On Monday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio confirmed the U.S. will eliminate 83% of the foreign aid projects carried out by USAID — the U.S. Agency for International Development — and cancel almost $60 billion in foreign assistance.
The Trump Administration has already laid off all but a few hundred of USAID's 10,000 employees around the world.
Although Rubio himself has long been a booster of USAID and the "soft power" goodwill it affords the U.S. around the world, President Trump says its work doesn’t align with his “America First” agenda.
Either way, the news is a blow to people in Latin American countries like Honduras, where one TV news report forecast that USAID will now "probably disappear.”
That means the loss of yanqui help with everything from schools to economic development to public security to pro-democracy and anti-corruption struggles — and, along the way, helping to keep communist China's influence in check in the region.
Not to mention: helping to keep even more illegal migration from flooding the U.S. southern border — which, like facing China's incursion, would also seem to "align" with the America First crusade.
In fact, if and when USAID does disappear from Latin America, a big question is whether more people will now disappear from impoverished and violence-plagued places like Honduras — and migrate to the U.S.
That’s because the annual $180 million USAID spent there supported programs that have, according to U.S. data, helped curtail irregular immigration from Honduras.
USAID-led projects like Regreso Seguro, or Safe Return, which the agency launched last year in Honduras, help relocate and re-employ the thousands of people who've been deported back to their country from the U.S., or who've been displaced from their homes, neighborhoods and businesses by gang brutality and extortion.
"We just recently helped a young woman driven from her home by gangs — and was about to leave for the U.S. — set up a small but successful nail salon," said Cándida María Sauceda, who directs the nonprofit Casa Alianza in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, which has partnered with USAID in the Safe Return program.
“This helps keep people here in Honduras," Sauceda told WLRN. "So losing the USAID funding is painful.”
Foreign assistance accounts, at most, for 1% of the U.S. federal budget. Still, Trump and his conservative allies say USAID is too left-wing and wasteful — run, as he asserts, by "radical lunatics."
Republican Miami Congresswoman María Elvira Salazar last month blasted it for "losing its way" and funding pro-LGBTQ and DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) efforts in Latin America.
Billionaire Elon Musk, who heads Trump's so-called Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, is even calling USAID — also falsely if not slanderously — a "criminal organization."
Meanwhile, liberals have in the past accused USAID, which Congress set up in 1961, of aiding U.S. interventionism in Latin America, sometimes as a CIA lackey in support of right-wing dictatorships.
Like any federal agency, USAID is hardly immune to waste and overreach.
But U.S. foreign assistance veterans like Mileydi Guilarte, USAID’s deputy assistant administrator for Latin America and the Caribbean under the Biden Administration, say one bottom line is that the agency — ironically — has delivered when it comes to Trump’s big priority: curbing illegal immigration.
“In places where we doubled down our efforts, particularly in high-crime areas in Honduras," Guilarte told WLRN, "the intention [of local residents] to leave and take the dangerous journey north [to the U.S. border] had been reduced three-fold.”
As WLRN reported a decade ago in its series “The Migration Maze,” increased U.S. development and police-reform aid — which helped cut Honduras' homicide rate by 30% in 2015 — also helped bring U.S. Border Patrol encounters with Honduran migrants down by two-thirds that year.
Those numbers stayed below 100,000 until 2019 — when Trump, in his first presidency, cut that aid and they shot back up to more than 250,000. They unsurprisingly dropped off dramatically during the pandemic, but then spiked above 300,000 in 2021, before Biden had fully reinstated the programs. After he did, they fell again by a third or more in 2022 and 2023.
No one, of course, suggests USAID programs, or lack of them, were the sole drivers of those migration fluctuations.
Still, they did in fact assisting deportees, displaced residents, at-risk youths and former gang members with finding new educational and economic opportunities — and helped make Honduran streets and neighborhoods safer via neighborhood policing ushered in by the State Department's Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs.
What's more, U.S.- and USAID-backed projects promoted Honduras' first real anti-corruption efforts. Those eventually helped lead to former President Juan Orlando Hernández's 2022 extradition to the U.S. on corruption and drug-trafficking charges. He is currently serving a 45-year prison sentence.
And that matters, say development experts, because corruption is not just a crime but a key cause of the economic despair that drives illegal migration out of countries like Honduras.
All that is in addition, they say, to the humanitarian anti-poverty and disaster-aid relief USAID oversees in developing regions like Latin America as well — which accounts for 75% of its portfolio around the world.
Elsy Reyes, who heads the Human Mobility Protection agency at Honduras' National Human Rights Commission (CONAPEH), says those were all immigration-prevention programs that the Honduran state itself is unable or unwilling to sponsor — as is the case in many other Central and Latin American countries.
"The government here has a hard time responding to those needs," Reyes told WLRN. "The U.S. aid is essential to helping victims get the protection they need so they don't feel the need to leave the country."
"It’s counterproductive cutting aid then leaving thousands without alternatives. This doesn't put America first — it puts the People's Republic of China first."Mileydi Guilarte
As a result, Guilarte argues, “It’s counterproductive cutting aid but then leaving thousands without an alternative.
