Desertification has intensified globally, especially in semiarid regions such as the Brazilian semiarid. Restoration strategies have been applied to improve soil biological properties, but the processes driving microbial community assembly, particularly among rare taxa, remain poorly understood. This study assessed how different restoration strategies influence the ecological processes (selection, drift, dispersal, diversification) shaping dominant and rare bacterial communities in two desertified regions in Brazilian semiarid: Gilbues (Piaui state) and Iraucuba (Ceara state). Using 16S rRNA sequencing and null models, we found that degradation increased stochasticity, mainly through drift and dispersal limitation. In Gilbues, restored soils showed higher dispersal limitation (0.17) and drift (0.66) than native soils, where homogeneous selection (0.28) prevailed. In Iraucuba, stochasticity remained high across sites (similar to 0.88), but restored areas displayed greater heterogeneous selection (0.0432) than degraded (0.0095) and native (0.0107) soils. Candidatus Udaeobacter dominated native soils but declined with degradation and restoration, whereas Rubrobacter increased under restoration. The rare taxon Solirubrobacter was depleted in degraded soils but recovered in native and restored ones. This study showed that terracing and green manure in Gilbues and grazing exclusion in Iraucuba promoted heterogeneous selection, indicating that restoration strategies modulate bacterial assembly differently.