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Panama’s Incoming President Wants To Shut Down His Country’s Most Treacherous Route For Migrants — But Will It Work?

Published

4 months ago

10 minute read

From the Daily Caller News Foundation

By JASON HOPKINS

 

Panama’s new president-elect is pledging to close a key corridor used by hundreds of thousands of migrants en route to the U.S., but experts and Panamanians aren’t so sure it can be done.

President-elect Jose Raul Mulino handily won the Panamanian presidential election earlier in May, riding a wave of voter discontent over the country’s slow economic growth and an endorsement from a popular former president. The 64-year-old lawyer also campaigned on a pledge to end the illegal immigration that runs through the tiny Central American nation’s Darien gap — but some question the feasibility of that pledge, given the vastness of the jungle, the cartels that populate it and the sheer amount of migrants flowing through it.

“While President Mulino’s promise to close the Darien Gap to migrants appears to be made in good faith, it’s unclear how he could ever actually deliver,” Matt O’Brien, director of investigations for the Immigration Reform Law Institute, said to the Daily Caller News Foundation. “The region consists of thousands of square miles of jungle that are virtually impossible to police.”

“And the gap itself is already home to massive migrant assistance operations that are funded by politically-potent, anti-borders groups from all over the world,” O’Brien added. “None of these organizations are likely to close up shop and go home without a fight.”

The number of illegal immigrants crossing the Darien Gap is incredibly massive — and rising. More than half a million migrants passed through the region in 2023, double the nearly 250,000 that had crossed the year before, according to the Council of Foreign Relations.

“The border of the United States, instead of being in Texas, moved to Panama,” Mulino said on the campaign trail. “We’re going to close the Darien and we’re going to repatriate all these people,” referring to a vast jungle region across Panama and Colombia known as the Darien Gap.

The pledge has received notable coverage from American media, and the Secretary of State’s office made mention of anticipated cooperation on the issue shortly after Mulino’s election victory.

The Darien Gap, however, is roughly 40 miles wide and 100 miles long, with a combination of rainforests and mountains and virtually no government presence, according to the Guardian. Hiking through the region can take days.

The area is also under the de facto authority of drug-trafficking organizations such as the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and the Gulf Clan paramilitary group, according to the Council on Foreign Relations. The groups are known to extort and sexually assault travelers who pass through the region.

The idea of closing off the Darien has long been regarded as too much of a burden to accomplish, given these factors.

“Panama closed their border,” Wisconsin GOP Rep. Tom Tiffany said in 2021 after a trip to the Darien Gap. “But they, in effect, can’t because of the incredible crush of migrants that are coming from all over the world.”

More recently, Juan Pappier, the Americas deputy director at Human Rights Watch, framed Mulino’s promise to close the Darien Gap as “virtually impossible.”

The majority of migrants crossing the Darien Gap are Venezuelan nationals, but people from Ecuador, Haiti and other African and Asian countries also utilize these routes to make it to the U.S. border.

Panamanians have made notice of the enormous flow of migrants crossing their country on a daily basis.

“It’s impossible to not run into a foreigner who is begging for money or puts their child in front of you to beg for money, or sell you chewing gum or candy,” Allan Baitel, a born-and-raised Panamanian citizen, told the DCNF. “We have a lot of individuals who are present on the streets at all times, 24 hours a day with signs asking for help.”

Baitel noted that the government is “doing its best” to mitigate disruptions to daily Panamanian life by getting the migrants off the street and moving them to the border of Costa Rica. While he acknowledged the difficulty in closing up the Darien Gap, he expressed optimism over Mulino’s background.

“It’s going to be very hard to close the gap, very difficult,” he said, noting that Colombia was unlikely to help in the effort. Colombia’s leftist president, Gustavo Petro, has long been hesitant to adopt measures to physically bar migrants from entering the jungle, claiming that a more humanitarian approach should be taken.

“Let me tell you that Mulino’s background is in security,” Baitel said. “He has preparation in having to deal with a lot of these issues, so he may have something up his sleeve.”

Currently, the Panamanian government’s policy has been to immediately bus incoming migrants to the Costa Rican border, allowing them to carry on in their U.S.-bound journey. In a recent radio interview, the incoming president said most would-be migrants would simply not even try to cross Panama once he begins deporting them.

