An early Center for Immigration Studies assessment from the field
By Todd Bensman as published September 9, 2024 by the Center for Immigration Studies
KEY FINDINGS
1. Panama was unable to ramp up substantial air or ground expulsions because the United States did not follow through with seemingly promised financial support Panama thought necessary for repatriation flights to be effective. Although a few expulsion flights carrying mostly criminal aliens did begin to disembark from Panama City to Colombia, China, and India, the Biden-Harris administration apparently cited restrictive conditions for its July 1 agreement with Panama, and sustained aid for a frequency of flights needed to create deterrence is not likely to materialize until at least the end of the Biden-Harris term. Also, short of a U.S. contribution of diplomatic pressure, Panamanian agreements with Colombia and other sending countries to take back their expelled citizens were delayed.
2. A significant decline in human traffic followed Mulino’s initial orders, which intended to channel migration flows from several trails through the Darien down to one, in preparation for the expected U.S.-supported air expulsions. But the ensuing slowdown, which has been significant, was not likely attributable to Panama’s moves so much as 1) initial migrant decisions to wait in place to observe whether Panama followed through on expulsion plans; and 2) Venezuelans, a leading nationality using the gap, appeared to have stayed home to vote in much-anticipated July 28 national elections that many hoped would topple that nation’s unpopular dictator Nicolas Maduro, but ultimately did not.
3. While the Mulino government’s first enforcement moves altered migration flow patterns through some areas, migrants who delayed travel plans in Venezuela, Colombia, or other South American countries appeared to have begun returning to the trails in increasing numbers during late August and early September 2024 when it became apparent that Venezuelan elections failed to unseat Maduro, and that Panama was still allowing almost all arrivals to transit in the absence of significant expulsions of non-criminal aliens.
4. Colombia, whose cooperation is key to Panama’s deterrence plans, appears to have continued open tolerance policies that foster a marriage between legitimate agencies and illegitimate criminal organizations that operate in tightly integrated partnership to facilitate mass migration into the gap toward Panama. No changes or impediments to this infrastructure were evident on the Colombian side.
5. Panama’s success in fulfilling its aspirations to reduce illegal immigration through the Darien Gap in the near and far term will depend, in large part, on the next U.S. administration’s commitment to supplying unconditional financial support as well as applying its diplomatic muscle on key countries to more decisively and demonstrably change their free-transit policies, such as Colombia and Ecuador. A Kamala Harris administration is less likely to provide these necessary commitments than would a Trump administration.
INTRODUCTION
PANAMA CITY, Panama — On the first day of July 2024, new Panamanian President Jose Raul Mulino began his five-year term and quickly went to work implementing a chief promise that no previous contemporary leader of Panama has attempted.1 Within hours of inauguration, President Mulino ordered the first tentative steps to “close” the Darien Gap migrant passageway on his border with Colombia, an unprecedented policy U-turn for Panama with significant consequences for the United States.
The Darien Gap is the roadless 70-mile part of the isthmus that connects North and South America, through which a record-breaking 1.5 million foreign nationals from 170 countries passed from 2021 to mid-2024 en route to planned illegal U.S. southern border crossings.2
Colombia and Panama had never experienced such high numbers as in those three-plus years, and foot traffic was continuing at the record levels through to Mulino’s July 1 accession as president.3
The purpose of this report is to assess early progress of President Mulino’s highly consequential closure initiative, to chart its direction, provide a medium-term prognosis, and identify challenges to achieving Panamanian goals that might improve current U.S. border security and immigration-control management.
