The unlawful, unilateral U.S. military operation in Venezuela on January 3, 2026, capture and extraction of de facto president Nicolas Maduro, followed by President Trump’s announcement that the United States would “run” Venezuela, including control of its oil sales, culminated a turbulent year in U.S. foreign policy towards Latin America.
In the first year of Donald Trump’s return to the White House since January 20, 2025, his administration has taken a bulldozer to the institutions of the liberal international order that the U.S. spent eight decades helping to build. From slashing U.S. foreign assistance, ending USAID, gutting the State Department, criticizing and withdrawing from dozens of international bodies, and lawlessly using lethal military force, the Trump administration is prioritizing narrowly defined U.S. interests and denigrating multilateral cooperation. By U.S. law, the promotion and protection of human rights and democracy are fundamental (if inconsistently applied) goals of U.S. foreign policy; however, this is clearly no longer the case.
Beyond the global ramifications of these dramatic policy shifts, Latin America has undoubtedly become a focal point of the administration’s actions, as the “Trump Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine in the new National Security Strategy lays out. Perhaps nothing makes this clearer than a recent post on X by the State Department: “This is OUR Hemisphere, and President Trump will not allow our security to be threatened.”
While Trump’s first term was characterized by a transactional foreign policy, his second has also included coercion through threats of tariffs, sanctions, and military action to pressure governments to advance the administration’s own priorities. For Latin America, this has focused on stopping migration and the flow of illicit drugs, while the administration also aims to control access to the region and limit “outside influence” from countries on the “other side of the world,” primarily China. Not only does the administration want governments in the Western Hemisphere to see the United States as their “partner of first choice,” but it “will (through various means) discourage their collaboration with others.”
Several Latin American governments and political leaders are willing partners with the Trump administration in these goals, both ideologically, in advancing an anti-rights agenda, and in their disdain for checks and balances on executive power. Many others have worked to balance the need to engage with the Trump administration to avoid negative repercussions while safeguarding their own priorities and sovereignty.
There is a long list of actions undertaken in the Trump administration’s first year that have had an outsized impact on Latin America. Below, WOLA highlights four key developments affecting the region during this time.
- Undermining the promotion of human rights and democracy abroad
The closure of USAID, along with the cancellation of most U.S. foreign assistance, has had devastating impacts worldwide. The administration has yet to provide any public information regarding the final amount of assistance and programs that were eliminated globally. WOLA’s own analysis, based on a memo the administration sent to Congress in March 2025, suggests that over 84 percent of USAID assistance to Latin America and the Caribbean was eliminated, along with substantial funding cuts to other programming administered by various bureaus within the State Department.
While some programs supporting public health, humanitarian assistance, and economic development remain, the majority of funding for human rights, democracy, the rule of law, diversity and equity, and support for migrants and asylum seekers scattered across the region, has all but disappeared. The State Department’s Bureau for Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor saw 389 of its 391 democracy promotion grants canceled. Analysts have affirmed that 80 percent of U.S. funding for democracy globally has been cut. Local organizations have been forced to shut their doors, end programs, and dismiss staff, while international organizations have faced the same fate.
As Trump’s team sought to demolish U.S. foreign aid in 2025, the Republican-led Congress largely sat in silence. But the foreign assistance legislation for fiscal year 2026, now making its way through the legislature, provides over $50 billion in U.S. foreign aid, $19 billion more than the administration requested, but $9.3 billion less than the FY2025 enacted levels. The funding still needs to be approved by the full House and Senate, but the bill was agreed upon by the Committees on Appropriations in both chambers on a bipartisan basis.
The State Department sought to eliminate the Democracy Fund and made no mention of any human rights programming in its budget request, but the bill advancing in Congress includes over $205 million for a Human Rights and Democracy Fund at the State Department and $315 million to support the National Endowment for Democracy (NED). The House report accompanying the legislation, which is considered the bill’s directive language, states that the Committee on Appropriations “believes strongly that defending democracy and human rights is fundamental to United States national security.”
While renewed U.S. foreign assistance would be welcome, it remains unclear how, or even whether, new foreign aid spending approved by Congress will be implemented. Questions remain about the State Department’s capacity to administer funds in light of the closure of USAID, and the department’s own staffing cuts and restructuring, which all but eliminated the personnel tasked with human rights and democracy programming. It is also unclear how the funds would be allocated, given the administration’s disregard for democracy promotion and human rights. Indeed, it is not even clear that new foreign aid funds will be spent at all, as the Office of Management and Budget has demonstrated a willingness to withhold or delay the spending laws passed by Congress.
