ARICA, Chile—Out on the wide open plain on Chile’s northernmost coastline, dust billows in the cool breeze which sweeps across the pampa.

In front of a row of concrete markers tracing the border with Peru, two sandy-yellow Chilean military excavators crawl along a deep trench, digging three metres down before swinging sharply to dump bucketloads of earth into a rising embankment.

A few hundred yards across the pampa from where Chilean soldiers patrol the boundary, stern-faced, the Peruvian border police sit under wind-torn blue awnings, eyeing the Chileans warily.

This barrier is newly inaugurated far-right President José Antonio Kast’s answer to the migration crisis that propelled him to power in December’s runoff election, where he won 58% of the vote. It also echoes President Trump’s pledges to build a wall along the U.S.–Mexico border, a key element of his immigration agenda.

During the campaign, Kast regularly threatened the 336,000 migrants living illegally in Chile, according to official estimates, with expulsion.

So far, he has deported just 40 people on a single outbound flight.

“We want to use excavators to build a sovereign Chile… which has been undermined by illegal immigration, drug trafficking, and organized crime,” he declared on a visit to this frontier just five days after assuming the presidency.

Kast, an ultra-conservative Catholic father-of-nine, has made a career on the extreme fringes of Chilean politics with his hardline views. Over the last five years, he has made illegal immigration – and the public security fears which have accompanied it – his battleflag, drawing comparisons to President Trump.

“We have made 53.6% progress, which means about six kilometres in this area,” says Cristián Sayes, President Kast’s delegate in this, Chile’s northernmost administrative region.

“The ultimate goal is to have constant control of the border so that we can stop illegal migration once and for all, but also confront drug trafficking, smuggling, and human trafficking,” said Sayes.

This ditch will be 11 kilometres long. Another, higher up in the mountains, will stretch for seven kilometres, and further south on the border with Bolivia, two more ditches are being dug.

Tank traps dug during a time of heightened political tensions in the 1970s strafe the landscape either side of the highway, and a section of desert along from where the trench is being dug is still laid with anti-tank mines from the era.

In March, Kast flew up to Arica, the sleepy desert town on the border with Peru, to announce the initiation of his ‘border shield’ plan.

The plan aims to seal vulnerable stretches of the 1,200-kilometre border Chile shares with Peru and Bolivia across its three northernmost regions in the Atacama Desert.The first phase includes several short trench sections along the most exposed parts of the frontier. Surveillance equipment will follow in the next phase, while the original proposal also called for five-metre walls in some areas.

“In addition to ditches, fences and walls, there will be thermal and infrared cameras, sensors, radars and drones with facial recognition cameras – all operating 24 hours a day,” explained Sayes.

But the wave of illegal migration across this border may already be a thing of the past as illegal entries have been steadily declining.

“In 2024, we had around 2,460 attempts, but in 2025, there was a significant decrease to 1,746,” said Prefect Inspector José Contreras Hernández, the regional head of Chile’s investigative police force.

“The most significant increase we have seen is actually in attempts by people to leave or try to leave the national territory irregularly,” says Contreras Hernández, attributing the exodus to migration policies and the change of government.

Already in the first four months of this year, border patrols have thwarted nearly 500 attempts to leave the country illegally in Arica y Parinacota – compared to just 33 in the whole of 2024.

Sayes says that the border deterrents will be continuously reviewed: “This is a constant and dynamic job, we will have to keep an eye on where traffickers and contrabandists are crossing, and we will have to maintain the trench so that it doesn’t crumble or fill with sand.”

Already, two Bolivian citizens were detained on another section of the border trench for trying to fill in the ditch to make it passable.

Entering the country illegally is not a crime in Chile, and the Kast government has already sent two bills to congress which would criminalise illegal entry, as well as limit immigrants’ access to social security benefits.

Yet doubts remain over whether digging ditches along short stretches of Chile’s more than 4,800 miles of porous borders will do much to curb the flow of migrants, drugs, or contraband. And with desert winds already blowing sand back into the trenches, the question is no longer just how far this barrier will extend — but whether it will stop anyone at all.

Copyright 2026 NPR