This piece appeared in the Spring 2026 issue of NACLA’s quarterly print magazine, the NACLA Report. Subscribe in print today!
“Migrants trying to reach the United States no longer come through here; the crossing through the jungle is over,” Doña Jacinta, a resident of Necoclí, a coastal municipality in the department of Antioquia, Colombia, told us. “Those who come here are the returned ones, but they don’t stay in Necoclí; they carry right on. I don’t know if they go to other places in Colombia or to other countries, but they’re not here anymore. Everything has changed.” Doña Jacinta co-owns one of the many hotels that sprang up a few years ago to serve the massive influx of migrants. Her words, which she shared with us in July 2025, describe how the dynamics of crossing the Darién jungle en route to the United States have abruptly transformed.
Donald Trump’s return to the White House has prompted brutal consequences not only in the United States but also externally, including a radical shift in the dynamics of mobility and control along the continent’s migratory corridors.
The changes are being felt in the corridor connecting the Andes and Central America, especially along the border between Colombia and Panama in the Urabá and Darién regions, where Necoclí has played a key role. This territory, a connecting hub for population and trade flows since pre-colonial times, became one of the main irregular crossings into the north of the continent in the second decade of the 21st century.
Between 2010 and 2019, a total of some 109,203 migrants from more than 70 countries in the Caribbean, South America, Africa, Asia, and Eastern Europe crossed the Darién Gap. In 2023, the number of crossings in a single year reached a record high of more than 520,000. The following year, the decline began: in 2024, 302,203 people made the crossing. By June 2025, after Trump’s return, the collapse was complete: in November, only 29 south to north crossings were recorded, according to the latest Panamanian statistics.
As Doña Jacinta observed, crossings through the jungle appear to have ceased. Instead, return journeys to South America are increasing—albeit slowly. Between February and August 2025, some 14,000 people—2,333 per month or 77 per day—traveled that route. Doña Jacinta and other locals refer to them as “the returned ones.”
How has the Trump administration’s anti-immigrant crackdown transformed migration routes from South America to North America through the Darién Gap? How have these transformations reconfigured migrant trajectories and subjectivities? How are the inhabitants of the Colombian-Panamanian border adapting to these southward return migrations? Through multi-sited immersive ethnography in coastal communities of the Panamanian and Colombian Caribbean, we demonstrate how these migrations are reshaping social relations, local economies, and border control mechanisms along the Andean–Central American migration corridor. To protect our interlocutors, all names that appear in this text are pseudonyms.
Anti-Immigrant Sentiment Ramps Up
The decline in Darién crossings since 2024 reflects a convergence of regional geopolitical factors. The shift under the Joe Biden administration toward increasingly restrictive southern border measures was compounded by Panamanian President José Raúl Mulino’s agenda; one of Mulino’s first—albeit mostly symbolic—actions after being elected in May 2024 was to, in his words, “fence off the entrance to the jungle.” This trend intensified in 2025 with the return of Trump, who sought to secure regional “allies” through economic and political pressure. In this context, Panama agreed to receive deportees from the United States, reinforcing Washington’s containment policy. Expanding an earlier arrangement under which the United States funded the expulsion of unauthorized migrants from Panamanian territory, the new agreement made Panama a deportation stopover between the United States and other countries.
Among the strategies rolled out in the Trump 2.0 era is the extraterritorialization of deportation: the expulsion of migrants to third countries—including Panama—as part of a regionalized control mechanism. At the same time, migrant detention has been sensationalized: images of migrants being “hunted” by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), filmed live by government agents, have circulated in the media. Hundreds of detainees have been sent to Guantanamo Bay or to maximum-security prisons in El Salvador, consolidating a transnational punitive regime.
Fear operates as a technology of control that intensifies deportability, racializes migrant presence, and pushes forced returns to South America through migration corridors marked by precarity, prolonged waits, and multiple forms of violence.
This openly racist policy has spread fear in migrant communities. Gladys, a 41-year-old Venezuelan woman we met at a migrant shelter in Capurganá, Colombia, expressed it clearly: “My husband and I were doing well. I worked cleaning offices, and he worked as a barber. Then Trump came to power, and everything changed.” They had been living in New York but decided to return to Venezuela. “We lived in terror: of running into ICE on the street, of being detained and imprisoned, and above all, of having my husband sent to the hell of El Salvador. No, no, what you experience in that country is too much,” she recounted. “They are against us, the migrants. That’s why we decided to leave the way we live: walking back to Venezuela.”