“Because when we start to deport people here in an immediate deportation plan the interest for sneaking through Panama will decrease,” Mulino said in the radio interview. “I assure you they are going to say that going through Panama is not attractive because they are deporting you.”

For many Panamanian citizens, the crisis hasn’t made much of a personal impact on them since the vast majority of the migrants are quickly moving on and out of the country.

“We don’t see that many, no one wants to stay here. They want to get to the shining city on the hill,” said Surse Pierpoint, a third-generation Panamanian who spoke to the DCNF.

Pierpoint said that the topic of immigration doesn’t even crack the “top five” issues that matter to him at the moment. Like many other voters, Pierpoint cited the tough economic times the country has faced and he liked Mulino’s agenda for the private sector.

Panama, once the top performing economy in Latin America, has struggled with credit downgrades, slow economic growth, less foreign direct investment and the closing of a major copper mine. The president-elect campaigned on a pledge to bring life back into the private sector with a pro-market agenda.

As for closing the Darien Gap, Pierpoint has doubts: “I don’t know how he can do that frankly,” he said. “It sounds good, but I don’t see how it’s feasible in the short term.”

While so much attention has been focused on Mulino’s ability to close the migration routes himself, policy experts in Washington, D.C,. and locals in Panama alike also pointed the finger back at the Biden administration. The crisis taking place in this Latin American isthmus, they say, begins and ends at the White House.

“Panama president-elect Jose Mulino’s pledge to close the Darien Gap route that migrants are traversing on their way to the U.S. southern border demonstrates the far-reaching negative consequences of Pres. Biden’s immigration policies,” Eric Ruark, director of research at NumbersUSA, said to the DCNF. “This is a humanitarian crisis entirely of President’ Biden’s making, and Panama is just one of the countries dealing with the fallout.”

“All of this has to do with the United States,” Baitel added. “It will not cease until there’s a very drastic change in the United States.”

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Venezuelan Migrant Says She’d ‘Return’ To Country After Living In Housing Taken Over By Venezuelan Gang

Published on September 7, 2024

By

From the Daily Caller News Foundation

By Hailey Gomez

 

A Venezuelan immigrant living in migrant housing in Aurora, Colorado, appeared to fight back tears while speaking to independent reporter Nick Shirley, saying she would return to her country after living in the U.S.

This week, the city of Aurora faced major pushback from Republicans after footage surfaced online of armed men inside an apartment complex in late August. Shirley was seen visiting various migrant housing units before stopping at the viral location to interview residents where the armed men had been spotted.

Shirley spoke with a Venezuelan woman who showed him the poor living conditions her family endures, stating she pays $1,200 per month for the apartment. The migrant stated that the electricity and hot water in her apartment weren’t working, telling Shirley that the landlord hadn’t accepted any payment for the “past couple of months.”

“Does your father still have to pay rent?” Shirley asked as they walked around her father’s apartment.

“The owner is no longer receiving any kind of payment, because he is also taking all this, that the gangs and the mafia are taking advantage of all of this to get us out as if we were dogs and it’s not fair,” the migrant stated, according to a translation.

Shirley asked if gangs had been charging people, to which the migrant replied, “no.” The independent reporter then asked if her life in the U.S. was what she expected after crossing the border.

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“No, never. I would have stayed in my country. They say that here everything is different, the laws, everyone gets a good job, you get ahead, you can save money to take back to your country,” the migrant stated. “But not everything is as they say, the American dream is simply just a dream. When you get here you wake up, it’s not like they say.”

Shirley then pressed the migrant, asking in Spanish if she would take a “flight or opportunity to go back” to her home country.

“With all the love in the world I would return to my country,” the migrant said.

Republican lawmakers on Friday sent a letter criticizing the Biden-Harris administration’s “open border policies” and local “sanctuary” policies over the reported presence of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua, which allegedly terrorized several apartment buildings in Aurora.

Reportedly beginning as a prison gang in 2014 within the northern Venezuelan state of Aragua, Tren de Aragua has grown into one of Venezuela’s largest criminal organizations. With around 5,000 members and stretching internationally across Latin America and the U.S., the gang has allegedly been connected to several high-profile crimes within the U.S., including the kidnapping and strangling of a Florida man last year.

