President Donald Trump’s administration has all but ended access to asylum at the US southern border, cancelled the protected immigration status of Venezuelans, Cubans, Haitians, and Nicaraguans, and deported hundreds of thousands of people.
While some stay in Mexico or Central America, many of those sent south join thousands more migrants who – faced with the increasingly alarming and impossible situation in the United States – have chosen to head back to South America, becoming part of a new and largely unmonitored migration trend known as reverse flow.
“The return journey, whether forced or chosen, can be as perilous as the initial migration, but it takes place in an even more hostile environment,” said Diego Chaves-González, senior manager for the Migration Policy Institute’s Latin America and Caribbean Initiative. “Shelters have closed their doors, protections have disappeared, and smugglers are adapting their business models. Migrants are increasingly invisible, desperate, and vulnerable.”
A record 520,000 migrants and asylum seekers crossed northwards overland from Colombia to Panama through the perilous Darién Gap in 2023, most of them heading for the United States. Just two years later, this traffic has slowed to a trickle. But thousands are now crossing each month in the other direction, and they’re mostly bypassing the Darién and taking boats.
One of the most popular maritime routes for those trying to return to South America starts in the ports of Panama’s Colón province and ends in Capurganá – a small Colombian town on the other side of the Darién.
According to official Colombian data, nearly 7,600 people crossed irregularly during the first four months of this year from Panama. But the real number is likely far higher as boats also avoid migration control in Capurganá by taking migrants directly to other nearby Colombian ports, such as Acandí, Turbo, or Necoclí.
The problem, experts say, is that these alternative maritime routes are just as unsafe as the overland route through the Darién, if not more so.
“The notion that avoiding the Darién is always the best option is not real,” said Mateo Echeverry, lead researcher for Action Against Hunger in Colombia. “When land paths are no longer an option, people look at maritime routes, but the sea is relentless.”
In February, an eight-year old Venezuelan girl died in a shipwreck off the coast of the Indigenous Guna Yala district, where the maritime route from Panama to Colombia originally started.
Local authorities then asked the government to stop the flow, which is when Panamanian migration officials reportedly started bussing migrants to a village called Miramar, formalising the current route from there and a nearby village called Palenque. “This has become an officially monitored maritime route, which wasn’t the case before,” said Echeverry.
Dangerous crossings
Visiting the area in April, The New Humanitarian came across Yorgelis Maldonado, a 25-year-old Colombian-Venezuelan, timidly stepping onto the tiny pier in Miramar. She and her four-year-old son were about to board a boat that would take them south.
They had arrived the day before from Panama City but didn’t have the $220-$280 per person the smugglers were demanding for the three-day journey to Colombia. If it hadn’t been for a setback at sea that allowed them a reduced-price trip, Maldonado would have remained stranded in Panama, as many still are.
Small villages like Miramar – home to just over 200 people – have little resources to assist those who arrive without the means to travel onwards.
Aid groups fear the daily rate of 40 to 100 asylum seekers and migrants arriving in Miramar and Palenque could soar in the coming months: Migrants they are assisting say thousands more are stranded in countries further north, trying to make enough money to continue their journeys south.
The three-day journey from Miramar to Capurganá includes an eight-to-10-hour boat ride to Puerto Obaldía. The border is then crossed on foot through informal trails from the Panamanian beach of La Miel. On the Colombian side, another boat then takes them to Capurganá.
The “chalupas” – the speedboats smugglers use – leave daily with 30-40 people on board on fast and bumpy crossings. They are often overcrowded with people and luggage, which increases the risks, especially for children and pregnant women.
“There have been several cases of migrants who have been abandoned on cays or islets by those responsible for the boats for various reasons, including fear of being caught by the authorities for migrant smuggling,” according to a recent report by Action Against Hunger and Heks/Eper (Swiss Church Aid).
Shipwrecks are also a risk.
Maldonado only obtained the reduced price for her and her boy because the first boat that left the port that day – carrying around 40 people – had started to take on water. The skipper had made an emergency return to Miramar, where the smugglers then decided to use a bigger boat and offer bargain rates to quickly fill the extra spots.
“This [boat ride] is the most dangerous part,” Maldonado told The New Humanitarian. “I’m really scared of what's ahead of us.”
Maldonado hoped to reach Ecuador. Her husband, an Ecuadorian national, had been arrested a few days earlier by the Panamanian authorities and faced deportation. She was protected because Panama and Venezuela have no diplomatic relations, so she could not be repatriated. “I’ll wait in Ecuador, where we used to live,” she said. After Maldonado’s departure, The New Humanitarian was unable to contact her again.