Her testimony is not exceptional, but rather encapsulates a shared experience. Fear operates as a technology of control that intensifies deportability, racializes migrant presence, and pushes forced returns to South America through migration corridors marked by precarity, prolonged waits, and multiple forms of violence. In this context of migrant terror, the border between Mexico and the United States has been further militarized, and the CBP One program—a Customs and Border Protection digital platform launched in October 2020 to allow asylum seekers from Mexico and Central America to schedule appointments—has been canceled. In practice, the right to asylum has been dismantled. Together, these factors have generated immediate repercussions thousands of kilometers to the south, especially in global transit hubs such as the Colombia–Panama border.
“We Never Thought the Migrants Would Stop Coming”
With this political reconfiguration, residents of Necoclí said the “migrant boom” ended abruptly. “We never thought the migrants would stop coming. Everyone wanted to go to the U.S.! Since 2020, we’ve received thousands and thousands of foreigners, and we all benefited,” Kevin, who worked sending money and recruiting migrants to traverse maritime and jungle routes, told us. Other people similarly recounted the magnitude of the phenomenon. “There was a time when the population doubled, all because of the migrant boom,” said Teresa, a community leader, hotel owner, and former mayoral candidate.
The boom brought sudden economic impacts. Between 2021 and 2024, hostels, guesthouses, and hotels like Doña Jacinta’s opened; restaurants, bakeries, and small shops proliferated. The sidewalks filled with vendors selling “jungle crossing kits”—rubber boots or Crocs, backpacks, waterproof sacs, insect repellent, flashlights, and small heaters—while dollars and euros circulated through the town.
In the streets, English, Arabic, Chinese, Hindi, Kreyòl, Portuguese, and a multitude of Spanish Latin American accents could be heard. The demand to venture into the jungle en route to the United States was so high that a second dock was built and boat companies expanded their fleets to cover the route to Capurganá, the gateway to the Darién. Business was so profitable that, according to local residents, “La Empresa”—as the Clan del Golfo, one of the country’s most powerful criminal organizations, is known—took control and organized migrant crossings, reaping incalculable profits. At the same time, the presence of humanitarian organizations grew. The first to provide assistance were local organizations such as the Pastoral Social de Apartadó, funded by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) between 2019 and 2020. The arrival of international agencies then intensified, until the municipality came to host more than 28 entities dedicated to responding to the needs of the massive number of migrants.
An Abrupt New Reality in Necoclí
By July 2025, the streets of Necoclí had emptied. The boardwalk, once a makeshift camp for thousands of migrants, had fallen silent, occupied only sporadically by local tourists. The jungle kits sat in storage without buyers. Hotel owners reported empty rooms; dollars and euros no longer circulated, only Colombian pesos. Boat operators, bus drivers, and taxi drivers, who once raked in earnings, have drastically reduced their trips and depend once again on business from domestic tourists and a few foreigners. “Because Trump came to power… nobody crosses the jungle anymore,” a resident of Capurganá who worked as a migrant smuggler told us. “Now people go back by sea. The business is over, and we have to find something else to do.” With the collapse of the “migrant boom,” hundreds of residents of Capurganá, Necoclí, and other towns in Urabá and Darién have returned to activities such as fishing, agriculture, commerce, and local tourism. Others have been pushed into illicit economies like those controlled by the Clan del Golfo, including drug trafficking, smuggling, and human trafficking.
By July 2025, the streets of Necoclí had emptied. The boardwalk, once a makeshift camp for thousands of migrants, had fallen silent, occupied only sporadically by local tourists. The jungle kits sat in storage without buyers.
The same thing has happened to people employed by humanitarian organizations, many of which suspended their operations. These decisions were due, in part, to the elimination of funding from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), which weakened the regional humanitarian architecture—another Trump 2.0 measure as part of a political-ideological shift that questions multilateralism and humanitarianism as pillars of U.S. foreign policy in favor of approaches centered on security, immigration control, and containment. This was compounded by the abrupt decline in the number of people traveling northward, which had previously justified the presence of these organizations in the region. These contractions highlight the structural fragility of humanitarian aid—dependent on external agendas and funding—and shows how political shifts in the Global North can suddenly reconfigure the opportunities for survival in transit spaces in the South. In this new reality, two dynamics persist. One is the trickle of migrants from China and South Asia, who continue to travel north along increasingly expensive routes through the Colombian Caribbean. The other, more visible, is the return movement south. While residents of Necoclí recalled that even during the boom years there were always people who, in the middle of their journeys to the United States, decided to return or stay behind to “try their luck” there, the decisive factor in 2025 was the abrupt decline in northward crossings and its profound economic and social effects on territories that previously sustained—and were sustained by—migrant transit.
Read the rest of this article, available open access for a limited time.