As of today all United States of America citizens who travel by air to the Caribbean must have a passport to re-enter their country, due to the expiration of the deadline for the Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative (WHTI) at midnight, yesterday. The WHTI requires all U.S. citizens, Canadians, Bermudans and Mexicans to have a passport or other accepted secure document to enter or re-enter the United States within the Western Hemisphere. After an original deadline of January 23, the U.S. Government was forced to ease the procedures governing travel by its citizens travelling to Canada, Mexico, the Caribbean and Bermuda. This came after they came under severe criticism from irate passport applicants and congressmen, and the burden of an overloaded system flooded by millions of applications that they have been unable to process on time. Reprinted from jamaica-gleaner.com