Darien Gap foot traffic at these levels matters to U.S. domestic policy and electoral political outcomes. That is because the high volumes — 520,000 in 2023 alone — have contributed outsized percentages of multinational migrant diversity to the record-breaking 10 million that attempted U.S. Southwest border crossings, a large majority of them ushered in by current U.S. quick-release policies, between 2021 and July 2024.4
Panama’s unusual proposal to reverse years of Panamanian Darien Gap policy — which was to quickly admit migrants for northern transit aboard government-organized bus caravans5 — portends meaningful consequences for U.S. national security, immigration control policy, and domestic electoral politics because migrants from non-traditional nationalities moving through the chokepoint have become so numerous in recent years.6
These migrants from 170-plus countries other than Mexico or Central America account for the highest-ever volumes of people reaching the U.S. border — some 45 percent — and present public safety and national security concerns to the United States. The highest percentages using the gap are Venezuelans and Haitians, who cannot be vetted for criminality.
But a great many also hail from Muslim-majority nations of national security interest where Islamic terrorist groups operate and adversarial countries known to field U.S.-targeting espionage operations, such as China, Iran, and Russia. So great had the volume become that Panama went from screening 90 percent of those passing through the country for terrorism or espionage before 2021 to less than 3 percent in 2024, resulting in the detection at the U.S. border of a record 378 on the FBI terrorism watch list from FY 2021 through July 2024.7
For their part, U.S. authorities also are largely unable to vet migrants from many of these countries for past criminal history, powering often-accurate perception that Darien Gap traffic poses an especially high U.S. public safety threat of criminality.8
Because polling shows strong dasapproval among Americans for the overall numbers and public safety threats, the new Panamanian president’s policy turnabout to close the Darien Gap carries the potential to significantly alleviate the U.S. border crisis in the longer term, reduce perceptions in the United States that it has compromised general public safety, improve U.S. and Panama counterterrorism security effectiveness, and even influence the outcome of future U.S. elections.9
This report is based on first-hand field research conducted from August 6-18, 2024, on both sides of the Darien Gap, which in Colombia encompasses migration trail entry points around the Gulf of Uraba and in Panama trail exits in Darien Province and Embera tribal reservation lands. This report is based on direct observation and interviews with migrants, residents, United Nations officials, smugglers, non-governmental organization personnel, area residents, and top Panamanian officials.
First Panamanian Moves
Prior to entering office, President-elect Mulino, a former security minister, publicly proclaimed that he would base his new Darien Gap closure plan on air expulsions and several other high-consequence enforcement measures using Panama’s National Border Service police forces, known by the acronym SENAFRONT. The idea behind expulsions is that migrants who pay high smuggling fees to cross would stay home and not pay for treks if the odds were high that they would be returned to starting lines with a total investment loss.10
“Panama and our Darien are not a transit route; they are our border,” President-elect Mulino first announced in a May speech right after his election.11 “And the concept of closure that I have outlined implies that we will initiate, with international assistance, a repatriation process in full compliance with human rights for all individuals in the Darien, so that those from there and those who wish to come know that anyone arriving here will be sent back to their country of origin.”
Perhaps most significantly, on his inauguration day President Mulino secured a signed “Arrangement with Panama to Implement Removal Flight Program” from U.S. Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, who was in attendance.12 The agreement seemed to commit the United States to “help the Panamanian government remove foreign nationals who do not have a legal basis to remain in Panama” as a primary means to “reduce unprecedented irregular migration through the Darien region”.13
But in early signs that this American support was less full-throated than the July 2024 agreement and trip readouts suggested, what the new Panamanian government requested was a dramatic 180-degree U.S. policy swivel.
For more than two years, the Mayorkas DHS and Secretary of State Antony Blinken have worked with the Panama and Colombian governments on “a coordinated approach” to expand the capacity and speed of forward movement through the Darien Gap, on purported humanitarian grounds. The premise of the American policy was that creating safer, shorter routes for more people would save the lives of the vast new numbers of migrants who were responding to new U.S. catch-and-release policies allowing hundreds of thousands a month to enter through the U.S.-Mexico border.
