows have occupied law enforcement efforts on both the United States and Caribbean sides for decades, this north-to-south weapon flow has opened new challenges for identifying and responding to illicit trafficking and the increasing presence of firearms in the region. New U.S. policy may make the situation more complicated, and, at the same time, new developments in firearms production render most historic approaches to counter-trafficking obsolete.
Since President Donald Trump began his second administration, new trends have emerged surrounding arms control. A variety of policy decisions have led to the loosening of both domestic and export firearms controls, with major decisions still to come. In Sept. 2025, the Trump administration repealed firearms export restrictions that had only been put in place the previous year. The restrictions were introduced in May 2024, shortening the export license terms from four years to one year whilst requiring import certifications and purchase orders for states with weak export controls. This, in turn, restricted sales to 36 countries deemed high-risk for firearms being diverted to criminals and terrorists, including those in the Caribbean.
The removal of this legislation prompted Rep. Gregory Meeks to warn that “U.S.-produced firearms will more easily find their way into illicit hands.” A 2023 report by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives found that at least 37 percent of firearms linked to crime outside North America could be traced to legal U.S. exports from 2017 to 2021. While it may be too soon to assess the impact of the legislative change, reduced export restrictions to at-risk Caribbean states significantly increase the opportunity for legally exported weapons to be diverted into criminal hands.
But legal exports gone wrong are only part of the concern for the Caribbean, as a significant amount of weapons are exported illegally, even if they are purchased legally. The perpetrators of arms trafficking are a mix of enterprising individuals, transnational criminal organizations, and foreign terrorist organizations. The Haitian gang 400 Mawozo, associated with the U.S.-designated foreign terrorist organization Viv Ansanm coalition group, has been found using Florida-based gang members to traffic U.S.-sourced weapons in food and household goods containers.
The arms trafficking system into the Caribbean is not dominated by a single transnational criminal organization but by a diverse, decentralized network of actors playing distinct roles. These criminal enterprises often use “straw purchasers”— individuals recruited within diaspora communities in Florida, Georgia, and Texas who legally buy firearms while falsely representing themselves as the final owners.
These individuals have been found using common postal carriers that people use for every kind of goods, like DHL, FedEx, or United Parcel Service, to smuggle firearms from U.S. addresses to destinations in the Caribbean. While shipping full weapons would raise alarms and likely lead to interdiction, criminal actors evade detection by disassembling weapons and shipping the component parts from different addresses in the United States, often from states such as Florida and Georgia, using different carriers and end destinations. End users then assemble the pieces into full weapons upon arrival.
While this may seem like low-volume activity, regular shipments to small populations can lead to a large-scale proliferation of arms. Between 2023 and 2024, an operation used straw purchasers to buy weapons from licensed dealers across Florida and traffic more than 1,000 firearms to the Caribbean before agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives and Homeland Security Investigations dismantled it.
Another legislative change still waiting for adjudication could further exacerbate this issue — the legalization of online retail gun dealers selling handguns. Since 1927, U.S. federal law, 18 U.S.C. § 1715, has prohibited the United States Postal Service from mailing concealable firearms, with exceptions for licensed dealers, law enforcement, the military, and manufacturers. In Jan. 2026, the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel issued a memo declaring that the posting prohibition of firearms was unconstitutional under the Second Amendment. In response, in April 2026, the United States Postal Service proposed the “Revised Mailing Standards for Firearms,” allowing U.S. citizens to mail handguns domestically under the same conditions currently applied to rifles and shotguns, with the final ruling anticipated later this year.
While this would be a major win for U.S. shooting enthusiasts, this decision could have unintended consequences in facilitating the flow of weapons to the Caribbean — especially as handguns already account for the vast majority of illegally seized weapons in the Caribbean. The new rule would allow handguns to be mailed to individuals who haven’t undergone a background check across U.S. state borders. This opens a new domestic channel that feeds traditional trafficking methods into the Caribbean. A carousel of mailings from state to state, taking advantage of individuals with clean records, can obscure the original purchaser from the exporter and create substantial challenges, particularly for Caribbean states, in identifying responsible parties and pursuing the networks responsible for weapons arriving in the region.
