Collective human trauma refers to the psychological, social, cultural, and emotional harm experienced by a group of people following a shared cataclysmic event and/or chronic distress that shatters societal constructs at multiple levels. In this Perspective, we focus on forced human migration as collective human trauma, exploring the introduction and spread of invasive alien species as a catalyst for land abandonment due to the loss of vital resources and other threats to collective security. Far too little attention has been given to the linkages between invasive alien species and forced human displacement. To the best of our knowledge, ours is the first article to explicitly place the impacts of invasive alien species in the collective human trauma context. We describe the role of invasive alien species in human displacement, providing case studies, and call for a multilateral framework to address this growing source of collective human trauma. Four recommendations introduce the need for a) the definition of ‘invasive alien species’ to explicitly recognize impacts on human security, b) multilateral agreements aimed at food and water security to address invasive alien species, c) invasive alien species be integrated into biosecurity policy and programming, and d) governments to work with human displacement data providers to document and report land abandonment resulting from biological invasions.