Trump Reversed Migration in 100 Days, and My Trip to Panama Proves It

Ambar Ramierez’s daughter burrows her face into her mother’s chest, her pink bunny rabbit pyjama bottoms blowing in the 6.30am breeze, as the boat operator checks their name against his list.

Behind them stand dozens of Venezuelan migrants, their possessions stuffed into black bin bags, as they wait for a coveted blue wristband which will secure their place on a speed-boat from this small concrete jetty on Panama’s Caribbean coast towards Colombia.

A few feet away, a boat operator dressed in a satin camouflage tracksuit counts a wad of cash – the spoils of his passengers’ desperation.

Six months ago, Ms Ramierez and her three children – Edwin, six, Amber, five and three-year-old Antonella – embarked for the United States. Their gruelling passage included days walking past decomposing bodies in the Darien Gap, the sliver of jungle connecting South and Central America that has become one of the world’s most deadly migration routes. When they finally reached Mexico they were kidnapped and extorted by the cartel.

Despite their setbacks, they carried on, buoyed up by the promise of a better life on American soil.

Now, after Donald Trump sealed the US border and shut down pathways for migrants to claim asylum, that dream is over – and they are heading home.

“Nobody can imagine what it is to cross the jungle, you have to live it to understand… We did all of that, for what?” Ambar asks as she waits on the dirt and gravel path leading to the port.

“There’s no way I’m going back to the jungle, so the only option is the sea,” she says.

The Ramierez family are among thousands of migrants, predominantly from Venezuela, who have started making the long journey back south in a wave of reverse migration sparked by Mr Trump’s hardline immigration policies.

After Mr Trump pegged his campaign to a pledge to carry mass deportations and “seal the border on day one”, the dramatic slump in border crossings has been heralded by his administration as one of the successes of his first 100 days in power.

By shutting down Joe Biden’s CBP One app, which helped more than 936,000 migrants schedule appointments at US ports of entry for asylum processing, reinforcing the border and pressuring Mexico to send 10,000 troops to patrol the 2,000-mile stretch, Mr Trump has stemmed the flow of migrants crossing into the US.

Mr Trump’s immigration policies, while controversial, stand out as the area in which the US president enjoys the strongest support. According to a poll by the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, 46 per cent of US adults approve of his handling of immigration, nearly 10 percentage points higher than his rating on the economy.

Border Patrol agents recorded just 7,181 encounters at the southern border in March, according to government data – a 95 per cent drop from the 137,473 crossings reported in for the same month in 2024. The downward trend began under Mr Biden, but Mr Trump has since slowed crossings to a near halt.

In the first three months of his presidency, some 44,632 migrants have been apprehended crossing the southern border, according to the US Border Patrol.

This is the lowest number under any president since at least 2000 and a seventh of the number who crossed the border in the first three months of Mr Biden’s presidency.

And for those who have already made it to the US the Trump administration’s message has been clear: go home now, or we will find you and deport you.

“The reality is the Trump administration has not managed to deport a lot of people from the interior of the country, but they have managed to effectively stop illegal entries across the US border,” Andrew Selee, president of the think tank Migration Policy Institute (MPI), says.

“Those are two different promises they made, the one they really have succeeded almost immediately, by stopping people from crossing the border.”

Mr Selee adds: “I do think the numbers will go up here and there… but my sense is that the Trump administration is really willing – they have made closing the border their number one priority above everything else.”

A few colourful houses, a smattering of dirt roads and one shop make up the tiny town of Miramar, where around 200 residents have for years survived off catering to tourists visiting the San Blas Islands’s crisp, white beaches.

But three months ago a handful of migrants who did not want to retrace their treacherous steps in the Darien Gap after fleeing America turned up at the town’s concrete jetty, which sits around an hour and a half down a potholed road from Colon, the nearest city, asking for help to get to Colombia.

Now, the village has become one of the main routes for migrants making the journey back home, with boat operators charging the influx of migrants $260 (£195) for each adult for the “VIP” service to Necoclí in Colombia. Children under four go free, those aged four to six cost $60 (£45) and seven to nine $130 (£98).

The indigenous Guna people had initially been running the crossings to Colombia, but stopped after an eight-year-old Venezuelan girl died when a boat capsized while making the seven-hour crossing in February.

Now Zamar Meza, 36, and his “co-operative” of boat owners rule the roost. He and his friends have taken around 5,000 Venezuelan migrants south in the past three months. He says they currently make around $6,000-a-week (£4,498) profit.

Adverts for the “all inclusive” route from Panama to Colombia that include a video of the Miramar port have also been shared on TikTok in a bid to pull in desperate paying customers.

Before 7am on Wednesday April 23, two boats packed with 35 adults and seven children sitting on their parents’ laps, slowly backed out of the water, which was thick with algae, before speeding off into the distance. Some of the migrants took selfies as they set off, while others waved goodbye to the dozens left waiting at the water’s edge.

“Although it’s new, it’s also been a blessing,” Mr Meza says, as he points towards the construction of a new house he’s building. “This has been possible thanks to the migrants”, he adds.

