Trump budget would eviscerate already limited US Coast Guard presence in the Caribbean

WASHINGTON, USA — US President
Donald Trump’s budget proposal reportedly includes a $1.3 billion cut to the US CoastGuard, which would significantly reduce the already minimal national security presence in the Caribbean.
The administration’s 2018 financial year budget proposal plans to boost the Department of Homeland Security’s total budget by six percent, to $43.8 billion. That increase would primarily go to land border security and would be paid for with theCoast Guard cuts and reductions to other agencies.
Rep. Duncan Hunter, a California Republican,said the planned cuts would “severely undermine national security”.
“Such a drastic reduction in Coast Guard funding would not only diminish the CoastGuard’s standing and mission,” Hunter wrote in a letter to Trump, it “would severely undermine US national security.”“A cut to the Coast Guard of $1.3 billion will effectively paralyze the service and create unnecessary risk and exposures to the homeland,” Hunter’s chief of staff, Joe Kasper, added.
“As Trump builds the wall on the southern border, it’s going to push more migrants and smugglers to the water — and the only entity there to stop all of it is the Coast Guard,” Kasper said.
The Coast Guard has played a big role in drug and illegal migrant interdiction, issuesTrump has pointed to as the rationale for why a border wall is needed.
“This is insanity to leave the CaribbeanSea open for drug traffickers to operate with impunity like the 70s and 80s. The Colombians and Venezuelans must be very happy and thanking President Trump for according them a free trade route to transport their drugs to North American markets,” a seniorUS intelligence source told Caribbean NewsNow.
In March 2015, General John Kelly, then commander of US Southern Command
(SOUTHCOM) and now ironically the new head of Homeland Security, which will benefit from the proposed budget increase, complained about the lack of naval assets in theCaribbean.
“I don’t have the assets [in the Caribbean].
I have two navy ships right now, that will goto zero for ever by the summer,” he told theSenate Armed Services Committee two yearsago.
Kelly also stated then that SOUTHCOMhad insufficient airborne intelligence, surveillanceand reconnaissance (ISR) assets
available in the area.
Although the US Coast Guard had made a commitment to double the number of CoastGuard cutters in the region, Kelly pointed out that this represented an increase from just three to six.