This week, the Aurora Police Department announced the arrest of two confirmed Tren de Aragua gang members, Jhonnarty Dejesus Pacheco-Chirinos and Jhonardy Jose Pacheco-Chirinos, following a July 28 shooting that left two men hospitalized with serious injuries.

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Daily Caller

‘Clearly Flawed’: Immigration Hawks Decry Biden-Harris Admin’s Decision To Quickly Resume Mass Parole Program

Published on September 3, 2024

By

From the Daily Caller News Foundation

By Jason Hopkins

 

The Biden-Harris administration has decided to resume a mass parole program that was sidelined due to the discovery of widespread fraud, but immigration hardliners say the vetting process remains critically flawed.

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is resuming an immigration program that allows foreign nationals to apply for asylum in their home countries and fly into the U.S. at various airports upon approval, known as the CHNV program, which has allowed hundreds of thousands of migrants from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela into the country, a spokesman confirmed to the Daily Caller News Foundation on Thursday. However, border hawks are cautioning that the program has not sufficiently updated its vetting procedures since it was placed on pause last month after the discovery of rampant fraud.

“My Committee has engaged with the department since this pause was announced, and the results were sobering,” House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Mark Green said in a Thursday statement following news of the program’s restart. “Instead of scrapping the clearly flawed program, the department is allowing it to continue without rooting out the fraud or putting adequate safeguards in place to prevent exploitation by sponsors here in the United States.”

Originally launched for Venezuelans in October 2022, the CHNV program was later expanded in January 2023 to include Cubans, Nicaraguans and Haitians. The parole initiative gives foreign nationals two-year authorization into the U.S. and work permits, provided they have not previously entered the country illegally and pass other vetting processes.

Green referred to the CHNV program as a “massive shell game” that allows 30,000 otherwise inadmissible foreign nationals to simply enter the country every month in lieu of crossing the border unlawfully.

At the beginning of August, DHS confirmed that they placed the program on hold following an internal audit. That report — first publicized by the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) — identified a litany of red flags, such as 100,948 CHNV forms being completed by just 3,218 sponsors, 24 of the 1,000 most used Social Security numbers by sponsors belonging to a deceased person and an IP address located in Tijuana, Mexico, being used more than 1,300 times.

Matt O’Brien, investigation director at the Immigration Reform Law Institute (IRLI), told the DCNF that the CHNV program is inherently susceptible to fraud due to the inherent reliance on sponsors and foreign governments.

“The supposed improvements made by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) simply can’t lead to better vetting,” O’Brien said to the DCNF. “The entire structure of the program encourages fraud because it relies on a ‘sponsor’ relationship that is impossible to verify and imposes no enforceable obligations on sponsor or beneficiary.”

“Second, and perhaps more importantly, one cannot vet Cubans, Haitians, Venezuelans or Nicaraguans,” O’Brien continued. “None of these countries have reliable, functioning records systems. And none of them share information with the U.S.”

The program has so far paroled roughly half a million foreign nationals into the U.S. since it launched in January 2023, according to Customs and Border Protection. There are more than 1.6 million other foreign nationals awaiting travel authorization into the country through the CHNV program.

CHNV is being relaunched with bolstered procedures meant to address the issues that initially halted the program, such as manually vetting sponsors in smaller numbers. Sponsors suspected of engaging in fraud in the program will continue to be referred to Immigration and Customs Enforcement for investigation.

However, the House Homeland Security Committee says DHS hasn’t explained what’s improved in the program now that is back up and running.

“DHS resumed issuing travel authorizations but has not provided the Committee with any additional information on how they intend on preventing fraud,” a House Homeland Committee spokesperson stated to the DCNF.

The spokesperson also noted that DHS has not satisfied the committee’s document requests for information following the allegations of mass fraud.

FAIR also noted that the program is better off being abolished.

“DHS announced it has already restarted CHNV, while offering only very vague assurances that they’ve fixed the problems,” FAIR President Dan Stein said in a statement, noting that DHS has not explained how they plan to vet each sponsor. “The American public has every reason to be very skeptical.”

“There is only one way to address the myriad problems with the Biden-Harris CHNV program,” Stein continued. “As House Speaker Mike Johnson tweeted earlier this month when FAIR exposed the rampant fraud: ‘Shut it down permanently.’”

DHS did not respond to a request for comment from the DCNF.

Featured Image: Official White House Photo by Adam Schultz

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