This story was supported by the Pulitzer Center. It is part of a project on reverse migration by Arizona Republic reporter Daniel Gonzalez and El Paso Times visual journalist Omar Ornelas.
PALENQUE, Panama — Jose Iguaran waited 19 days for his family in Venezuela to scrape up enough money to pay for his boat trip back home.
The 46-year-old migrant stood on the sandy beach in flip-flops one morning watching a boat packed with other migrants leave without him. He had done the same every morning since arriving in this fishing village on the Caribbean coast of Panama after abandoning his plans to reach the United States.
Iguaran is just one of growing numbers of Venezuelans returning to uncertain futures in the South American country, where nationalism is on the rise under U.S. military threats and where an economic crisis persists.
After the boat departed, Iguaran walked back to the modest beach house where he was living. He paid a local fishing family $5 a day to sleep on a hammock slung from wooden beams on the front porch.
The family served him one simple meal a day consisting of rice and red kidney beans, and sometimes chicken grilled on a tiny stove cobbled out of an old propane tank.
Bags stuffed with Iguaran’s belongings leaned against a wall next to the hammock. Some of the bags were printed in Spanish with the insignia of the IOM, the United Nations’ International Organization for Migration, which had distributed the bags to migrants. Wording printed on the side said the bags were paid for by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
Iguaran reached into one of the IOM bags and pulled out a manila folder. The folder contained papers Iguaran had carried with him for months, among them a printed Jan. 15, 2025, email from U.S. Customs and Border Protection. The email confirmed that Iguaran’s request for an asylum appointment through the Biden-era CBP One app had been scheduled for 6 a.m. Jan. 23, 2025, at the Brownsville and Matamoros International Bridge.
On the date Iguaran received the email, he was living in Tuxtla Gutierrez, a city in the southernmost Mexican state of Chiapas. Iguaran said he left Venezuela on Sept. 4, 2024, two months before Trump won the November election.
He traveled first to Colombia, then north through the perilous Darién Gap jungle to Panama. From there, Iguara journeyed through Central America to Mexico, where he had made it only as far as Tuxtla Gutierrez.
After receiving the email, Iguaran said he was preparing to fly to northern Mexico in time for the Jan. 23 asylum appointment.
But on Jan. 20, three days before the appointment, Donald Trump was sworn in as president after campaigning to shut down the U.S. southern border to asylum seekers and carry out the largest deportation in U.S. history.
At 2:46 p.m., hours after Trump was sworn in, Iguaran received another email from CBP. His asylum appointment had been terminated.
Some migrants headed for the US are giving up and going home
Some migrants making their way to the U.S. through Latin America are turning back. One Venezuelan migrant explains why. (This story was supported by the Pulitzer Center.)
“I cried a lot,” Iguaran recalled, sitting on his rented hammock. “It was a sad moment. Heartbroken. My dreams were shattered.”
Iguaran remained in Tuxtla Gutierrez for months, saving up money working as a construction laborer, while he waited to see if the Trump administration would follow through.
As the months went by, Iguaran said it became clear the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown had “gotten really ugly” as heavily armed federal officers in masks rounded up immigrants in cities and neighborhoods throughout the U.S and Border Patrol agents arrested and detained undocumented border crossers.
Political turmoil has fueled migration by Venezuelans
In early August, Iguaran made the painful decision to turn around and return home to Venezuela despite the South American country’s ongoing economic and political turmoil under autocratic socialist President Nicolas Maduro.
Iguaran is a member of the Guahibo, an Indigenous population who face extreme poverty and discrimination in Venezuela.
Nearly 8 million people have fled Venezuela since 2015, according to the U.N.’s International Organization of Migration. About 6.7 million Venezuelans are living in other countries in Latin America, according to the IOM. Since 2022, more than 850,000 Venezuelans have arrived at the U.S. southern border, the majority of them seeking asylum, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection data.
Since Trump took office in January, however, the number of Venezuelans arriving at the U.S. southern border has plummeted. In September 2023, the peak month, CBP officers logged more than 72,000 encounters with Venezuelans. In September 2025, only 361 encounters were recorded, the data shows.
Not only are Venezuelans not arriving at the U.S. southern border, thousands of Venezuelans who were headed to the United States, such as Iguaran, are headed home.
From January through the end of September, the government of Panama has counted nearly 18,000 migrants headed south instead of north. Of those, 94% were Venezuelans, according to Panama’s National Migration Service data.
Iguaran said he was happy to return to his wife, five children, and a grandson. They live in Maracay, a city in northern Venezuela near the Caribbean coast.
But he was anxious about the future he faced.
“The situation there is still very critical,” Iguaran said.
Before he left, Iguaran said he made a living as a taxi driver. But he also had some training as an auto mechanic and a welder.
“I’ll do anything I can” to earn a living in Venezuela, Iguaran said.
One bus ride south turns into another, and another
To reach Palenque, Iguaran said he took a bus from Tuxtla Gutierrez south to Tapachula, Mexico.
From there, he took another bus south to Guatemala City, and then another bus to Aguas Calientes, Honduras. From there, he took another bus south to Las Manos, on the border of Nicaragua, and another bus to Managua, the Nicaraguan capital. From there, Iguaran took another bus south to San Carlos, Costa Rica.
From San Carlos, Iguaran took a taxi to Los Naranjos, Costa Rica, where he was stopped by police at an immigration checkpoint.
Iguaran said he and about 30 other migrants got around the checkpoint by walking about 200 yards through the woods. From there, Iguaran took a short bus ride to Los Chiles, Costa Rica, where he was fed a meal and slept for seven hours at a migrant shelter.
He took a bus south to San Jose, the capital of Costa Rica, and another bus south to the border of Panama. He crossed into Panama and took a short bus ride to David, a city in northern Panama, and from there another bus to Panama City, the capital.
In Panama City, Iguaran said he slept at the bus terminal after running out of money. He waited four days until relatives sent him enough money to take a bus from Panama City to Palenque.
But he was about $50 short of the $250 entrepreneurs charge southbound migrants to get to Colombia by boat, a six- to eight-hour journey via the ocean.
While Iguaran was waiting for relatives to send more cash, and earning small amounts of money working odd jobs, the men who operate the fishing boats transporting migrants to Colombia cut him a break. They let him climb into an empty seat at the very front after packing the rest of the boat to capacity.
Inside one of his bags, Iguaran carried the manila folder with the asylum papers from U.S. Customs and Border Protection. The documents had no use, but Iguaran said he planned to hold on to them forever.
“I haven’t given up faith” that one day the documents might help him enter the United States, Iguaran said.
Iguaran said there was another reason he hadn’t thrown out the papers.
He wanted to show them to his wife, his children and, one day, his grandson. The papers, he said, were proof that “I tried, I was close” to his dream of reaching the U.S.
“I just missed it by two or three days.”
El Paso Times visual journalist Omar Ornelas and Arizona Republic reporter Daniel Gonzalez spent 12 days in Mexico and Panama in August reporting how the Trump administration’s immigration and border policies are affecting migrant patterns. Both had spent years chronicling immigrants’ movements north. In a dramatic shift, this time they captured people heading south, often back to their home countries. See more of Ornelas’ work on instagram at @fotornelas and Reach Gonzalez at daniel.gonzalez@arizonarepublic.com.