Democracy is barely mentioned in the National Security Strategy, and a July 2025 State Department memo calls on its staff to “avoid opining on the fairness or integrity of an electoral process, its legitimacy, or the democratic values of the country in question.” Administration officials have issued mixed messages as to whether the restoration of democracy is even part of their aims in Venezuela, let alone the need for accountability for the grave human rights violations that have occurred under the Maduro regime.
Likewise, rather than upholding universal human rights standards enforceable through international law, the administration’s focus is on securing “God-given natural rights.” Weakening standards and downplaying certain types of human rights violations is also evident in the State Department’s new, streamlined annual human rights reports. The reports eliminate references to diversity, equity, and inclusion, sections on government corruption, and analysis of the rights of women, the disabled, and the LGBTQ+ community, as well as on governments denying freedom of movement and peaceful assembly. Guidelines issued in November for the 2025 reports also require reporting that characterizes as abuses providing subsidies for abortion, carrying out gender-transition surgery, as well as the “human rights abuses caused by mass migration,” including “policies that punish citizens who object to continued mass migration and document crimes and human rights abuses committed by people of a migration background,” as the Department stipulated in a post on X.
- Interference in the election processes in Latin America
As the Trump administration has stepped away from promoting democracy globally, its actions over the last year illustrate that it has little problem seeking to influence election outcomes to favor certain candidates or parties, or remaining silent when allies further dismantle democratic norms. When the Salvadoran National Assembly, dominated by President Nayib Bukele’s party, Nuevas Ideas, passed constitutional reforms in July 2025 that included abolishing term limits, allowing Bukele to run for re-election indefinitely and legally consolidating an authoritarian regime, the State Department affirmed that it is up to the Salvadoran legislators “to decide how their country should be governed.”
This contrasts dramatically with Trump’s call for the Honduran people to elect his preferred candidate in the November 2025 presidential elections, coming after significant cuts in U.S. assistance to strengthen the country’s electoral institutions. In the week leading up to the election, not only did Trump pardon former Honduran president Juan Orlando Hernández, who had been convicted by a U.S. federal jury of conspiring to import cocaine into the United States, but he also endorsed Nasry “Tito” Asfura, from Hernández’s National Party, as president of Honduras, highlighting repercussions for future U.S. assistance if Asfura did not win. When the results were close after the November 30 election, Trump warned in a post that there would be “hell to pay” if Asfura didn’t prevail. After weeks of tension in Honduras, and despite the failure to resolve all legal challenges, Asfura was declared president of the country on December 24, 2025, with 40.27% of the vote, defeating Salvador Nasralla of the Liberal Party, who received 39.53%, and whom Trump had called a “borderline communist,” as well as the Libre Party candidate Rixi Moncada.
Previously, when the Trump administration provided a $20 billion bailout to Argentinian president Javier Milei to help stabilize the economy, Trump said the support was contingent on Milei’s party winning the October 2025 legislative elections. After Milei’s party obtained a resounding victory, U.S. Treasury Secretary Bessent affirmed that the results “are a clear example that the Trump Administration policy of peace through economic strength is working.”
The administration had also imposed punitive measures against Brazil, including tariffs and individual sanctions against Brazilian judicial officials, primarily due to what it perceived as political persecution of former Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro. In July 2025, the White House asserted that actions against Bolsonaro undermined “the ability of Brazil to hold a free and fair election of the presidency in 2026,” and that “[t]he Government of Brazil’s treatment of former President Bolsonaro also contributes to the deliberate breakdown in the rule of law in Brazil, to politically motivated intimidation in that country, and to human rights abuses.” Bolsonaro was convicted in September 2025 for his role in leading an attempted coup to overturn the 2022 presidential election results.
With key legislative and presidential elections occurring this year in Brazil, Colombia, Costa Rica, and Peru, we can expect the Trump administration to take great interest in their outcomes, as well as some candidates seeking Trump’s favor if they view it as likely to advance their own political aims.