Following the April 2022 joint signing of a “Bilateral Arrangement on Migration and Protection”, for instance, Panama agreed not to impede a recently opened Caribbean Sea access to a navigable Panamanian river that dramatically shortened the difficult foot journeys.14 Panama was soon expanding and improving processing centers and funding hundreds of non-governmental migration-assistance agencies on both sides of the Darien Gap.15
“Every country must do its part,” Mayorkas said in an April 2022 readout from his just-ended tour of the Darien Gap and meetings with ranking Colombian and Ecuadorian officials in Panama. “We will continue working with partners in the hemisphere to implement a coordinated approach to humane border management that includes improving access to protection and legal pathways, stabilization efforts, and protecting the integrity of our borders.”16
But while the Biden government was now asked to sign a new opposite policy agreement to add expulsions into the mix, a careful reading of the agreement shows verbiage that was quite conditional, while Panama’s government would quickly learn of other sharply limiting factors, such as the fact that U.S. funding for flights was budgeted at only $6 million.17
For starters, the agreement neutralized deterrence by requiring that migrants targeted for repatriation first undergo humanitarian “protection screening” to determine if individuals can be rechanneled into so-called “lawful pathways” to the United States.
“Lawful pathways” is an obvious reference to the legally dubious “humanitarian parole” programs the Biden administration created that, between the fall of 2022 and July 2024, allowed some 1.2 million inadmissible aliens to enter the United States via U.S.-authorized direct flights from all over the globe for two-year renewable residencies; and a second similar “lawful pathways” program that provided escorts by appointment on a cell phone app through certain U.S.-Mexico border land ports of entry.18 This second one allows intending border-crossers to apply on the “CBP One” mobile phone app for scheduled escorts over U.S.-Mexico land ports for the two-year residencies.19 A third lawful pathways program “refugee-izes” applicants in Latin America who were rarely granted refugee status in the past, and has flown in tens of thousands more.20
These post-signing agreement limitations on U.S. supported repatriation flights, at least initially, have hobbled the early Panamanian efforts.
Tepid U.S. Support
But before he understood there would be limiting American pre-conditions on the air flight aid and probably no new aircraft; the new president prepared in naïve earnest for the expected U.S. support.
Mulino ordered 4.7 kilometers of barbed wire barriers and checkpoints to block three of four main foot trails across the Colombia-Panama line at geographically strategic spots and channel them onto a single main trail. The idea was to direct far more migrants into the hands of an awaiting SENAFRONT (although many other trails traverse the region).21
Mulino also ordered Panamanian coast guard vessels to hunt for smuggler vessels on the Pacific and Atlantic oceans with orders to detain “irregular migrants”.22 SENAFRONT next launched a campaign to investigate and arrest Panamanians involved in Darien Gap smuggling operations.
But before he understood there would be limiting American pre-conditions on the air flight aid and probably no new aircraft; the new president prepared in naïve earnest for the expected U.S. support.
Mulino ordered 4.7 kilometers of barbed wire barriers and checkpoints to block three of four main foot trails across the Colombia-Panama line at geographically strategic spots and channel them onto a single main trail. The idea was to direct far more migrants into the hands of an awaiting SENAFRONT (although many other trails traverse the region).21
Mulino also ordered Panamanian coast guard vessels to hunt for smuggler vessels on the Pacific and Atlantic oceans with orders to detain “irregular migrants”.22 SENAFRONT next launched a campaign to investigate and arrest Panamanians involved in Darien Gap smuggling operations.
That wasn’t the only important foundational groundwork laid. According to SENAFRONT Director General Jorge Gobea, during an August 13 interview with the Center for Immigration Studies in Panama City, the Panamanians also opened diplomatic talks with Colombia, Venezuela, and Ecuador to secure agreements for them to accept increased numbers of citizens that Panama planned to target for air expulsion. Their acceptance was seen as a necessary precursor to enable Panama to meet legal international migration treaty obligations that otherwise required allowed transits.
(See extended excerpts from the interview with Director General Gobea here.)
Gobea said Colombia had been accepting one planeload of criminal aliens per week Panama sent to Medellin since November 2023. Now Panama was asking for dramatic increases in flights to create deterrence and also help attack the pervasive “Clan del Golfo” paramilitary criminal organization that controlled all Darien Gap traffic from Colombia.
