Chile’s new government freezes migrant legalization, eyes deportations
Chile has been undermined by illegal immigration, and organized crime, Kast said. However, Chile still has one of the lowest homicide rates in Latin America: 5.4 per 100,000 inhabitants in 2025.
President José Antonio Kast’s government has suspended a decree drafted by the previous administration of Gabriel Boric that would have regularized some 182,000 people who entered Chile irregularly and voluntarily registered with immigration authorities.
We are not going to carry out a mass regularization like the one proposed under the Boric government, said Frank Sauerbaum, head of the National Migration Service. He justified the decision by noting that 6,000 of the 182,000 registered migrants had already committed a criminal offense.
Kast took office on March 11 after succeeding Boric, whose government had launched the voluntary registration process to identify migrants who had crossed through unauthorized border points. The new president made fighting irregular migration and organized crime the centerpiece of his campaign and pledged to pursue the deportation of the roughly 337,000 irregular migrants currently living in the country, most of them Venezuelan, according to official figures.
Chile has been undermined by illegal immigration, drug trafficking, and organized crime, Kast told reporters on Monday. While homicides and kidnappings have risen in recent years with the arrival of foreign criminal groups such as the Tren de Aragua gang, Chile still has one of the lowest homicide rates in Latin America: 5.4 per 100,000 inhabitants in 2025.
Five days after taking office, Kast traveled to the Arica region on the Peruvian border to oversee the construction of physical barriers across Chile’s three northern regions under a plan called Border Shield, with a 90-day deadline for completion. The government also announced an expanded military deployment and upgraded surveillance technology, including drones, cameras, and sensors.
The administration will also send two bills to Congress: one to penalize those who facilitate irregular migrant entry and another that would criminalize illegal access to Chilean territory. Kast ruled out mass raids, however. We don’t want to go place by place hunting people down. But every one of them knows they will have to face the state at some point, he warned in an interview with Canal 13.
The decision is fueling anxiety among the migrant community. This whole situation creates enormous uncertainty, Freymar Márquez, a 30-year-old Venezuelan woman living in Chile, told AFP. If they are denying regularization to the people who registered, what will be left for those who didn’t? she added.