- Latin America bears the brunt of the administration’s attacks on immigrants
As the region with the largest population of undocumented migrants living in the U.S., many benefiting from temporary legal pathways, Latin America has been dramatically impacted by the Trump administration’s efforts to advance mass deportation and de-legalize a growing number of individuals. In its first year, the Trump administration has suspended access to asylum at the U.S. border; terminated the humanitarian parole program for Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans; terminated Temporary Protected Status for Haitians, Hondurans, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans; and terminated the Family Reunification Parole processes for people from Colombia, Cuba, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Haiti, and Honduras. Although all of these measures are being challenged in court, nearly all remain in place for now.
In December, the administration paused all pending asylum applications and announced that it would review past immigration decisions for individuals from 19 countries subject to various levels of travel restrictions announced by the administration in June 2025, including Cuba, Haiti, and Venezuela. Also in December, the administration extended the travel ban to 20 additional countries and tightened some restrictions, partially or fully halting entry from Antigua and Barbuda, Cuba, Dominica, Haiti, and Venezuela, among others.
To achieve its mass deportation goal, the administration has ramped up the U.S. deportation machinery, fueled by an unprecedented influx of funding through the budget bill that passed Congress in July 2025, carrying out massive, cruel, and inhumane deportation campaigns in several U.S. cities. Over 90 percent of migrants detained in the past few months have no criminal convictions. As WOLA documented with the Women’s Refugee Commission during field research over the summer of 2025, not only are migrants subject to multiple abuses during arrest, detention, and deportation, they are being returned to countries often ill-equipped to support them and without most of the U.S. resources that once funded reception and reintegration, as well as asylum processing and other regularization efforts.
The administration has also expanded the use of third-country removals. While permitted under U.S. law in certain circumstances, a much higher number of migrants and asylum seekers are now being sent to third countries, mostly in cases where they cannot be returned to their home countries or in order to pressure a migrant to accept their removal from the United States. Amnesty International reported that in the first six months of the year, the administration had deported over 8,100 migrants to a third country. Between January 20 and November 15, 2025, the administration deported 10,967 non-Mexican citizens into Mexico, according to a Mexican government response to an information request from the migrant rights defense group IMUMI, including cases of individuals expressing fear of harm should they be sent there.
An alarming number of asylum seekers, as well as individuals with no restrictions from their home country to receive them, are also being subjected to this practice. It is not clear what, if any, information is being provided to receiving countries regarding individuals with legal decisions issued by a U.S. judge prohibiting their return to their home countries due to safety concerns. This increases the likelihood of “chain refoulement”: returning an individual to their home country, where they face likely death or persecution, from a third country, a practice already being documented in several cases.
In Latin America—apart from Mexico, which began to receive non-Mexican migrants under the first Trump administration’s “Remain in Mexico” and “Title 42” policies—the Trump administration has reached some type of asylum cooperation or “safe third country” agreements, or other arrangements to receive migrants (not always asylum seekers) with Belize, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Guatemala, Honduras, Panama, and Paraguay.
This is apart from the March 2025 agreement and payment to El Salvador to receive, and send to its high-security prison CECOT, 252 Venezuelan migrants and asylum seekers, regardless of whether there was any evidence they had committed a crime in the U.S. There, they were held incommunicado, beaten, tortured, and subjected to sexual violence and other inhumane treatment for four months. In July, they were returned to Venezuela, a country that some had fled seeking asylum, as part of a prisoner swap between the Trump administration and the Maduro regime. In December 2025, a federal judge ruled that the Trump administration must provide the men with due process in the United States, either by returning them to the U.S. or by holding court hearings.
- Taking the “war on drugs” to new extremes
It is now clear that although blowing up boats was presented as a purported new strategy to reduce the flow of illicit drugs into the United States, the extensive U.S. military buildup in the Caribbean since September 2025 also sought to prepare for an operation in Venezuela. To date, the 32 unlawful strikes on boats in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific have resulted in the extrajudicial execution of at least 124 individuals. The administration has left open the door for additional military strikes on boats allegedly trafficking illicit drugs to the United States.
As WOLA has previously stated, apart from the lawless nature of these strikes, five decades of U.S. focus on overseas drug supply control and interdiction have failed to curtail the availability of illicit drugs in the U.S. or to weaken organized crime. Moreover, if the boats being destroyed without any due process whatsoever were indeed smuggling drugs, as the Trump administration claims, it is more than likely cocaine, and may have been intended for Europe. There is no evidence that illicitly manufactured fentanyl, the drug most responsible for the still alarmingly high number of drug overdose deaths in the United States, is being produced in or exported from Venezuela or anywhere else in South America.
