What Did Trump Say About Latin America in His 2025 Address to Congress?

“Tariffs are about making America rich again and making America great again, and it is happening,” Trump said during his address. Hours earlier, his administration imposed a 25 percent tariff on goods imported from Canada and Mexico, after a month-long delay to the initial planned start date of the trade measures.

Both North American countries, the United States’ top two trade partners in 2024, have trade deficits with the United States—$171 billion with Mexico and $63 billion with Canada last year. The countries are, per Trump, “in effect receiving subsidies of hundreds of billions of dollars.” Trump said Canada and Mexico need to do more to “stop the fentanyl and drugs pouring into the U.S.A.”

More broadly, Trump spoke of his plans to impose reciprocal tariffs on countries that already have tariffs on U.S. goods in place, a system he called “very unfair.” “Whatever they tax us, we will tax them,” Trump said, announcing these would go into effect on April 2, 2025. He said that the United States has been “ripped off for decades by nearly every country on earth” and vowed to stop this. One Latin American country he named other than Mexico that he believes charges the United States high tariffs? Brazil.

Trump also referred to planned tariffs that haven’t gone into effect yet, saying he is imposing a 25 percent tariff on foreign aluminum, copper, lumber, and steel. The ones on aluminum and steel are expected to go into effect on March 12. Canada, Brazil, and Mexico are the main providers of steel imports into the United States. Canada also leads U.S. imports of aluminum, with Argentina and Mexico also in the 10 main sources. As for copper and lumber, the president had not provided details about the tariff rate until this address. Chile is the main source of foreign copper in the United States, followed by Canada, Mexico, and Peru. Canada is, by a large margin, the leading supplier of lumber and timber.

“Within hours of taking the oath of office, I declared a national emergency on our southern border,” said Trump in his address. “And I deployed the U.S. military and Border Patrol to repel the invasion of our country.”

In his first two months, Trump has increased the resources and personnel of U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), mainly through a series of executive orders. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has spearheaded efforts to sign agreements with countries, mostly in Latin America, around the deportation of migrants.

“As a result, illegal border crossings last month were by far the lowest ever recorded ever,” he claimed in his speech. CBP reported that 8,300 migrants were apprehended in February 2025, which would represent a decrease from over 130,000 compared to the same month in 2024. Trump claimed this was in part due to his rhetoric: “They heard my words and they chose not to come. Much easier that way.”

Trump pushed for Congress to support his efforts to conduct “the largest deportation operation in American history.” While arrests of migrants have increased under Trump, deportations lag behind levels seen during Trump’s first presidency, meaning a large portion of arrested migrants are in detention.

Trump tied migration with violent episodes across the country and several victims were at the Capitol during the address. When talking about the case of 12-year-old Jocelyn Nungaray in Texas, the president said the crime was committed by migrants who were undocumented and members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua.

Two weeks before the address, the Trump administration declared eight criminal groups in Latin America—six from Mexico, one from Venezuela, and one associated with El Salvador—as foreign terrorist organizations. He spoke on it in the address. “The cartels are waging war in America, and it’s time for America to wage war on the cartels, which we are doing,” he said. Trump celebrated that the previous week, Mexico extradited 29 suspected cartel leaders to the United States, claiming this was unprecedented. However, between 2019 and 2023, Mexico extradited about 65 suspects a year to the United States. 

When speaking on cartels, Trump commented on Mexico: “The territory to the immediate south of our border is now dominated entirely by criminal cartels that murder, rape, torture, and exercise total control. They have total control over a whole nation, posing a grave threat to our national security.” Similar comments, spoken while Trump was threatening tariffs on Mexico at the start of February, sparked ire in Mexico. President Sheinbaum and Mexico’s governors all rejected claims over the extent of the cartels’ control.

Ever since a December 21 social media post, Trump has said that the United States should control the Panama Canal. This came up again in the Congressional address. “We are taking it back,” he repeated and deemed Rubio as “in charge” of this task. Rubio visited Panama in early February and met with Panamanian President José Raúl Mulino, who rejected Trump’s claim after the address.  After the meeting with Rubio, Mulino announced Panama would not renew its signature in the Chinese Belt and Road Initiative. 

Trump’s address took place on the same day that the American asset manager BlackRock announced it struck a deal with the Hong Kong-based conglomerate CK Hutchison to buy two ports located on either side of the canal. The Trump administration had pointed to CK Hutchison’s holdings as evidence of Chinese influence in the waterway, though the Panama Canal Authority, an autonomous government entity, is the sole administrator of the canal.

A priority of Trump’s second presidency thus far has been making cuts to the federal workforce and federal programs, a function performed by a new organization within the executive office called the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). Many of these cuts have eliminated U.S. programs that aid Latin America, run by federally-funded agencies like USAID, the Inter-American Foundation, and the U.S. Institute for Peace. In a long list of programs Trump highlighted to demonstrate the type of programs he sought to cut, he mentioned one Latin American example: a program to empower Afro-Caribbean and Indigenous people in Central America. 

Trump also said he believes the CHIPS Act is a source of waste. The act provided funding to supercharge semiconductor manufacturing in the United States. Some of that funding—and other federal initiatives—have gone to building out the supply chain to include Latin America, especially Costa Rica.