How Trump’s Aid Freeze Could Drive More Drugs and Migrants to U.S. Streets
Pausing assistance to crime-battered countries like Haiti, Colombia and Ecuador may worsen issues the Trump administration is focused on, regional officials say
Feb. 9, 2025 The Wall Street Journal
For his second term in office, President Trump has pledged to crack down on migration and go after violent drug cartels, putting a renewed focus south of the border where he had also threatened to take back the Panama Canal and prepared to impose tariffs of up to 25% on imports from Mexico.
Yet security officials say some moves—chiefly the administration’s decision to freeze aid that helps Latin American governments take on criminal groups—could undermine the White House’s plans in the region. And, in the worst-case scenario, they could enable the gangs to expand their territory, traffic more cocaine and fentanyl, and prompt more people to migrate, possibly to the U.S.
In Haiti, the United Nations said Tuesday the Trump administration put a hold on $13 million to help a multinational security-support mission to fight gangs that killed more than 5,000 last year and have uprooted more than one million people. Security experts say the gangs could easily expand into powerful regional crime organizations.
“That would be detrimental for U.S. interests,” said Vanda Felbab-Brown, a Brookings Institution scholar on organized crime.
In Colombia, 18 Black Hawk helicopters used for antinarcotics operations were grounded for lack of U.S.-funded fuel and maintenance amid a recent surge in drug violence. And in Honduras, prosecutors tracking the notorious MS-13 gang were told that U.S. training on new software to help track illicit money and fight drug trafficking had been suspended.
“This is going to impact investigations, it is going to have consequences,” said Luis Santos, Honduras’s top anticorruption prosecutor who survived an assassination attempt in 2008.
Suspending security assistance is part of a broader move to slash billions of dollars in foreign aid that the White House says wastes taxpayer money.
“I have long supported foreign aid. I continue to support foreign aid. But foreign aid is not charity,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Tuesday in Costa Rica. “Every dollar we will spend…is going to be a dollar that’s advancing our national interests.”
Some analysts expect the security aid to eventually resume due to the Trump administration’s focus on drugs and immigration from the region. But critics say it has already hurt U.S. interests.
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Critics say the freeze could undercut the work of law-enforcement officials fighting powerful groups that traffic in narcotics and migrants while corrupting officials and extorting businesses. The chaos from Ecuador to Colombia and Central America drives some people to flee to the U.S.
“If you’re developing day-to-day working relationships with police units that are carrying out complex investigations, you can’t just walk away from that,” said Adam Isacson, a security expert at the Washington Office on Latin America, a think tank. “Not only have you badly disrupted their operations, you’ve violated trust and credibility.”
It is unclear how much aid is frozen for anticrime efforts, but the U.S. provides hundreds of millions of dollars to foreign governments through the State Department’s International Narcotics and Law Enforcement bureau on everything from training anti-gang police units in Central America to eradicating the leaf used to make cocaine in the Andes. The U.S. Agency for International Development, now being dismantled, also funded organizations that work on stopping root causes of violence.
The Trump administration’s aid suspension comes as several Latin American countries grapple with some of the worst violence in years.
Ecuador, which in September signed a $25 million security deal with the U.S., has gone from being one of the safest countries in the Western Hemisphere to one of the world’s most violent during the past five years amid a brutal drug war over routes used to move cocaine to the U.S. and Europe. That led Ecuadorean President Daniel Noboa last year to send soldiers into the streets and prisons that served as de facto headquarters for gang leaders.
After an initial decline in homicides, killings are surging again. In January, Ecuador had one of its highest monthly homicides rates on record with more than 700 people killed, about one per hour, according to police.
“We try not to go out much,” said Andrea Tello, a teacher in a violent suburb of Guayaquil. “When we do go out, we just have to pray that we get back OK.”
A senior Ecuadorean police officer said the U.S. assistance included a project to strengthen Ecuador’s porous border with Colombia to try to stop cocaine from entering. That included cameras and drones to identify vehicles suspected of moving drugs. The officer said funding for that work was put on hold.
“We need the technology,” the officer said. “Because monitoring it physically is too complicated.”
Violent drug gangs are also resurgent in Colombia, the world’s No. 1 cocaine producer. That country has long been one of the U.S.’s top regional security allies, receiving $14 billion in the last 25 years.
U.S. funds support police intelligence units that track cartels and migrant smuggling networks, security experts say. They also pay for the majority of humanitarian programs that seek to strengthen human rights, reduce corruption and provide young people with alternatives to gangs.
“We can’t move a finger,” said Laura Bonilla, deputy director of Pares, an organization whose human-rights programs in Colombia’s violent regions have been halted by the funding freeze.
Colombian President Gustavo Petro, in a televised cabinet meeting Wednesday, said the country’s army and police can’t depend on American assistance, adding he wouldn’t talk to the Trump administration about releasing aid, despite the impact of the freeze. The loss of the Black Hawk helicopters, which each cost about $5,000 an hour to fly, hits hard in a rugged country covered with vast swaths of isolated jungle, said Jose Luis Vargas, former director of Colombia’s national police.
But he agrees with the Trump administration’s decision to temporarily freeze funds and review how the assistance has been used, since cocaine production has risen sharply in recent years.
“It is very important that the United States government calls out President Petro and holds him to account,” he said.
Haiti, the Western Hemisphere’s poorest nation, has seen warlords and their gangs bring the country to a halt as they have taken over nearly the entire capital of Port-au-Prince, making foreign aid essential for everything from food to medicine and security.
“Aid to Haiti is absolutely critical because human rights organizations are at a breaking point, it’s the worst in modern history,” said William O’Reilly, the U.N.’s human-rights expert on Haiti. “Now is the time to reinforce aid, not reduce it.”
The U.S.-backed multinational security mission, which was approved in 2023, struggled for funding to assist Haiti’s beleaguered national police before Trump took office.
In addition to supporting a security force of Kenyan police officers, the U.S. planned to provide $169 million in direct aid to Haiti this year to train SWAT teams to conduct high-risk arrests of gang members, rebuild citizen trust in the police and reduce gang influence.
On Wednesday, the U.S. Embassy in Haiti said on X that the State Department approved waivers for $41 million in assistance to the Kenya-led mission and police, a few days after the gangs launched an attack on one of the last remaining safe neighborhoods overlooking Port-au-Prince, killing over 60 civilians and burning homes and businesses.
“We have no idea what will happen, but we’re definitely not on a good path,” said an American security contractor, who said he was ordered back to work after initially being advised to pack his bags. “They’re going to go full steam ahead and it won’t be long before the Haitian police will suffer.”
Jenny Carolina Gonzalez contributed to this article.