(NEW YORK) — Migration to the United States has largely stopped, frozen in place amid prohibitive new restrictions put in place by President Donald Trump’s administration. Thousands of migrants are now giving up mid-journey and going home.
From Mexico to Panama, a region dominated in recent years by migrant flows heading north, reverse migration is in full swing. The exact number of people going south is impossible to count, but anecdotally there is no question the numbers are in the thousands and quickly rising.
“There is no more American dream,” one migrant told international news agency AFP. “There’s no hope now, none.”
Former President Joe Biden’s administration also played a big role in slowing down arrivals to the southern border. And though funneling asylum claims through the CBP One app was enough to stop most migrants from moving forward toward the border, it did not persuade them to go back home. There was still hope.
But through fast action and strong deterrents, Trump has been remarkably effective at curbing irregular migration to the United States. As important to that effort as actual policy changes has been the public messaging surrounding it.
With migration trending back southward, it is apparent that migrants have lost hope.
Each day, hundreds of migrants line up outside an immigration office in southern Mexico.
They’re putting their names on a list for future repatriation flights sponsored by the Mexican government. They are primarily Venezuelan and Colombian, the two biggest recent emigration hot spots.
However, little info about the flights is available — so many are choosing not to wait, instead walking and riding buses along the same path that took them north just a few months ago.
As a result, at border checkpoints in Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica and Panama, there are now migrants walking south.
In a tiny Indigenous town along the Panamanian Atlantic coast, hundreds of migrants sit and wait to board rickety boats that will cross the sea, landing in Colombia. Each ticket costs $250.
For those that don’t have the money, they will have to walk back through the Darien Gap jungle, the perilous land bridge between Central and South America that many crossed just months before.
It’s entirely possible that February numbers will reflect that, for the first time, more migrants will head south through the Darien Gap than north.
Crossings north into Panama last month were down 94% year over year, the lowest total crossings since February 2021.
The reason everyone is going home is twofold: One, the Trump administration has effectively made it impossible to apply for asylum, blocking nearly all entries to the U.S. Two, the climate of fear among migrants in the U.S. is palpable.
Migrants know the hostile environment that awaits them and are instead choosing the better of two bad options: Head back home and tough it out.
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