The increasing prevalence of privately made firearms further complicates arms trafficking. This includes “ghost guns,” which are assembled from unserialized component parts rather than by a licensed firearm producer, making them untraceable by law enforcement. Ghost guns can be produced using 3D printers as well as computer numerical control milling machines. Both 3D-printed parts and complete firearms can be easily created using blueprints circulated online. Seizures have already occurred in multiple Caribbean states, including St. Kitts and Nevis, while authorities in Trinidad and Tobago discovered a 3D-printed ghost gun lab, confirming the region already has indigenous production capacity.
Additionally, computer numerical control milling machines can produce firearm receivers, and authorities have already seized such machines in the Caribbean. In 2023, an operation in Trinidad and Tobago seized 91 computer numerical control-milled AR-15 lower receivers, demonstrating the scale of production. These techniques are enabling criminal networks to decentralize weapons production and reduce detectability by negating the need for import-dependent supply chains. If this trend continues to grow, arms trafficking will become increasingly difficult to detect for authorities.
Linking back to the postal trend, the posting of ghost gun components separately has also been documented, an artful technique that exploits the intelligence-sharing gaps between customs and postal services. The abuse of the postal system and 3D printers has led to a concerning and related trend in the proliferation of machine gun conversion devices, commonly referred to as “auto sears” or “Glock switches.” These accessories can be 3D-printed and fitted to the back slide mechanism of a Glock-pattern pistol or AR-15 to convert them into fully automatic weapons, increasing lethality. Many are manufactured in China and shipped to the United States before onward smuggling to the Caribbean. Their small size — no bigger than a coin — makes them easy to disguise as coat hangers and other household items and readily pass through untrained customs officials. Seized conversion devices in Jamaica have been linked to numerous murders.
As north-to-south arms trafficking persists, the United States bears a heavy responsibility for illicit arms flows. Vigilance is necessary to remove guns from Caribbean streets and prevent them from reaching the region in the first place. As the Trump administration has scaled back several arms regulations since 2025, Caribbean law enforcement and regional institutions with limited resources increasingly bear the burden of responding. Nevertheless, America continues to help tackle the problem. The U.S. Department of State has led numerous operations to arrest those involved in arms trafficking in the Caribbean. It also provides technical training and equipment to strengthen forensic and ballistic analysis capabilities and support a regional weapons stockpile security program along the Dominican-Haitian border.
Furthermore, Homeland Security Investigations, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, Customs and Border Protection, and the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Industry and Security all work to detect and intercept firearms shipments at U.S. ports of entry to prevent legal shipments from being diverted to transnational criminal organizations.
On the Caribbean side, the Caribbean Community’s Implementation Agency for Crime and Security successfully established its own firearms unit, the Caribbean Community Crime Gun Intelligence Unit, with U.S. support. All states and partners now should leverage this regional hub for intelligence sharing to identify new trends and insights as early as possible to address them. The creativity and adaptability of criminals mean that every law enforcement agency trying to combat the problem must continuously innovate and evolve to stay effective. If any jurisdiction becomes a haven for arms trafficking, it threatens all the others. The criminals are already playing to blind spots and geographic anomalies — they should be foreclosed from doing so further. Regionalized vigilance will help make the Caribbean less hospitable to arms trafficking, even from its neighbor to the north.
Ian Ralby, PhD, is president of Auxilium Worldwide, a charitable nonprofit focused on human security and good governance. Auxilium has a memorandum of understanding with the Caribbean Community’s Implementation Agency for Crime and Security to support maritime governance and has identified arms trafficking as a key security threat in the Caribbean. Ralby has worked in the region for 15 years and is a leading expert on maritime law and security, including illicit weapons trafficking. He has advised on security issues in more than 100 countries and holds a law degree from William & Mary and a Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge, where he was a Gates Scholar.
Isla Matheson recently left the British army as a captain in the Queen’s Royal Hussars, whose antecedent regiment included Sir Winston Churchill. At Auxilium Worldwide, she leads the firm’s work on arms trafficking and now serves as a country security adviser. Matheson holds degrees in marine biology and strategic studies and international law.
Image: Jerry Glaser via DVIDS