"It’s really horrendous that we’ve pulled out entirely. We will likely see an uptick of immigrants heading for the U.S."
One former USAID contractor in Central America, who asked to remain anonymous, told WLRN, "I think we were actually doing more than Trump is to foster America First, in terms of cost-benefit, when it comes to reducing irregular immigration."
Immigration experts also point out that Venezuela — whose dictatorship has impeded that kind of USAID assistance — became a prime source of illegal migration to the U.S. in recent years. In 2023, in fact, Venezuelans were the No. 1 nationality coming over the U.S. southern border illegally.
Dictators applauding
Which brings defenders of USAID and U.S. foreign assistance to another key facet of the agency's work in Latin America: promoting democracy.
USAID, for example, supported the Venezuelan opposition's efforts to conduct remarkably broad and close scrutiny of the voting in last summer's presidential election.
That vigilance network secured hard proof that left-wing dictator Nicolás Maduro lost the contest to opposition candidate Edmundo González by a landslide before Maduro brazenly and brutally declared himself the winner.
As a result, many democracy activists are left bewildered as to why the right-wing Trump Administration would now want to terminate USAID's pro-democracy activities around the region, especially in other countries run by left-wing dictatorships, like Cuba and Nicaragua.
Last week the USAID-backed nonprofit International Republican Institute announced its resources for helping dissidents and political prisoners in Cuba — another heavy source of illegal migration to the U.S. — had been cut off.
At the same time, the National Endowment for Democracy, is suing the Trump Administration for now denying it access to more than $200 million in congressionally approved funding.
Not surprisingly, the Venezuelan, Cuban and Nicaraguan regimes have all publicly applauded USAID's demise under the new Trump Administration.
"If there is something we do agree on with the multi-billionaire Elon Musk," wrote Cuba's official workers' daily Trabajadores, "it is that USAID is a criminal organization and must disappear."
Guilarte, a Cuban-American who grew up in Miami, believes another government that’s celebrating is communist China — a key U.S. adversary that may be eager to fill the U.S. assistance void.
“This does not put ‘America first,’" Guilart said. "It puts the People’s Republic of China first.”
Many diplomats share that national and economic security concern in the U.S.'s own hemisphere. That's especially true in Central America, where five of the seven nations in recent years have dropped diplomatic relations with Taiwan in favor of Beijing, hoping to benefit from the infrastructure largesse of its global Belt and Road Initiative.
“Without USAID, the Chinese can come in and generate more friends and allies in the region in a way that they haven’t been able to do in the past, because AID has played such a prominent role doing this kind of [foreign aid] work," said Enrique Roig, a former Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights and Labor.
Roig, who a decade ago worked at USAID on security in Central America, also worries that without USAID efforts to steer youths away from gangs, more governments will resort to abusively authoritarian mass arrest campaigns like President Nayib Bukele’s in El Salvador — where 2% of the population is now behind bars.
Bukele insists that itself has brought down migration from El Salvador. But, Roig insists "that's not sustainable."
"You can’t build prisons forever, you can’t incarcerate your way out of the problem," he told WLRN. "You also need to invest in prevention and rehabilitation when it comes to how you deal with security.”
Secretary of State Rubio, however, is a big Bukele fan — a reality that only brings up another: that until now, Rubio has spent his entire political career promoting and applauding the work of USAID and U.S. foreign assistance as being quite closely aligned with U.S. strength.
Rubio, himself a Cuban-American from Miami, said back in 2013, for example:
“Obviously there's a component to foreign aid that's humanitarian in scope, and that's important...[But we] don’t have to give foreign aid. We do so because it furthers our national interests."
In 2017, he added:
"I promise you it's going to be a lot harder to recruit someone to anti-Americanism...if the United States of America is the reason they're even alive today."
Those past sentiments were a big reason Latin Americanists had hope that Rubio's appointment as Trump's top diplomat meant the U.S. would pivot more foreign policy attention to the region.
Instead, Trump has had Rubio assume control of a drastically gutted USAID, which Rubio now accuses of "rank insubordination" because some of its administrators have resisted the DOGE cuts. That is a legally questionable move since Congress created USAID as an independent agency that was to receive policy guidance from the State Department.
In fact, the Trump Administration's liquidation of USAID's projects and personnel is also legally and constitutionally questionable without a congressional green light.
It's a big reason Trump is locked in a federal court battle over $2 billion in foreign aid payments he froze in January — a struggle in which the U.S. Supreme Court last week ruled against him.
Which perhaps makes this Rubio statement from 2019, a reference to USAID's cost-effectiveness, more noticeable amid the DOGE frenzy:
"Anyone who tells you we can slash foreign aid and that will bring us to [budget] balance is lying to you, [because] foreign aid is less than 1% of our budget."
USAID may indeed represent a very small part of the U.S. outlay. But its supporters say it’s been proven to be a big part of the reason Latin Americans can stay home.
