Within the north of Costa Rica, an irregular grime path runs parallel to the freeway that connects the nation with Nicaragua on the Las Tablillas border put up. 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 depart their ruined sneakers behind as soon as they make it throughout. On a go to to the world final month, I noticed a whole bunch of discarded footwear, sun-bleached and caked in mud. However I used to be shocked to see that they had been piled up on the southern facet 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 rare reversal in human migration: For the primary time in current historical past, the folks passing by 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, tens of millions of migrants from Latin America, the Caribbean, Asia, and Africa have carved a path from South America by the treacherous Darién jungle and into Panama en route north to the USA. However that large circulate is now dwindling.
Costa Rica is consultant of the development. For many years, a whole bunch and typically hundreds of migrants crossed the nation by bus every single day, touring the roughly 300 miles from Paso Canoas within the south to Los Chiles within the north; based on the UN-affiliated Worldwide Group for Migration, from 2021 to 2024 greater than 1.2 million folks entered the nation heading north from Panama. However after peaking in August 2023 at about 84,500, the variety of folks migrating north by 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 folks moved south into Costa Rica.
Different nations within the area, together with Guatemala and Colombia, have additionally seen a reversal of their migration flows, and have recorded even greater numbers of southbound migrants to this point this 12 months. The Panamanian authorities has reported about 5,100 such migrants for the reason that 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 embody migrants who enter the nation at evening or over the weekend, and don’t all the time 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 that they had resided whereas awaiting asylum interviews with U.S. officers that by no means came about. Help staff I spoke with stated that bus corporations had not too long ago begun organizing further routes from Los Chiles to inside cities farther south, corresponding 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 suppose they may get into the USA. 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 might schedule screening appointments. Migrants I interviewed stated that that they had 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 must pay smuggling sums that the majority of them can’t afford; El País not too long ago reported charges between $6,000 and $10,000 per individual in Tijuana.
Some migrants advised 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 folks, typically concentrating on these more likely to have U.S.-based family members prepared to pay their ransoms. A number of migrants advised me that they wished to flee situations in Mexico that had been worse than those who impressed them to go away their house nations within the first place.
Till not too long ago, Abismael, a 25-year-old Venezuelan automotive mechanic who withheld his full identify as a result of he fears retribution, labored for an auto store in Tapachula, Mexico. In alternate for meals and shelter, he advised me, he labored 12-hour days, seven days every week for a $15 weekly allowance. He stated that earlier this 12 months, 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 hanging Abismael on his again with the barrel of a rifle. “Fuck your mother, I need my cash!” they shouted at his 4-year-old nephew. Abismael and his relations 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 an area market, however he stated that they deliberate to use for asylum in Costa Rica and settle there. “Whenever you take a breath right here after Mexico,” he stated, “it’s completely different air. It’s a unique world. We are able to take walks on the streets. They provide us meals right here, water, bogs.”
“Actually, 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 secure 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—are not any higher than in Mexico. Early outcomes from an unpublished IOM survey in Costa Rica present that 22 p.c of polled southbound migrants plan to remain, whereas 73 p.c 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 turning into overwhelmed. After I met with him final month, Omer Badilla Toledo, a vice minister who oversees migration coverage for Costa Rica’s authorities, advised me that the nation of about 5.1 million folks was at present processing greater than 200,000 asylum functions. In response to 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 quantity of reverse migration from Mexico might swell much more. From January to August 2024, Mexican authorities reported greater than 900,000 situations 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 folks transfer southward within the coming months, a humanitarian disaster will come up in Costa Rica and presumably 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 anticipate a wave—a big wave,” Badilla advised me throughout an interview in his San José workplace. “We expect they”—migrants—“are staggered between Mexico and Nicaragua, and in some unspecified time in the future they’re going to explode into Costa Rica.” With sober certainty, he advised me that the nation must declare a state of emergency to authorize the discharge of state sources to construct momentary shelters and supply meals, medical help, clothes, and toiletries for migrants. “We should not have the potential,” he stated.
The workplace of the nation’s ombudsman—its high accountability officer who additionally oversees the safety of human rights—not too long ago criticized authorities “failures” related to Costa Rica’s therapy 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, the USA is compounding the humanitarian disaster in his nation. However he stated that Costa Rica “sadly” stays closely reliant on the USA 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 full of migrants deported from the U.S. Human-rights litigators have filed go well with towards each Costa Rica and Panama for allegedly detaining the migrants, together with kids, and violating their rights; the circumstances are ongoing, however U.S. expulsion flights to each nations have since stopped. (The governments of each nations have denied that the migrants are being detained towards their will.)
Badilla—an appointee of President Chaves, whose centrist Social Democratic Progress Social gathering gained 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 celebration, which faces an election in 2026, solely stands to lose from a nativist political backlash like those who have displaced average governments in Europe and the USA lately.
The Trump administration may welcome the information that migrants are turning again, however a extra unstable Central and South America might 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 as a replacement. In the meantime, the shutdown of the U.S. asylum system will stress extra migrants to flip to smugglers to cross the border, and depart 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 folks trying to find freedom and human rights, and will embolden different nations to undertake related ways in violation of worldwide legislation.
Trump has proclaimed that his border restrictions will likely be loosened after he determines that the “invasion on the southern border has ceased.” However even with hundreds of migrants now turning south, humanitarian challenges within the Western Hemisphere will persist.
