Panama All Over Again

On Offshoring Migrants near the Darién Gap

If you’ve spent time reading about immigration in the last few years, you may have heard about the Darién Gap as a kind of near-mythological hell-on-earth.

If you’re picturing a map of the world in your head, the Darién Gap is the little isthmus of land where South America hangs off of Central America like a fruit on a stem. It’s a remote, jungle-filled and mountainous region that has long been considered near-impassable, particularly on foot. However, hundreds of people make the trek every day.

The Darien Gap, image from Council on Foreign Relations.

I think that when you read that migrants can expect to find mud and roots and extortionate locals, you maybe get an image in your head of what that might mean—splashed ankles, expensive food on the road. When New York Times reporter Julie Turkewitz and photographer Fernando Rios hiked the length of the gap with a group of migrants, the photos and accompanying story show people’s bodies, feet-to-shoulders, slick with mud and faint with exhaustion, show a mother and daughter separated (and eventually reunited,) tell of a village that trapped migrants within a chain-link camp and charged them $20 each to leave.

According to Panamanian migration officials, 300,000 people walked through the Darién Gap in 2024, and 55 people were confirmed to have died—although the area is so remote and difficult to transit that the number is likely to be much higher. Many of these border-crossers are Venezuelans fleeing years of economic hardship and political oppression in their home country, trying to get to safety and political asylum in the U.S. However, it isn’t just Venezuelans, or even Latin Americans—other years, the Darién Gap has mostly been traversed by Haitians, and Cubans, and there are increasing numbers of other people from all over the world who end up crossing from South to Central America via Darién.

Why is this? Panama is hardly en route between Haiti and the U.S., and there are more direct ways into the country for any number of other migrants. The answer comes down to the ways that global patterns have developed.

Many migrants from around the world begin their journeys by buying plane tickets to Ecuador. Just south of Colombia, it has some of the most lax visa requirements in Latin America, making it easy to legally enter that country as a tourist. From there, migrants can make their way into Colombia and take ad-hoc sea routes past the Darién Gap, or, more cheaply, take the dangerous overland route through the jungle. The crossing is now such a common journey that it’s become peppered with the same kinds of dark economies as the rest of the migrant route—kidnappers and extortionists and smugglers who lure their clients with promises of easy crossings, only to take their money.

For many who choose the overland route, the Darién Gap is the first spot on their journey that they will encounter real, body-burning difficulty, danger, a feeling of a journey. It is not the last—Prevention Through Deterrence has been the name of the immigration enforcement game for a couple of decades now. Prevention through Deterrence means allowing for migration to be as difficult as it can be, means pushing people into inhospitable landscapes and terrains. 550 migrants died of a variety of environmental causes along the U.S.-Mexico border last year thanks in large part to border policies that funnel migrants to the most dangerous parts of the U.S.

So why is the Darién Gap coming up now?

Because, as of last week, the U.S. is sending migrants back to there, whether or not they are Panamanian.

In the last several years, the U.S. has been deporting migrants to countries they are not from—most often, dumping Latin Americans fresh off a perilous desert crossing back across the border into Mexico, regardless of country of origin. In the last several weeks, among news of “enhanced enforcement activity” from ICE, we’ve seen news of Guantanamo opening to accept migrants—not as deportees to Cuba, but rather as a kind of temporary holding pen. This isn’t the first time asylum seekers and migrants have been held at Gitmo (see: Steven Thrasher’s excellent piece on the Haitian immigrants held there at the height of the AIDS epidemic).

Guantanamo occupies a very specific place in the mental imaginary of your average resident of the U.S.—at least in my lifetime, it’s the place where the most dangerous-of-the-dangerous go, the terrorists no one else wanted in their backyard. Of course, if you pay attention to the news at all, you also know that Guantanamo is the site of horrific human rights abuses—where people are held without an end date, are subject to torture, are held without contact with loved ones, or attorneys, or many rights at all. To send migrants to this site indicates the perceived danger of these people, and it gives the message that much like those other long-time Guantanamo detainees, they are beyond the reach of the law, that American rights do not apply to them. In other words, it sends a clear picture to other Americans about who migrants are and what we owe them.