Rather, Mexico has borne the brunt of U.S. pressure to stop fentanyl from entering the country, including the designation of six Mexican drug trafficking organizations as Foreign Terrorist Organizations (FTOs) and the imposition of tariffs. Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum has undertaken many actions throughout the year to fend off additional punitive actions, including increasing security cooperation with the U.S., extraditing or transferring 133 Mexican cartel members to the United States, deploying National Guard troops to Mexico’s northern states, drugs and arms seizures, and a stepped-up focus on high-impact arrests, among other measures. After Secretary Rubio’s visit to Mexico in September, both governments issued a statement reaffirming their commitment to security cooperation, while President Sheinbaum has consistently called for respect for Mexico’s sovereignty in any U.S. action, including after a call with President Trump in the days following the U.S. military strikes in Venezuela.
Other countries have not escaped U.S. punitive measures. For the first time since the late 1990s, the administration decertified Colombia for not doing enough to control the drug trade, and sanctioned Colombian President Gustavo Petro and others for their alleged role in the “global illicit drug trade,” without providing evidence. After months of escalating tensions, the two presidents spoke and established cordial relations again on January 7, 2026. As a way to prevent future retaliatory U.S. actions, Petro committed to resuming aerial fumigation with glyphosate against coca plants and the extradition of drug trafficker Andres Felipe Martin, among other actions.
Throughout the region, the administration has conflated organized crime with terrorism, undoing a distinction in place since before the September 11, 2001, attacks, as both groups are different phenomena that require different approaches. While there were four Latin American groups on the U.S. government’s Foreign Terrorist Organization list in February 2025, there are now 19.
After eliminating more than 200 U.S. assistance projects designed to curtail the illicit flow of drugs into the country, the administration requested just $125 million in worldwide funding for the Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement (INL) at the State Department for FY2026, although Congress is proposing $1.4 billion, similar to current funding levels. Funding priorities aside, actions taken so far, including the lethal boat strikes, suggest a focus on military spectacle coupled with a traditional focus on arrests, crop destruction, and drug seizures, rather than on the deeper, more effective support for justice and police reform, the rule of law, and anti-corruption work that has characterized part of INL programming in recent years.
Domestically, it is not clear how the administration will advance goals it laid out in its National Drug Policy Priorities, such as reducing the number of overdose deaths in the U.S. and providing effective treatment and recovery services. Since January, the administration has reduced by more than half the staff of the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) within the Department of Health and Human Services, which administers grants for mental health and addiction services. Likewise, the July 2025 budget bill eliminated almost $1 trillion in funding over the next decade to Medicaid, the United States’ primary source of treatment for substance use disorders.
Conclusions
Marco Rubio’s confirmation as Secretary of State was the first time someone of Latin American descent had occupied the post, and signaled a renewed focus on the region. Trump’s first year in office has made clear that this focus, however, is based on asserting U.S. dominance, rather than on the bilateral, if unbalanced, cooperation that had characterized U.S. foreign policy more recently. Whether through gunboat diplomacy or economic threats, the administration aims for the United States to “be preeminent in the Western Hemisphere as a condition of our security and prosperity—a condition that allows us to assert ourselves confidently where and when we need to in the region.”
The recent vote in the Senate to advance the War Powers Resolution on the need for congressional authorization for military action in Venezuela, although followed by a disappointing loss (50-51) in which Vice President JD Vance had to cast the deciding vote, was a rare sign of concern about executive overreach from select Republicans. Yet events of the past few months, including at least 124 extrajudicial killings in the boat strikes and the military operation in Venezuela, make clear that Congress must undertake more and stronger actions to be an effective check on an administration that has shown itself willing to disregard U.S. and international law. Likewise, beyond appropriating adequate funds to reassert a U.S. commitment to promoting democracy and human rights, it should act to ensure that the administration uses those funds as intended, and members should continue to speak out about threats to democracy, human rights, and the rule of law domestically, globally, and as a result of U.S. foreign policies.
In this turbulent and unprecedented context, it’s more important than ever for civil society in the U.S. and Latin America to collaborate to make visible the human rights impacts of the U.S. administration’s actions in the region, and to advocate for policies region-wide that preserve civic space, protect human rights, and strengthen, rather than undermine, a rules-based international order.