According to a recent investigation by the Mixed Migration Center (MMC) and the Protection Information Management Initiative for Latin America and the Caribbean (ProLAC), 85% of reverse flow migrants decide to return due to the new US migration policies, and 34% fear deportation. About 73% of the people interviewed in Colombia had crossed via the Caribbean coast.
“The most vulnerable among the vulnerables”
Sitting in a hammock in Miramar, Darlis Dávila, a 27-year-old Venezuelan, wondered how she would ever be able to pay for the boat trip to Colombia, where she planned to settle eventually if she could.
Dávila explained how she had run out of money after her brother was kidnapped in Mexico. “They are asking for $3,500 for his release. We've only managed to raise $200 from the whole family,” she said.
When she arrived in Mexico in 2024, she too experienced the horror of kidnapping, but the sums demanded were much lower: a few hundred dollars in total for her, her sister, and their seven children. “Now that no one is migrating anymore, they realise they're losing their business, so they’re raising the prices,” she explained.
The Caribbean maritime route is also becoming one of the most costly, which only adds to the challenges those trying to head south are facing. “These migrants are the most vulnerable among the vulnerables, because they exhausted their resources, they have nothing,” said Echeverry.
Earlier this year, the Miramar community made an abandoned pink house available to those seeking shelter. Inside the run-down building, a strong smell of urine emanated from the corridors. People slept on cardboard in six modest rooms closed off by colourful curtains – a flimsy barrier to maintain a semblance of privacy.
According to the Panamanian Red Cross, 93 people – mostly Venezuelans – stayed there in April. Since then, the house has been closed due to disputes among the migrants, and a one-room bakery that is still under construction is being used instead.
“In the absence of formal shelters, many people spend the night on terraces or outdoor spaces of local homes, or in improvised structures,” said Leonarda De Gracia, project manager for the RET International aid group in Panama.
Security is an issue, especially at night-time, due to the presence of drug trafficking in the region.
According to a recent report by RET and Action Against Hunger, access to basic services is limited, sanitation is poor, and drinking water must be purchased, which exposes migrants who can’t afford it to diseases. Miramar only has one health centre with minimal resources and limited hours.
“Cases requiring [even] simple procedures must be transferred to nearby communities,” De Gracia told The New Humanitarian. “In Palenque, there is a health post that started opening in May, which has a nursing technician; however, it does not have medication supplies and there is no doctor on a permanent basis.”
This kind of precarity is the norm in many of the places that reverse flow migrants are passing through.
“The capacities of transit states, which already face high levels of poverty and fragile social systems, are being severely tested,” Chaves-González said. “Without sustained international support and a clear reintegration strategy, these countries risk becoming dumping grounds for people who have no place and no protection.”
Local residents fill the gaps
In Miramar, the Panamanian Red Cross was among the first to provide assistance. Organisations such as the Pan American Development Foundation (PDAF) and the UN’s migration agency, IOM, among others, also do occasional interventions, such as providing medical care, kit distribution, and data-gathering. Médecins Sans Frontières has done some monitoring to assess the situation, while RET International has a mobile team going to Miramar and Palenque daily to provide psychosocial support to children, teenagers, and pregnant women.
Once they reach Colombia, migrants are presenting with multiple health issues.
“Many people suffer from skin problems, infections, rashes, malnutrition, and dehydration. Others also have wounds that become infected due to lack of care – not to mention mental health and trauma related to family separations and disappearances,” said Luis Rodrigo of the Colombian Red Cross.
For now, most migrants in Miramar don’t stay long. They are resorting to whatever work they have to in order to raise enough money to continue southwards. And with assistance slow to come, local residents have also stepped in to help.
Dávila and her sister told The New Humanitarian they planned to start selling empanadas using equipment a local resident had lent them for free.
It was a local couple who took in Maldonado and her son for the night, when she realised she couldn’t afford the crossing. The couple, who sell lottery tickets, said they constantly help people passing through by offering them a hot meal and a safe place to sleep, even if it can end up costing them. “Sometimes, when they stay for a long time, it becomes difficult. Some have spent nearly a month with us,” said the husband, who asked to speak anonymously.
Desperate to reach their destination, other migrants work directly for the smugglers. Enyerbeth Oropeza is one of them. In April, the young Venezuelan was being paid $30 a day to stack travellers’ luggage and tout travel packages.
Oropeza had left his home country for Colombia nearly 10 years ago while serving in the military and faces imprisonment for desertion in Venezuela. “I then managed to settle in Washington, D.C., where I worked as a ride-share driver,” he said.
But in January, Oropeza was deported to Mexico, from where he began his journey to Panama. His plan is to return to his adopted country, Colombia – once, that is, he has earned enough money from the smugglers to pay the smugglers.
With additional reporting by Daniela Mohor from Santiago, Chile. Edited by Daniela Mohor and Andrew Gully.