The new Panamanian government then waited for the promised U.S. assistance to ramp up the policy’s most essential deterrent element, the “removal flight program”, Gobea stated. The expectation was also that the Americans would add diplomatic muscle to Panama’s requests of its southerly neighbors.
“We can’t deal with this in a unilateral way,” Gobea told the Center. “We understand that we need logistics support to reinforce the politics of expulsion of migrants … so we can expel to different countries and avoid their movement in the normal flow to the United States. The politics is a big deal. It’s the golden nugget of all the migration.”
A Dramatic Slow-Down, Briefly, but Still No U.S. Cavalry to the Rescue
Some good news arrived amid these early moves and public messaging. Migrant arrivals declined sharply in early summer amid the publicity about the coming changes and the Venezuelan election.
The number of arrivals dropped from about 50,000 during June and July 2023 to just 5,000 in June and July 2024, Gobea said.
“We expected reductions in the four months prior to [Venezuela’s] elections because a lot of people were waiting to stay there and vote to see what happened,” Gobea explained. Maduro retained power amid an often-violent crackdown on political opponents who cried fraud.
The August numbers showed the slowdown had persisted a full second month, coming in at 30 percent of the January-August 2023 numbers, Gobea later reported in a text message to the Center.
But Gobea also said that “We expect an increase in the flow.”
Why?
While Gobea would not elaborate, President Mulino has publicly complained several times since his inauguration about one main reason to expect rising volumes: Loopholes and restrictions in the July 1 agreement with the Biden-Harris administration to assist with repatriation flights. Chief among these, Mulino publicly complained, was that the U.S. would support expulsion flights only for migrants who volunteered to board the flights, which poses no real deterrent.23
“If migrants don’t want to return to their countries, “then they’ll go (to the United States). I can’t arrest them. We can’t forcibly repatriate them,” Mulino admitted, noting the irony that, “This is a United States problem that we are managing. People don’t want to live here in Panama. They want to go to the United States.”
No significant U.S. financial support was forthcoming, either, the president complained at a July 18 press conference.
By mid-August, the Biden administration still had not provided the promised assistance. When it did finally announce it had funded a first expulsion flight in late August, it turned out that it was the same one full of criminal alien Colombians that Panama had already been sending to Medellin since last year, rather than non-criminal aliens representative of the high-volume categories that Panama wanted to impact.24 With U.S. backing, Panama also sent some flights to China and India with plans for additional ones, although again, little is known about plans for how frequent these might become or whether those aboard volunteered to leave or also were criminal aliens whose departures would not create deterrence for non-criminal migrants.
Furthermore, there was little evidence to the Panamanians that the United States was providing the diplomatic muscle necessary to persuade South American countries to accept the large-scale repatriation flights necessary for deterrence.
During his interview with the Center, Gobea suggested that Panama’s diplomatic effort with Colombia and Ecuador to take back their expelled citizens was a solo affair and wasn’t going well, either. (Venezuela broke off diplomatic relations with Panama for not recognizing its election results and ended talks about repatriation flights.) But Colombia, where millions of Venezuelans have lived for years with government permission and could be returned, hadn’t committed to anything more than the once-a-week flights of criminal aliens already in place.
“For both countries, this phenomenon has overcome our capacities and capabilities, but we are working together in a better way,” Gobea told the Center, optimistically, in early August. “This is still a diplomatic effort. That’s the task. We’re doing what we know how to do. We’re working on that.”
Ecuador, whose “open skies” policies of allowing many nationalities to fly in without visas or with tourist visas obtained on minimal requirements, also had not committed to changing that important policy yet either.
“Unilaterally, we don’t have the capability without the U.S. government support of our efforts,” Gobea said of expulsion plans. “We want to increase that capability to more Colombians, more Venezuelans, and more from Ecuador. But all that depends on the diplomatic line of effort we need to bring forth. There is a diplomatic line of effort.”
