Arrival and departure forms to go online at last

Kevon Felmine

Trav­ellers en­ter­ing and leav­ing Trinidad and To­ba­go will soon com­plete im­mi­gra­tion ar­rival and de­par­ture cards on­line as au­thor­i­ties pre­pare to re­place the long-stand­ing pa­per-based sys­tem.

A no­tice from the Im­mi­gra­tion Di­vi­sion of the Min­istry of Home­land Se­cu­ri­ty in­di­cates the On­line Ar­rival and De­par­ture Card Plat­form is sched­uled to go live on March 17, 2026, al­low­ing pas­sen­gers to sub­mit their im­mi­gra­tion de­c­la­ra­tions elec­tron­i­cal­ly be­fore trav­el­ling.

Un­der the sys­tem, users must cre­ate an ac­count on the Gov­ern­ment’s por­tal, up­load a pho­to of their pass­port bio­da­ta page and com­plete the form with­in 72 hours be­fore ar­rival or de­par­ture.

Once sub­mit­ted, trav­ellers will re­ceive a dig­i­tal re­ceipt with a unique code and QR code to present to im­mi­gra­tion of­fi­cials.

Asked for con­fir­ma­tion, Min­is­ter of Home­land Se­cu­ri­ty Roger Alexan­der said the min­istry will host a press con­fer­ence on Wednes­day morn­ing to pro­vide de­tails, not­ing of­fi­cials were fi­nal­is­ing sev­er­al mat­ters ahead of the launch.

In a no­tice to the me­dia, the min­istry said the plat­form forms part of ef­forts to mod­ernise the coun­try’s bor­der man­age­ment sys­tems and digi­tise the ar­rival and de­par­ture process for trav­ellers en­ter­ing and leav­ing Trinidad and To­ba­go.

“The in­tro­duc­tion of this ini­tia­tive rep­re­sents a sig­nif­i­cant step in the Gov­ern­ment’s on­go­ing ef­forts to en­hance op­er­a­tional ef­fi­cien­cy, strength­en bor­der se­cu­ri­ty, and im­prove the over­all trav­el ex­pe­ri­ence for vis­i­tors and re­turn­ing na­tion­als,” the min­istry said.

Sim­i­lar dig­i­tal ar­rival card sys­tems are al­ready used in sev­er­al Caribbean coun­tries and oth­er in­ter­na­tion­al des­ti­na­tions as gov­ern­ments move to mod­ernise bor­der pro­cess­ing.