President Trump’s border buildup has been so successful that America’s southern neighbors are now dealing with a startling new problem: migrants streaming south, trying to return back home after realizing they wouldn’t make it to the U.S.
Officials from Panama and Costa Rica met this week to work out details for how to handle the flow, which is already a steady stream and could become a flood as people who’d been waiting in Mexico for a shot at the U.S. give up.
In Nicaragua, authorities this month have had to figure out what to do with migrants crossing south from Honduras. After initially resisting them, Nicaraguan immigration officials ended up allowing them to cross, as long as they promised to keep heading further south.
It’s a startling reversal, though one the U.S. is trying to help with by orchestrating flights to get the migrants out of Central America and back to their home countries.
“We want to guarantee an orderly, legal, humanitarian and safe migratory flow,” said Mario Zamora Cordero, Costa Rica’s minister of public security, after Tuesday’s meeting with Panama. “This meeting marks the beginning of a coordination that seeks to ensure the return of migrants to their countries of origin in adequate conditions.”
Internal documents from Homeland Security’s Customs and Border Protection, viewed by The Washington Times, described some of the incidents.
In one of them, Nicaraguan border authorities were surprised by 26 migrants heading south from Honduras. Nicaragua initially refused them entry but after negotiations decided to let them cross, under the promise that they would “continue en route to their country of origin.”
The migrants — 23 from Venezuela and three from Cuba, some of them traveling as families with kids in tow — had been headed north and got as far as Tegucigalpa, in Honduras, when they looked at what awaited them at the U.S.-Mexico border. That’s when they gave up.
“The migrants had been United States-bound but due to increased security on the Southwest Border, they decided to return to their countries of origin,” the CBP document read.
In another incident last week, Honduran officials encountered a bus with 23 migrants that was returning south after an aborted trip to the U.S.
The 23 migrants had made it into Mexico before realizing their journey was futile.
“Upon learning about the multi agency force security on the Southwest Border in social media and through family members in the United States, the migrants decided to return to their country of origin,” CBP said.
They surrendered to Mexico’s immigration agency, which sent them back to Guatemala, where they caught the bus to take them into Honduras. Honduran authorities let the migrants continue.
Mr. Trump declared a border emergency on his first day in office and in a series of executive actions has surged resources to deal with it. He has limited asylum claims, deployed the military to help with deportation flights and increased prosecutions of border crimes.
Under threat of crippling tariffs, Mexico has also agreed to do more to stop the flow of people and drugs heading north. That includes deploying 10,000 more of its National Guard troops.
The result are stunning.
Border Patrol agents, who at the height of the Biden border surge detected 10,000 illegal immigrants a day at the southern border, are now reporting days of fewer than 500.
“You talk to agents on the line, in their entire careers they’ve never seen crossing days as low as what they’re experiencing right now,” Stephen Miller, Mr. Trump’s domestic policy advisor, said this week.
The lower chance of success in gaining a foothold in the U.S. has changed the calculation for would-be illegal immigrants, who now face a greater possibility of having paid thousands of dollars with nothing to show for it.
That’s likely boosted the numbers heading south.
Panamanian news accounts this week reported that hundreds of migrants are waiting along the border between Costa Rica and Panama after having given up hope of reaching the U.S.
“We went in search of a dream, but now we are going back home,” one Venezuelan migrant told Newsroom Panama.
The Tico Times, in Costa Rica, said the southbound flow “shows an upward trend.”
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