A busy commercial area, it once hosted Spanish tailor shops, Italian fruit sellers, Lebanese boutiques and so many Eastern European Jews that a Yiddish newspaper had circulated there. Now Peruvian and Bolivian shop stalls that sell mounds of quinoa and purple corn buzz with a new wave of arrivals who have made Argentina home.
But on a recent Friday, the neighborhood’s rhythm was suddenly disrupted.
Hundreds of law enforcement agents descended on shops, cafes and malls, demanding documents, checking legal statuses and detaining people in new sweeping raids conducted by Argentine authorities who have taken a tougher stance on immigration.
“It’s the first time this has happened to me in 40 years here,” said Julia Aguillon, 42, a Peruvian shop assistant who was at a mall in Liniers when the agents stormed in and ordered people not to move. “I was shaking.”
Argentina has often stood out for its openness to immigration, absorbing Europeans, Latin Americans, Jews who fled persecution in Europe and even the Nazis who had hunted them.
But under President Javier Milei, a right-wing libertarian, the government is joining a global trend of cracking down on immigration, and is publicizing its shift with an aggressive enforcement messaging similar to that employed by the Trump administration.
Critics call it an unnecessary and dangerous political gimmick meant to emulate President Donald Trump and other right-wing leaders, but supporters say Milei is taking necessary measures to overhaul an immigration policy that had long been too lax.
“Under President Milei, Argentina regained control of its borders,” Alejandra Monteoliva, the country’s security minister, said in a recent video.
“If you’re a foreigner and try to enter or remain in Argentina illegally, we will identify you,” she warned in another, “expel you and you will not be able to return to our country.”
More than 2 million foreign nationals live legally in Argentina, accounting for roughly 5% of the population, according to government data. There are no public figures on the number of migrants living in Argentina illegally because a lack of political focus and easy access to legalization have largely kept the issue off the radar.
Milei has introduced tougher immigration measures, including imposing stricter criteria for migrants to earn permanent residency and making it easier for the government to deport those accused of committing crimes. The government shifted the role of overseeing immigration from the Interior to the Security Ministry, effectively making migration a law enforcement issue with an emphasis on border control.
The Milei administration has claimed — without providing evidence — that the tens of thousands of South Americans deported by the Trump administration could fuel illegal immigration in Argentina.
Argentina deported 620 immigrants in 2024, about a 40% increase from the previous year. In January, Monteoliva announced that nearly 5,000 people had been “expelled, denied entry or extradited” during the previous two months. “RECORD NUMBER OF FOREIGNERS DENIED ENTRY AND DEPORTED,” she wrote on the social platform X. (Monteoliva declined to be interviewed for this article.)
Despite the Milei administration’s aims, Argentina’s immigration policy is still far less strict than in the United States under Trump. But what has changed drastically is the Argentine government’s tone.
“Law and order to make Argentina great again,” Patricia Bullrich, a powerful conservative senator and a former security minister, wrote on X. The post included a video with an action-movie soundtrack that Bullrich said showed several people being detained for deportation.
Immigration advocates say the increasingly threatening language is gratuitous and has sown unjustified fears among newcomers.
Migration “has never been a sensitive or difficult topic for Argentina,” said Diego Morales, a lawyer at the Center for Legal and Social Studies, a human rights and civil liberties watchdog. “They’re creating an internal enemy where there isn’t one.”
At the birth of the Argentine Republic in the early 19th century, the government saw European immigration as essential to the country’s growth and vowed to populate the vast nation.
Open immigration was enshrined in the country’s constitution in 1853, which states that Argentina welcomes “all men in the world who want to live on Argentine soil.” From 1850 to 1913, more immigrants entered Argentina per capita than any other country.
Argentina eventually imposed some limitations, but still accepted many immigrants, including tens of thousands of Jews fleeing fascism in Europe and hundreds of Nazi war criminals.
By the early 2000s, Argentina had one of the world’s most progressive immigration policies, recognizing migration as a fundamental human right, guaranteeing equal access to health, education and social services regardless of immigration status, and granting citizenship after two years of residence.
In a country geographically removed from most global crises, Argentina has welcomed hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans and even became an unlikely hub for gay Russian exiles.
Polls show that anti-immigration sentiment is much lower in Argentina than in most of Latin America, where it has been on the rise. An Ipsos poll in 2025 found that just 4% of respondents in Argentina cited immigration control among their top three concerns, much lower than the 17% figure globally.
Still, something is changing.
Milei government officials argue that Argentina’s immigration system does not work and that too many immigrants were living in the country without legal migration status. The cost of treating them in public hospitals and educating them in schools, they say, had helped bloat the government’s budget.
On a recent Saturday morning in Buenos Aires, a group of Argentines took a guided tour of what was the country’s Ellis Island, a tall, neoclassical-style building at the gates of the city’s port that hosted thousands of newly arrived immigrants in the early 1900s and is now a museum.
Newcomers were entitled to free lodging upon arrival and passage to the country’s immense interior. In the high-vaulted dining halls, hundreds of new arrivals would eat in a shared, heavy silence — a stillness the guide said was thick with mourning, fear and anticipation.
The museum’s tiled walls now showcase the fruits of that journey: photographs of the homes, workplaces and social clubs that wove them into the country’s fabric.
“It was paradise,” said Luigi Solazzi, 85, a tour participant who arrived in Argentina from the Italian city of Porto Recanati in 1948, when he was 8. He became a factory mechanic in Buenos Aires, married and had two children.
His daughter Laura Solazzi, 45, was visibly moved by the museum visit. But her tone hardened when she started talking about more recent arrivals. “Today’s migrants are different,” she said. “Too many people who do not come here to work, do not have documents and do not contribute.”
“Argentina was too open,” she added. “You need some limits.”
That is what the authorities are trying to show through their public displays of enforcement.
The raid in Liniers was part of a series of continuing immigration operations.
Last week in Once, a district of Buenos Aires famous for its textile trade and Jewish population, the police descended on a shopping gallery and arrested four foreigners who they said had criminal records and now faced deportation. The authorities posted footage of the arrests in a social media clip in which the four migrants’ names scrolled across the screen in a font from the popular video game franchise Grand Theft Auto.
The concrete results of some of the operations seemed less impressive. In Liniers, the police identified 615 migrants, of which, they said, only 15 did not have legal status.
How Milei’s policy will evolve and how Argentine society will respond in the long run are unclear, but a new degree of anxiety is already evident in immigrant enclaves.
“Our president started acting all Yankee,” said Alan Romero, a server at a Bolivian restaurant in Buenos Aires. “You have got to be careful now.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
“Our president started acting all Yankee,” said Alan Romero, a server at a Bolivian restaurant in Buenos Aires. “You have got to be careful now.” (Photo: Wikimedia Commons) 
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