However, last week, The New York Times also broke the news that the U.S. is deporting people to Panama—first to a glass-walled hotel in Panama City, and eventually to a migrant camp…just north of the Darién Gap, initially built to house migrants on their northward journeys. While U.S. officials claimed that all the people taken to Panama had received asylum screenings and were legally deportable, the Times talked to a number of Iranian Christian converts—people who faced the death penalty back home for religious persecution, basically the entire reason our asylum laws exist—who found themselves in Panama without reason or explanation. Many of these migrants were from countries with which the U.S. has no repatriation agreements—Venezuela and Kazakhstan and Afghanistan and Iran—and so, unable to properly deport them, they ended up in Panama. These migrants were kept in place by armed guards, were often stripped of ID papers and cellphones, and were unable to contact lawyers, who might have helped them prove they were being deported unlawfully.

Panama’s acceptance of these thousands of deportees likely has something to do with Trump’s threats to re-take the Panama Canal. If I were a much smaller, less militarized country, I’d be doing what I could to stay on his good side, and if that means putting a bunch of new arrivals into already-existing refugee camps in a corner of the country that is sparsely populated, well, then, that’s what it takes.

For years now, the militarization of the U.S. border has pushed farther and farther south—the Mexico-Guatemala border is increasingly militarized thanks to U.S. funding, as of the Biden administration, Panama has received funding to deport the increasing numbers of Venezuelans crossing through into the U.S. This movement of migrants is a microcosm of all the ways in which U.S. migration is every other global issue stacked up in a trench coat. It spans U.S. interventionism and colonial projects, prevention through deterrence, the war on terror, climate change, trade policies, white nationalism, and more.

But I think the thing we haven’t really talked about is the message that patriation to Panama sends to the migrants themselves. In the same way that Guantanamo Bay is a piece of quasi-American geography that looms large in the U.S. psyche, so too is the jungle of the Darién Gap in the mind of the migrant. To them, it symbolizes despair, dehumanization, perhaps the first place that the scale and scope of their journey became apparent to them. And then the U.S. scooped them up and placed them, shackled, on a plane, and without telling them, in a matter of hours, wound back the thousands of miles they traversed at great personal cost, from the border they had so recently achieved back to this site of misery. That also sends a message—one that emphasizes the power of the U.S. and the powerlessness of the people who come to it, asking for help, one that seems designed for maximum cruelty.

If you want to do something about this, I’d recommend doing what you can to get people out of immigration detention. I’m a bit biased on this as I’m on the board of the Midwest Immigration Bond Fund which both pays and facilitates payments for immigrants across the Midwest, but if you’re not in our service area, the National Bail Fund Network can help you find an immigration bond fund in your area, or that supports detainees of an identity category that matters to you (Black or queer migrants especially). I know not everyone shares my stance that no one belongs in immigration detention, so if you’re on the fence about putting your hard-earned money towards this cause, let me give you some incentive: Only folks without criminal convictions are even eligible for immigration bonds, and making space in our local, more easily accessible detention centers means that fewer people get deported so quickly—and helps people reunite with their families and communities while they wait the months or even years for their immigration trials to make their dates in court.

You can also call your congresspeople and ask them to not approve the budget resolution that calls for $350 billion in immigration enforcement—a tenfold increase from current (already high!) levels of funding, much of which will go into the pockets of private prison corporations.

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If you liked my essay a few weeks ago on the Sensitive Locations Memo, I wrote a piece for Commonweal on visibility and invisibility of migrants here in Chicago amid immigration raids.

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Alejandra Oliva is an essayist, embroiderer and translator. Her writing has been included in Best American Travel Writing 2020, and was honored with an Aspen Summer Words Emerging Writers Fellowship. Her book, Rivermouth: A Chronicle of Language, Faith and Migration, was published by Astra House, and received a Whiting Nonfiction Grant. She was the Yale Whitney Humanities Center Franke Visiting Fellow in Spring 2022. You can find her newsletter here.