Turned Away at The U.S. Border, Migrants Make A Dangerous Trek in Reverse

The Washington Post

13:54 JST, February 26, 2025

TURBO, Colombia – The Venezuelan migrants had crossed a treacherous jungle and all of Central America. They had waited in Mexico for months for a chance to head north and enter the United States. But after Donald Trump became president, their options, and the road, quickly ran out.

So they decided to turn around – returning south, to the Darien Gap, the dense jungle they never wanted to see again, and beyond it, the autocratic state they had fled.

Growing numbers of migrants – many of them Venezuelan – have made this journey in recent days, a reverse wave of migration in response to Trump’s hard-line anti-immigration policies.

Many have hired smugglers to take them around the jungle, by boat. But last week, dozens appeared to have been assisted by Panamanian authorities, several of the migrants told The Washington Post, recounting an unusual journey through dangerous waters to Colombia – and away from Trump’s America.

In recent days, hundreds of migrants arrived at the Lajas Blancas camp, controlled by Panamanian authorities, in the Darien Gap. The migrants pleaded with authorities to allow them to return home. But flying them back would not be easy: Most of the Venezuelans had no valid passport, and Panama has no diplomatic relations with the government of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.

Panamanian authorities instead opted for an “experiment,” several migrants recounted. They granted an initial group of about 50 migrants access to a route – by bus and then, by boat – that would take them through the daunting waters bypassing the Darien Gap and into Colombia.

Late last week, an officer in Lajas Blancas, which is secured by Panama’s National Border Service, Senafront, told the migrants in the camp about the plan, approved by superiors, to help move an initial group of people south, according to a video of the officer’s explanation. The officer’s comments were captured by a migrant who recorded them and provided them to The Post.

A private company charged a package fee for the entire trip to Colombia, costing about $175, the officer told the migrants.

The migrants agreed and the next day boarded a bus to begin a multiday, three-boat journey through the rough ocean waters surrounding this remote jungle.

“Our coyotes were the Panamanian officers,” said Alfredo Valbuena, a 30-year-old Venezuelan migrant, using a term referring to illegal smugglers, after he stepped off a boat in the Colombian coastal town of Turbo on Sunday afternoon, completing the final leg of the trip.

Anelio Merry, a spokesman for the Guna Yala Indigenous territory where the boat trips took place, confirmed that the trips were coordinated by the Panamanian border service and the country’s ombudsman’s office. Asked in a news conference Tuesday about the trips, Frank Ábrego, Panama’s security minister said the country’s border service has begun “regulating” the boat trips, journeys that were already taking place with “irregular contacts.” He didn’t provide any further details.

“It would have been easier to take things into our own hands – safer, cheaper, faster,” said Franyelis Izarza, 25, a Venezuelan mother who made the trip with her 4-year-old daughter.

A New Migration Challenge for Panama

The group of Venezuelans who arrived in the Colombian town of Turbo on Sunday afternoon had met along the journey from Mexico.

They had traveled by bus to the Costa Rican border with Panama, where Panamanian authorities told them they would aim to get them a “humanitarian flight” to Venezuela, Izarza said.

They had no idea where they were being taken – until the bus dropped them off in the Darien Gap, the jungle Izarza had crossed about eight months earlier. “I said, ‘I’m not going back to the jungle with my daughter,’” Izarza said.

At the Lajas Blancas camp, they spent their nights sleeping on mats as thin as cardboard, several migrants said. Growing tired of the conditions, they pleaded with authorities for a way out. An officer eventually told them about a boat trip that could drop them off in La Miel, close to the Colombian border, where the migrants would be able to walk across.

Things didn’t go as planned. The water was choppy, and their boat – what appeared to be a fishing vessel with a weak motor for 16 passengers – nearly teetered over at one point. They were lost at sea for about an hour. As night fell on Friday, they pulled over onto shore and spent the night with an Indigenous community.

It wasn’t until they reached Puerto Obaldía, Panama, the following day that they learned, from an officer, that one of the three boats had flipped over, leaving an 8-year-old girl dead.

Panamanian authorities rescued 20 passengers on board, the border service said in a statement, confirming the death of the Venezuelan girl. Migrants who knew her said she had been traveling south with her mother, father and 11-year-old sister.

Panamanian border authorities later explained in a statement that rough waters forced two of the three boats to pull ashore. The driver of the third decided to keep going, according to the statement.

In the statement, Panamanian authorities reiterated their “commitment to safety and compliance with navigation regulations.”

They did not mention playing any role in the planning of the trip.

But in recent weeks, Panamanian authorities spoke publicly of their struggle to help a group of Venezuelan migrants return to their home country.

In a news conference last week, Panama’s president, José Raúl Mulino, said the government was looking into whether it could fly Venezuelan migrants to the Colombian town of Cúcuta, on the border with Venezuela.

But the mayor of Cúcuta, currently facing an influx of about 25,000 Colombians displaced by violence along the border, said the city “is not in a position to receive a single additional migrant.”

“There is an inverse migration that continues to grow more and more from Mexico to our border,” Ábrego said in a recent interview with a Panamanian radio program. “Many of them are asking us to give them the opportunity to continue in boats … toward the border with Colombia, to cross the border. … That’s something we can’t stop them from doing.”

Juan Pappier, a deputy Americas director for Human Rights Watch, said that while it is “not necessarily wrong” for the Panamanian government to help move people south, “if they’re escorting people onto boats, they have to take basic steps to make sure they’re not putting those people at risk.”

A Smuggling Economy Looks South

Some are choosing to make the journey on their own. Boats carrying Venezuelan migrants have been arriving on a near-daily basis in Necocli, Colombia, a beach town that in recent years has served as the gateway to the Darien Gap.

The town, once packed with families sleeping on the street and vendors selling tents and rubber boots for the journey, is now largely empty.

On Saturday, two immigration officers waited on a dock in Necocli as dozens of people stepped off a boat.

A 35-year-old mother with three children – ages 12, 6 and 3 – disembarked carrying a garbage bag with tote bags inside, and hauling a large suitcase with a broken wheel. Katerine Rodriguez had tried to enter the United States the legal way, she said. She applied for a CBP One appointment, with no luck. She struggled to earn a living in Mexico, and decided she’d rather return to her partner in Colombia and eventually go back to Venezuela.

She paid a smuggler $620 for her and her children to travel by boat around the Darien Gap – the same jungle the family had crossed more than a year ago, where they got lost in the mud, where she and her children would look inside tents to find cadavers.

Now, they were back where they had started, and the migration officers on the Colombian shore were asking them for their documents.

“Are most of you going back to Venezuela?” one of the officers asked the group of migrants. Yes, they were, most of them replied.

“Well, best of luck,” the immigration officer told them.