Within the north of Costa Rica, an irregular dust path runs parallel to the freeway that connects the nation with Nicaragua on the Las Tablillas border submit. When torrential downpours flood the Río Frío and drench the encircling lowland forest, the path turns right into a viscous paste that sucks on the footwear of migrants crossing the border by foot; they typically go away their ruined sneakers behind as soon as they make it throughout. On a go to to the realm final month, I noticed a whole lot of discarded footwear, sun-bleached and caked in mud. However I used to be stunned to see that they had been piled up on the southern aspect of the border—an indication that the migrants who’d as soon as worn them had crossed into Costa Rica from the north.
This was a monument to a unprecedented reversal in human migration: For the primary time in latest historical past, the individuals passing by way of Central America are largely transferring south. The brand new migration circulate appears to have been triggered by the Trump administration’s crackdown on each authorized and unlawful crossings on the southern U.S. border. And it’s already disorienting the area.
In recent times, hundreds of thousands of migrants from Latin America, the Caribbean, Asia, and Africa have carved a path from South America by way of the treacherous Darién jungle and into Panama en route north to america. However that huge circulate is now dwindling.
Costa Rica is consultant of the development. For many years, a whole lot and generally 1000’s of migrants crossed the nation by bus on daily basis, touring the roughly 300 miles from Paso Canoas within the south to Los Chiles within the north; in accordance with the UN-affiliated Worldwide Group for Migration, from 2021 to 2024 greater than 1.2 million individuals entered the nation heading north from Panama. However after peaking in August 2023 at about 84,500, the variety of individuals migrating north by way of Costa Rica started to say no—dipping to 14,400 in November 2024, then 1,600 in January 2025, the month Donald Trump was inaugurated; it was 1,600 once more in February, then zero as of mid-March. In the meantime, throughout a six-week interval in February and March, IOM estimates that some 1,200 individuals moved south into Costa Rica.
Different international locations within the area, together with Guatemala and Colombia, have additionally seen a reversal of their migration flows, and have recorded even larger numbers of southbound migrants to this point this yr. The Panamanian authorities has reported about 5,100 such migrants because the starting of 2025. Like Costa Rica, Panama has seen a dramatic lower within the variety of northbound migrants—from 110,572 within the first three months of 2024 to 2,838 within the first three months of 2025. (IOM knowledge in Costa Rica don’t embrace migrants who enter the nation at evening or over the weekend, and don’t at all times cowl each level of entry.)
In my conversations with greater than two dozen migrants in Costa Rica final month, all however one was both halting their northbound journey or returning after a interval in Mexico, the place they’d resided whereas awaiting asylum interviews with U.S. officers that by no means occurred. Assist employees I spoke with stated that bus firms had lately begun organizing extra routes from Los Chiles to inside cities farther south, akin to Quesada and the capital, San José, to account for the brand new migration flows. On the bus terminals in Los Chiles and Las Tablillas, I noticed coyotes, the exploitative human traffickers who as soon as facilitated migrants’ motion northward, providing to information migrants again down the route in the event that they selected to show round.
The migrants I spoke with had been broadly conscious of the Trump administration’s hostility towards immigrants, together with its extremely publicized deportations. Most had reversed their course just because they didn’t assume they might get into america. Asylum claims started to fall throughout the Biden administration, after it imposed restrictions. However the Trump administration successfully ended consideration of asylum claims on the southern border when, hours after Trump’s inauguration, the White Home shut down an app that the Biden administration had arrange so migrants may schedule screening appointments. Migrants I interviewed stated that they’d waited as much as 9 months for his or her appointments and determined to show again when these appointments had been canceled. Though some migrants proceed to cross the border illegally, they typically need to pay smuggling sums that almost all of them can’t afford; El País lately reported charges between $6,000 and $10,000 per particular person in Tijuana.
Some migrants instructed me that one other issue, one which predates Trump’s second time period, is driving southbound migration too: the grave hazard to would-be asylum seekers idling in Mexico. In January 2024, the Mexican authorities started serving to U.S. officers transfer migrants and asylum seekers away from the U.S. border. In southern Mexico, the place corrupt public officers typically overlook cartel violence, criminals have extorted and kidnapped individuals, generally focusing on these more likely to have U.S.-based kinfolk keen to pay their ransoms. A number of migrants instructed me that they wished to flee situations in Mexico that had been worse than people who impressed them to go away their dwelling international locations within the first place.
Till lately, Abismael, a 25-year-old Venezuelan automobile mechanic who withheld his full title as a result of he fears retribution, labored for an auto store in Tapachula, Mexico. In alternate for meals and shelter, he instructed me, he labored 12-hour days, seven days per week for a $15 weekly allowance. He stated that earlier this yr, he, his brother, sister-in-law, and 5 nieces and nephews had been kidnapped by gun-toting cartel members. “Plata o plomo”—cash or lead—their captors repeated, at one level putting Abismael on his again with the barrel of a rifle. “Fuck your mother, I would like my cash!” they shouted at his 4-year-old nephew. Abismael and his members of the family had been in the end launched when his mom offered the household’s fridge in Caracas and wired them its worth.
