The first time Venezuelan José Luis Redondo arrived in Panama, having trudged through the deadly Darién Gap to get here, his eyes were set north on the United States.
But after President Donald Trump took office in January, dismantling pathways to migrant protections in the U.S. and promising to deport historic numbers of people, Mr. Redondo, at that point in Honduras, turned around.
Now he’s in Panama for a second time, his eyes set south, on home. “My body aches, and my heart aches,” he says. But “I came to the realization that if I’m going to suffer, I’d rather be [suffering] at home with my family.”
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An eventual return home is an ideal woven into the migration experience, one that often makes communities more stable. But a swelling trail of migrants leaving the United States under President Donald Trump threatens to exacerbate instability at home.
Mr. Redondo is one of thousands of migrants who have reversed historic, northbound migratory paths in recent months. In Panama, record numbers of migrants from as far away as Asia and Africa had turned the deadly Darién Gap, a roadless strip of jungle connecting South and Central America, into a migratory thoroughfare over the past decade. The movement of people there peaked in 2023 with more than 520,000 migrants passing through.
But today there are more moving south through Panama than north. Panamanian President José Raúl Mulino said in a March press conference that the government recorded some 400 migrants entering the country through the Darién Gap in February, compared with almost 2,000 migrants who entered heading south that same month. Nearly 10,000 crossed Panama moving toward South America between November 2024 and early May, according to Roger Mojica, the director of Panama’s migration services. No one crossed the Panamanian border northbound in the first two weeks of May, according to the president.
The eventual return home, forced or by choice, is implicit in the migration experience in Latin America. But this southward wave has emerged suddenly, in response to the Trump administration’s hard-line immigration policies. And it threatens to exacerbate the region’s political, economic, and humanitarian crises at a time when views of migrants have hardened across the Americas.
“Deportation and return migration are phenomena that have happened for many years. What is new is this volatility,” says Diego Chaves-González, senior manager of the Latin America and Caribbean Initiative at the Migration Policy Institute. “These are people running out of options.”
The jungle is closed
Here on the new migration corridor, on a sweltering day in late March, a group of mostly Venezuelans gathers in Miramar, a fishing village on Panama’s Caribbean coast, trying to get home. Since January, dozens have arrived almost daily to these weathered wooden docks.
With the Darién Gap “closed,” according to the Panamanian government, returning migrants now must pay local fishers here to take them on the eight-hour journey via simple boat to reach the Colombian coast. But coming up with the fare, about $250 for each adult, isn’t easy. “Everyone here is poor,” says Víctor Daniel León, leaning against a pink, dilapidated building near the port where, with permission from the local mayor, many have been staying for the past month free of charge.
As they prepare food over an open-cook fire in the shade, they share stories of kidnappings in Mexico, robberies in Nicaragua, and violent attacks in Honduras, though they say the locals here have been good to them, even while Panama made international headlines for imprisoning deportees this year.
Mr. Léon left Venezuela for the U.S. last summer when Nicolás Maduro claimed without evidence that he’d won the presidential election. He crossed the Darién Gap and through Central America, eventually entering Texas without permission. He was deported to Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, two days after Mr. Trump’s inauguration.
“It feels like everyone is trying to get us out of their country,” he says, the curve of his right ear traced by thick black sutures he received following a recent mugging in Costa Rica. When he reported the attack to Costa Rican police, they immediately deported him to Panama without medical attention, he says.
“From Panama to the U.S.-Mexico border there is now an enormous ‘state of exception,’” says Elías Cornejo, who helps run the Fe y Alegría shelter for deportees in Panama City, referring to the idea of giving up civil liberties in exchange for safety. It’s a cornerstone of El Salvador’s security policy under authoritarian President Nayib Bukele.
The talking points across the Americas tell us that “Migrants are criminals; migrants destroy the environment; migrants are coming to invade,” he says. “This whole national security narrative is built on restricting human rights to confront the ‘enemy.’”
“I’ve walked seven countries, and they’re all equally bad,” says Mr. Léon. That helped convince him that going home – even without hope of employment – was better than continuing to seek stability elsewhere. And so, following his deportation to Mexico, he trained his focus on getting back to where he started, taking buses and trains, and walking southward.
An untimely return
“Home” has been a central part of the migratory experience over decades, says Irvin Ibarguen, a historian on migration in the Americas at New York University. Until 9/11, when the U.S. increased the militarization of its southern border, back-and-forth migration was the norm. Migrants might leave for work, but they’d return often to family, the land, and traditions.
“There is a word in Spanish, arraigo, this idea of rootedness, of thinking about going back home,” adds Mr. Chaves-González of the Migration Policy Institute. He sees rootedness as part of the “mental model” of most Latin America migrants. “People think, ‘If I migrate, I will be successful in life,’ but even as they’re embarking on the journey of migration, they’re thinking about buying land back home or building a house little by little [with remittances]. There’s always this hope of going back.”
But in today’s context, the return home has been made premature by sweeping policies under President Trump. And now migrants are finding themselves recalibrating expectations.
For a fleeting moment in March, the Facebook page of Yojani, a Venezuelan migrant whose last name is withheld for her security, looked like a recap of a family vacation. Normally her social media is overwhelmed by memes about missing home and her mother, two topics weighing on her heart over the seven months she was stuck in a migratory holding pattern in Mexico City, where The Christian Science Monitor first met her. But just days before leaving Mexico for South America, she shared a few short videos of her young son and daughter running and smiling in the capital’s historic Alameda Plaza and tripping through the greenery of Chapultepec Park. The last-minute outings were an attempt to rewrite the memories of a place where her family struggled nonstop for more than half a year.
The CBP One app, which migrants like her were waiting to use to schedule appointments to present their cases for entering the U.S., was disbanded following Mr. Trump’s inauguration. By mid-March, Mexico City’s tent camps, which had become a visual representation of the crises driving people to migrate to the U.S. from around the globe, began to be dismantled by local government.
And so, on the evening of March 17, just days after her cheerful Facebook videos, Yojani, her husband, and their two small children boarded a bus headed south.
“My kids have been through enough,” she said in the lead-up to their departure.
The family left Mexico City, weighed down by backpacks and shopping bags with essentials like warm blankets and resealable packets of tuna fish. They made it to Guatemala in less than a week. Some nights they slept on the buses shuttling them south, and when they could manage to, they rented humble rooms in small villages along their route.
“Thank God, we didn’t have any trouble getting out of Mexico,” she wrote via text message from Guatemala, where she and her family sold sweets at stoplights to save up enough money to continue their journey.
By the end of March, they’d arrived in Honduras, where they languished for two months trying to earn enough to continue south. They’re now on the move again, toward Nicaragua.
When Yojani and her family fled Venezuela last summer, it wasn’t the decision she wanted to make; it’s what she felt she had to do for her family’s future.
“When my son was struggling in the [Darién] jungle, I told him that in the U.S. he would have it all: a tablet, his own bedroom, a talented schoolteacher, that he’d see snow. It was the incentive he needed to keep going,” Yojani says. Now his father tells him the plan is to go back to study in Colombia, where they have relatives. The 7-year-old boy is excited about that.
“That’s the biggest thing I’ve learned in all this. There’s nothing more important than family,” Yojani says. “It may not be the life we dreamed of. The violence and the trouble will still be there. But being with family will be our security.”
Andrea Salcedo contributed reporting for this story.
