Tracking Trump and Latin America: Migration--Cuba, Haiti, Venezuela Applications Paused

Thursday, December 4, 2025

By
Khalea Robertson and Chase Harrison

The U.S. president has pursued a more aggressive reduction in immigration, pushing for record deportations while curtailing migrant protections.

With the declaration of a national emergency at the U.S. southern border and the classification of migration as “an invasion,” U.S. President Donald Trump made his focus on immigration clear on the first day of his second term, taking action on an issue that was a focal point in his 2024 presidential campaign. Since then, immigration enforcement authorities have received a significant budget boost as they make record numbers of arrests and pursue the president’s goal of 1 million deportations in 2025.

So far, Trump’s migration policy has touched Latin America in diverse ways. Just over half of the U.S. foreign-born population comes from the region, per 2023 census data—almost 24.5 million people. According to statistics from Pew Research Center, Latin Americans also make up around 74 percent of an estimated 14 million immigrants lacking full legal status in the United States. This includes people with temporary protections from deportation, such as a pending asylum claim, Temporary Protected Status (TPS), or humanitarian parole. The Trump White House has already moved to strip these protections from hundreds of thousands of immigrants from the region, many of whom either have been or can be deported even while these measures make their way through the courts.

During his first term (2017–2021), Trump passed policies that pressured Latin American governments to take more responsibility to deter migration and accept deportees. This term, Trump is resurrecting—or intensifying—several of those policies. Trump is also attempting to end birthright citizenship by reinterpreting the 14th Amendment and threatening a wider set of countries with punitive measures if they don’t comply with his requests around deportation.

https://www.as-coa.org/articles/tracking-trump-and-latin-america-migration-cuba-haiti-venezuela-applications-paused