Not a border crisis, but a “free trade” crisis
Public Citizen | 29 September 2025
Not a border crisis, but a “free trade” crisis
By Meena Rakasi
Alligator Alcatraz was not on anyone’s bingo card for 2025, but President Trump continues to surprise with his administration’s horrific capacity for violence towards immigrants. While Trump’s actions are unparalleled in scope and lawlessness, they are driven by a legacy of U.S. interventionism in Latin America and exploitative trade policies. These policies have destabilized communities abroad, creating the very migration flows Trump now seeks to exploit for political gain.
A new report by Iza Camarillo from Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch and the National Project for New Americans (NPNA) unpacks how decades of corporate-led trade agreements have displaced millions of people, stripping them of their livelihoods and forcing them to migrate to survive. Once they arrive in the United States, many migrants are criminalized, funneled into low-wage jobs, or detained in for-profit prisons. Yet Trump continues to blame immigrants for working people’s frustrations.
U.S. manufacturing workers have long decried free trade agreements that empty out factories and create ghost towns as companies relocate elsewhere. The flipside of the coin is that the countries to which these businesses relocate also get hollowed out. After the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), artificially cheap imports and multinational corporations displaced Mexican small farmers and artisans. Lucky workers found jobs in maquiladoras — sweatshops bordering the U.S. — while the less fortunate, facing unemployment, sometimes migrated to survive.
Despite having seen the destruction wrought by NAFTA, the United States, at the behest of corporate interests with privileged access to negotiations, repeated the model with the Central America Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA), which damaged the economies of the rest of Central America and displaced countless people.
Public Citizen’s report, “Exporting Instability, Importing Exploitation,” includes testimonials from immigrants who witnessed the cruelty of these systems firsthand, including an undocumented farm worker who, earlier this year, was injured on the job by an agricultural machine. He recalled: “If I went to a hospital or told anyone what happened, [the farm owner] would call ICE and deport my family.” Even though he did not disclose his injury to anyone, the worker was fired without pay.
For some industries, anti-immigrant sentiment is lucrative for reasons beyond the exploitable workforce it creates. The report documents, for example, that many donors within the private prison industry who gave millions to the 2016 and 2024 Trump campaigns were rewarded with government contracts for migrant detainment facilities.
Report Launch Event
The demonization of immigrants distracts from the real beneficiaries of current trade and migration policies: big corporations. They exploit both xenophobic fears and economic anxieties created by free trade agreements. “It is not immigrants who signed trade deals that devastated American communities…it was the billionaire class,” remarked Rep. Greg Casar (D-Texas) at a launch event for the report.
At Public Citizen’s report launch event, immigrant rights advocates from the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights (CHIRLA) joined with the United Auto Workers (UAW) to underscore that mass migration is a foreseeable consequence of trade policies that prioritize corporate profits over human welfare.
“This expansive report illustrates that trade agreements like NAFTA and the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) were always rooted in extraction and corporate greed,” said Christopher Zatratz, a legislative representative of the UAW. “The working class deserves a better way of life, regardless of where we come from.”
Representatives Linda Sánchez (D-Calif.), ranking member of the Ways and Means Trade Subcommittee, and Casar, chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, spoke to the centrality of trade in any structural immigration reform. Sánchez summed up Trump’s bait-and-switch approach to trade and immigration perfectly: “Trump has exacerbated economic pressures abroad while targeting immigrants to appeal to his MAGA base. The fact is that shutting down all legal pathways [to residency and citizenship], as this administration has done, doesn’t manage our borders.”
What’s Next?
Public Citizen and allies in and outside the United States are gearing up for an inflection point in the continent’s trade and migration history: a mandatory and first-of-its-kind review of USMCA. The review, due in 2026, is an opportunity to demand fixes to Trump’s USMCA, which has failed to reverse the race to the bottom that pits North American workers against each other.
Public Citizen has joined more than 600 labor and civil society organizations in a letter to the Trump administration about the reforms required to end the USMCA’s harms to working people across borders.
With continued pressure from engaged citizens and devoted members of Congress, we have a unique opportunity to not only turn the tide of American trade policy but also highlight the true costs of migration and displacement caused by trade.
It’s also a chance to hold Trump accountable for the lies he has fed the American people, both about our immigrant neighbors and his phony desire to upend the corporate-dominated global trade system. We will continue to fight against dehumanization and corporate greed to uplift the common dignity and rights of workers everywhere.