Finally, Gobea confirmed migrant testimony to the Center about one other new Panamanian move: that Panama would only allow entrances through the Darien to migrants who could show identification documents such as passports, so they can be checked against criminal and national security databases. Panama has widely messaged to aspiring migrants that they would not be allowed to pass without the documents, and migrants heard the message loud and clear.
However, without the ability to expel those without papers, Gobea acknowledged that Panama was forced to let even paperless migrants through.
“Not right now,” he said when asked if Panama was actually blocking those who don’t meet the new requirement. “In the future … because when you have 5,000 or 10,000 migrants you have to move them out. You need to keep them moving.”
Migrants Seeing No Expulsions Surge
The Center interviewed many dozens of migrants about how the news of Panama’s new policy was impacting their decisions to travel. In the Colombian town of Turbo, a popular staging town on the Gulf of Uraba for Darien Gap trips on the other side, long-time local residents explained that traffic had fallen off sharply after Panama announced it would close the gap.
One local businessman, who asked that his name be withheld out of fear of a local cartel that controls all the human smuggling, said the migrants had decided to stay back in the big cities Medellin and Bogota earlier this summer. The 200-500 migrants who had been arriving in Turbo on average each day for several years plummeted to maybe 50 a day, the man said in English.
“In this moment, there’s not much people coming because they’re not going to want to spend money over here for nothing,” he said. “The border is closed. It’s closed. They know it.”
But all migrants the Center interviewed who did come to Turbo for their Darien Gap crossing said they did so now because Panama was not following through on expulsions. In short, their testimonials supported the idea that more would not feel deterred from trying as time wears on.
“They say it’s closed but they’re passing us through,” one Venezuelan man in a crowd of freshly arrived Venezuelans in Turbo said. “They put barbed wire up, but then that’s it. And anyway, the Panamanians say they’re going to let Venezuelans pass. They said they were going to open so we can pass through.”
Another Venezuelan man in the group said he brought his family after the failed election and that many more were coming now behind his group, enthused by news that Panama was allowing all Venezuelans to pass through.
“A wave is coming. A wave is coming,” he assured.
A Cameroonian migrant carrying a heavy backpack in the town of Necocli, preparing to board a ferry to another town across the Gulf of Urabe where he would access a Darien Gap trailhead said Panama’s plans didn’t worry him enough to remain in place elsewhere in Colombia.
“We got information that it is closed but we are willing to try,” he said. “We are willing to risk it.”
Wedded Bliss in Status-Quo Colombia
Meanwhile, there was no sign that Colombia’s government headed by President Gustavo Petro, a former M19 guerrilla movement member and progressive liberal, has moved at all to meet Panama halfway.25
An armed paramilitary organization called the “Gaitanist Self-Defense Forces of Colombia”, or the “Gulf Clan” (Clan del Golfo), controls a wide swath of northwestern Colombian approaches to the Darien Gap, a powerhouse in all the migrant staging towns on both sides of the Gulf of Uraba.26 Theirs is a cocaine- and people-smuggling organization said to be Colombia’s largest and richest criminal/political group, with 6,000 men under arms who have at times engaged in hot wars with Colombian central intelligence and security forces.27 A 2023 U.S. Department of Justice press release announcing the sentencing of a top leader on drug trafficking and murder charges described the organization as “one of the most violent and most powerful criminal organizations in Colombia and one of the largest distributors of cocaine in the world” exercising “military control over vast amounts of territory in the Uraba region of Antioquia, Colombia”.28
In that region for nearly a week, the Center observed local and federal Colombian government entities working in deep integration with the Gaitanistas, as did U.S.-funded United Nations agencies and non-governmental migrant advocacy groups from the United States, Latin America, and Europe.
Working together openly, both legitimate and illegitimate entities operate an migrant-moving machine that is well-oiled and institutionalized.
Other than that business was unusually down, there was no sign of central government interference, only participation.