I met Abismael within the Los Chiles bus terminal, three miles south of the Nicaraguan border, the place he was pitching a plastic baseball to his nephew, who swatted line drives with a tree department. With native shelters full, he and his household have been sleeping within the corridors of a neighborhood market, however he stated that they deliberate to use for asylum in Costa Rica and settle there. “If you take a breath right here after Mexico,” he stated, “it’s completely different air. It’s a distinct world. We will take walks on the streets. They offer us meals right here, water, loos.”
“Truthfully, we simply need peace,” he added. “I don’t care what we do. I simply need sincere work.”
For migrants heading south, Costa Rica—a middle-income nation and the one steady democracy within the Central American hall—is a pure place to hunt refuge. Some migrants need to keep away from crossing Panama’s jungles again into South America, and situations in the remainder of Central America—Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, and Nicaragua—aren’t any higher than in Mexico. Early outcomes from an unpublished IOM survey in Costa Rica present that 22 % of polled southbound migrants plan to remain, whereas 73 % plan to proceed farther southward. (As a migration researcher, I counsel IOM’s Costa Rica workplace on knowledge assortment in an unpaid capability and have entry to its findings.)
Costa Rica is shortly changing into overwhelmed. After I met with him final month, Omer Badilla Toledo, a vice minister who oversees migration coverage for Costa Rica’s authorities, instructed me that the nation of about 5.1 million individuals was presently processing greater than 200,000 asylum purposes. Based on IOM officers I spoke with, the nation’s asylum system had a nine-month backlog. Not one of the seven shelters I visited had any vacancies.
The amount of reverse migration from Mexico may swell much more. From January to August 2024, Mexican authorities reported greater than 900,000 cases of individuals within the nation with out authorized standing. Within the final quarter of 2024 alone, roughly 475,000 such “irregular” migrants had been detained by Mexican safety forces. Ought to a big fraction of these individuals transfer southward within the coming months, a humanitarian disaster will come up in Costa Rica and probably elsewhere in Latin America. In 2019, when 60,000 Nicaraguans fled civil battle, Costa Rica’s asylum system was overloaded.
Costa Rican officers acknowledge that they aren’t totally ready. “We count on a wave—a big wave,” Badilla instructed me throughout an interview in his San José workplace. “We predict they”—migrants—“are staggered between Mexico and Nicaragua, and sooner or later they will explode into Costa Rica.” With sober certainty, he instructed me that the nation must declare a state of emergency to authorize the discharge of state sources to construct short-term shelters and supply meals, medical help, clothes, and toiletries for migrants. “We would not have the aptitude,” he stated.
The workplace of the nation’s ombudsman—its prime accountability officer who additionally oversees the safety of human rights—lately criticized authorities “failures” related to Costa Rica’s remedy of migrants in detention, together with individuals who had passports and different paperwork confiscated.
Badilla fears that by turning away even asylum seekers and pushing them south, america is compounding the humanitarian disaster in his nation. However he stated that Costa Rica “sadly” stays closely reliant on america on issues together with safety and public well being. In February, President Rodrigo Chaves Robles stated that the nation would cooperate with its “economically highly effective brother from the north” by accepting flights crammed with migrants deported from the U.S. Human-rights litigators have filed go well with in opposition to each Costa Rica and Panama for allegedly detaining the migrants, together with youngsters, and violating their rights; the circumstances are ongoing, however U.S. expulsion flights to each international locations have since stopped. (The governments of each international locations have denied that the migrants are being detained in opposition to their will.)
Badilla—an appointee of President Chaves, whose centrist Social Democratic Progress Get together received the nation’s 2022 election with an anti-corruption marketing campaign—says that xenophobia is already on the rise in Costa Rica. He believes that his social gathering, which faces an election in 2026, solely stands to lose from a nativist political backlash like people who have displaced average governments in Europe and america in recent times.
The Trump administration would possibly welcome the information that migrants are turning again, however a extra unstable Central and South America may harm U.S. pursuits. Ought to Costa Rica’s Washington-friendly authorities fall, a weaker state or a extra Beijing-oriented different may very well be elected instead. In the meantime, the shutdown of the U.S. asylum system will stress extra migrants to flip to smugglers to cross the border, and go away migrants weak to exploitation by the Mexican cartels that Trump promised to assault in his marketing campaign. Trump’s insurance policies are tarnishing America’s legacy as a refuge for persecuted individuals trying to find freedom and human rights, and will embolden different nations to undertake comparable ways in violation of worldwide legislation.
Trump has proclaimed that his border restrictions shall be loosened after he determines that the “invasion on the southern border has ceased.” However even with 1000’s of migrants now turning south, humanitarian challenges within the Western Hemisphere will persist.