Mr Meza says the full package includes a three-hour bus transfer at 2am from Panama City. If the boat doesn’t leave that morning because of the weather, he lets the migrants sleep on a thin mattress in his air conditioned half-built bakery.

He takes $160 (£120) of the $260 (£195) fee for the seven-hour boat ride to Puerto Obaldia, where they drop the migrants off. The other $100 (£75) goes to the Colombian boat operators who collect them and take them towards Necoclí, in Colombia.

His counterparts in Colombia will often call him to say they have dozens of migrants lined up who want to pay for the journey and where to collect them from.

While Mr Meza insists they have no links with criminal gangs such as the Colombian Clan del Gulfo, Elías Andrés Cornejo Rodríguez, who helps run migrant charity Fe Y Alegria, he says he thinks they “will definitely be involved, because they don’t miss a financial opportunity”.

“People are going to make money on others’ desperation”, Mr Selee adds.

“Often things do happen spontaneously, and then groups with experience, smuggling groups come in and provide some order, and some structure… They either force their way in, or they make it in everyone’s benefit.”

Mr Meza has insisted he has an official licence to run the boats. The Panamanian government has said boats are carrying migrants south with the “full knowledge of regional authorities” but said the specific arrangements were “irregular” deals struck with captains.

As well as sealing the border, the Trump administration has carried out a string of deportation flights and piled pressure on migrants already in the US to “self deport”.

The administration released the app CBP Home, a play on the Biden administration’s CBP One app, which allows migrants to notify the government of their intent to depart.

DHS has also contacted migrants threatening fines if they don’t leave, as well as highlighting their efforts to send 238 Venezuelans to El Salvador’s mega-prison.

Three weeks ago, Juan Miguel Perez had been living the “good life” in Minnesota, having worked as a mechanic in the Midwestern state since he walked across the US border two years ago.

But when he received a text from DHS telling him he had 10 days to leave the country or face fines of $900 (£675) per day, he decided to start making the 3,000-mile journey home to Venezuela.

“I thought ‘checkmate’,” he says as he packs his belongings into a black bin bag before boarding a boat towards Colombia.

“I’m disappointed, of course, to have to abandon my goals like this and leave everything,” the 36 year-old said.

The only saving grace is the “joy” of being reunited with his six children, who he has not seen since he left Venezuela seven years ago.

Anderson Mendoza, 29, had also been living in the US for more than two years when he walked into an ICE office in Washington DC and said: “I want to go home.”

“I made an early decision to come back because I knew what was coming for me,” he says.

He was put on several flights before being deported across the Mexican border in a minivan. He took the bus to Panama, but is one of the dozens of migrants who cannot afford the boat fare. He has been stranded in Miramar for a week, and is hoping immigration services will help him travel back to Venezuela.

Liseth Murillo, president of the Portobelo Red Cross Committee in Colón, was previously stationed at the Darien Gap. But when crowds of people crossing north through the jungles dropped from tens of thousands to a few hundred a month, she and her team relocated to Miramar.

“This is only the beginning,” she says. “There’s still a lot [of migrants] left because from what they tell us there are still many people in Costa Rica and in Mexico who are coming back south.”

It is not just those hoping to travel south who are stuck in Panama.

At the Fe y Alegría shelter on the outskirts of Panama City, 47 migrants who were among the 299 third-country nationals deported from the US to Panama on three deportation flights in February are trying to work out what to do next.

The group, which includes asylum seekers from China, Iran and Afghanistan, were shackled and put on a military plane to Panama, where they were kept in a hotel, unable to leave, before being moved to a “migration camp” near the Darien Gap where they claim they were treated like animals.

According to the International Organisation for Migration (IOM) by March 18, 179 of the original 299 deportees had returned to their home countries, but those that remain fear they will be killed if they return home.

Among them is Aleks, who sits on a thin mattress at the back corner of the cavernous shelter, his paperwork laid on top in a manilla folder.

The 38 year-old, who did not want to give his full name, says he left Russia in September 2022 because he feared reprisals for speaking out against the invasion of Ukraine on social media. He travelled to Europe and worked as a truck driver in Hungary, but decided to travel to the US after hearing stories of others being refused asylum in Europe.

Aleks, who worked as an engineer before leaving Moscow, flew to Mexico and crossed the border with Calexico in California at an official point of entry in a bid to plead political asylum. But as soon as he presented himself to Border Patrol, he was arrested and deported to Panama.

“I feel disappointment, confusion and resentment, because I think that the United States is the personification of freedom, and I thought that every person who enters the territory can ask for asylum, and his request will be accepted for consideration,” he says, speaking through a translation app.

Mr Rodríguez, whose charity Fe Y Alegria took in migrants for the first time in response to the flights, says this wave of deportees and migrants returning south is just the tip of the iceberg.

“This is a ticking bomb,” he says.

For now, Aleks says he plans to cross the US border again to try and seek asylum.

“I will 100 per cent be put to jail, and I will prove in prison that it is dangerous for me to return to my country,” he says.

“If I return to Russia, I will have two options: go to prison or go to war against Ukraine. In both cases, it will mean death.”