On the east shore of the gulf, in towns like Turbo and Necocli, the Gaitanistas solicit all arriving migrants for the fees, ranging from $175 to $300 per person, to board boats over to the western shore. The migrants acquire the necessary camping gear for their trek through the Darien at open street kiosks and fixed shops. All are given black plastic bags for the crossing and pack the equipment inside. The Gaitanistas make sure everyone gets a claim ticket with a name and number that matches a sticker placed on each black bag, which the organization transports over by boat.
A little later, the migrants are brought over on separate boats and are reunited with the black bags in towns such as Acandi and Capurgana on the western shore. Then they are bought by motorcycle taxis to meet their guides in trailhead camps from which they begin their hikes into Panama. A Gaitanista-linked group in Acandi calling itself the “Assembly for the Community of Acandi” manages all of this transportation as local police officers walk or drive by, apparently uninterested. Local assembly leaders granted the Center permission to access a boat ramp and one of its two staging camps for the hikes, clearly taking pride in the tightly organized operations.
Guards control the perimeter and access to “Camp 1”, but on the inside the Center found non-governmental organizations providing medical services, legal counseling, and food. Furthermore, Colombian banks also had been allowed to set up a money wiring service so that migrants could pay their Gaitanista foot guides.
All involved are aware that the people they are moving intend to break the immigration laws of a half dozen countries up trail, including, ultimately, illegally breaching the American border.
“When the people get off the bus, they are waiting for you,” one English-speaking Ecuadorian told me in Necocli. “They say yeah, yeah, I got the hotel and the passage. You must pay for entrance.”
Evidence of what happens when they don’t pay is pervasive: makeshift camps on beaches and in streets filled with those trying to collect the payment. None get on any boat without payment. The UN and NGOs provide aid and assistance to them, too.
There can be no misinterpretation of the migrants and their intent, either. All are readily identifiable by the hiking and camping equipment they’ve acquired for the Darien Gap trail — also by nationality and appearance.
Local governments are wittingly involved. The towns of Necocli and Turbo, for example, collect taxes at ferry docks of about $1.50 from every backpack-carrying ticket-holder.
Colombia’s central government is openly complicit too. Federal migration officers check for identification papers on every backpacking foreigner and permit them to board boats with all manner of trail equipment.
No federal immigration officers could be seen at unofficial boat launch spots where migrants without identity documents or could still cross with Gaitanista pilots.
Prognosis on Darien Gap Closure Depends on U.S. Presidential Election Outcome
Panama’s plans to permanently return traffic levels through the Darien Gap to pre-Biden levels depend greatly on U.S. funding for sufficient numbers of expulsion flights to have deterrent effect, and also on U.S. diplomacy to persuade Colombia, Ecuador, Venezuela, and perhaps countries elsewhere in the world to dramatically alter their own entrenched national policies and also accept the involuntary returns of their non-criminal citizens.
Early U.S. responses to Panamanian pleas for required financial and diplomatic assistance strongly indicate that the Biden-Harris administration is not genuinely interested in reversing its aversion to deterrence-based policies, and especially not its carefully crafted Darien Gap policy of easing the way to the U.S. border for migrants.
Although there is a small chance that the Biden-Harris administration will more robustly support the Panamanian plan, and that more frequent expulsion flights will dissuade Indians and Chinese from traveling the gap, interested stakeholders should not expect such a profound U.S. policy reversal that would be necessary to deter significant numbers in the near term. Panama, therefore, will likely find itself in a mostly unilateral position at least until the Biden-Harris term ends on January 20, 2025.
The success or failure of Panama’s gambit, therefore, probably hinges on the outcome of the November 5, 2024, U.S. presidential election.
Based on assessments of her current and prior positioning on mass migration, Democratic Party nominee Kamala Harris can be expected to withhold the funding and diplomacy that Panama requires to succeed and continue the Biden policy. By contrast, Republican Party nominee Donald Trump might be expected to provide the needed U.S. support.
Success for Panama would serve the U.S. national interest in matters of counterterrorism and public safety and security. Panama’s failure would guarantee a status quo in which, arguably, a rare opportunity to serve U.S. national interests will have been missed.
End Notes