illegal immigration
Panama’s Incoming President Wants To Shut Down His Country’s Most Treacherous Route For Migrants — But Will It Work?
From the Daily Caller News Foundation
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.”
Great Reset
A One-Stop Shop for Illegal Migration Reveals Ongoing Plans for Illegal Immigration
From the Center for Immigration Studies
By Todd Bensman
UN/NGO ‘mall’ under construction in southern Mexico shows they expect continued illegal flow to the U.S.
A 75,000-square-foot mega-mall, built to enable industrial-scale illegal immigration to the U.S. southern border, is almost online here in this key entry city in southern Mexico just across the border from Guatemala.
Scheduled to open in December, the mall suggests that powerful global agencies, the United Nations key among them, are bullish on a long-term future of continued heavy U.S.-bound illegal migrant traffic through Mexico – no matter the outcome of the November 5 American presidential election.
Those bullish investors are the dozens of migration-oriented UN agencies and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that have already plowed hundreds of millions of dollars of U.S. taxpayer money into constructing a permanent network of way stations for thousands of miles along the migration routes from South America to the U.S. border during the four years of the Biden-Harris administration.
The record hundreds of millions of dollars in aid is distributed at the way station network in the form of cash cards, cash in envelopes, food, vouchers for onward travel and lodging, medical treatment, pharmaceuticals, legal counseling, and much more. (See: “UN Budgets Millions for U.S.-Bound Migrants in 2024”.) This aid has without doubt helped the UN and its growing constellation of NGOs keep the masses moving north through Tapachula in record numbers toward irresistible Biden border policies that have welcomed across arrivals in historic millions. (See: “Biden Admin. Sends Millions to Religious Nonprofits Facilitating Mass Illegal Migration”.)
The UN and NGOs are betting on a busy future in Mexico. Going forward, the purpose of this one strategically located facility is to “respond comprehensively to the needs of people who arrive in Mexico … migrant refugees who travel together from all continents, and arrive in Tapachula in need of a response or attention”, Giovanni Lepri, the Mexico representative for the United Nations High Commission on Refugees (UNHCR), told reporters when Mexico’s foreign ministry announced it in April 2024.
But the Tapachula mall represents a far more expansive billion-dollar migration-route safety net constructed during the Biden-Harris years using record-breaking U.S. taxpayer contributions.
It plugs into two other big one-stop-migration malls erected in the northern Mexico cities of Monterrey and Tijuana. These gleaming new Mexican facilities, and plenty of other UN and NGO substations in Mexican towns and cities, form the final terminus of the trails to the United States lined with pots of U.S. taxpayer money. And they are representative of what’s happening throughout Latin America.
The UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), which received $1.9 billion in U.S. taxpayer funds in 2024 and $2.1 billion in 2023 (compared to $377 million in 2019) for migration assistance throughout Latin America, started building the Tapachula facility on land donated by Chiapas State as part of the deal with Mexico to run it.
The UNHCR, UN’s International Organization for Migration (IOM), UNICEF, and dozens of private, often religion-based, NGOs scattered around Tapachula will work alongside one another under one massive roof here — evidently planning a years-long collaboration.
None of the UN/NGO pots of gold are exactly a secret but are relatively hard to find for the uninitiated. And harder to grasp as connected to domestic American policies or as a legitimate point of political debate.
The UN’s 2024 update to the “Regional Refugee and Migrant Response Plan” (RMRP for short), a UNHCR and IOM planning and budget document, lays out in detail that it planned to hand out nearly $1.6 billion in 17 Latin America countries using its network of 248 different NGOs. (For the complete list of involved groups, see p. 268, here, and explore their activities further with this interactive tool).
That was on top of the 2023-2024 RMRP plan, which called for 228 NGOs (all listed on p. 268 of the list of involved groups) to spend $1.72 billion on trailside assistance to mass migration that all know will illegally pass through many countries and, finally, breach the U.S. border.
Hundreds of millions of dollars for all of this comes straight from U.S. taxpayers in the form of sharply increased US State Department bequeathals, USAID grants, and flexible spending contributions to the UNHCR and IOM.
Too Far for Average Americans to See
For an idea of how U.S. tax money is spent to flood the American border, the far northwest Colombian town of Necocli provides a window. This is a major staging town for migrants preparing to boat across the Gulf of Uraba for smuggler-guided backpack trips through the so-called “Darien Gap” jungle passage that leads into Panama and eventually Mexico.
In Necocli, the UN and NGO agencies have arrayed themselves in something like an outdoor swap meet of NGO booths and an IOM mobile bus office on a few acres next to the gulf beach, the Center for Immigration Studies observed during an August 2024 research trip to the region. The Jewish NGO Cadena was set up in a booth next to the Adventist Development and Relief Agency (ADRA).
NGO and UN workers there said they provide a variety of trail advice — and plenty of supplies to the immigrants, to include socks, underwear, backpacks, bug repellant, water filters, sunscreen, and Vaseline.
And food.
“Like things easy to carry so they can eat and be done with it,” a Cadena worker said.
ADRA provides children’s classes thrice weekly on how to avoid sexual predators among the strange men traveling the Darien Gap.
On this day, a Cadena worker said she’d given out thousands of food items such as packaged soup to more than 3,000 migrants during the previous few months, showing the last of it: a box with a handful of granola bars she hoped to hand out soon so she could go home.
What about critics who say NGOs like Cadena are helping migrants break the laws of many countries?
“As an organization,” the Cadena worker responded. “We’re not here to judge. We’re just here to provide a service.”
”But aren’t you helping them migrate?”
“Only by giving them the things that I mentioned, not money or fare, just certain resources for the trip,” she explained.
UNHCR workers carrying iPads interacted with groups of migrants sitting in chairs under open-air shelters, surveying them and their needs for the trail ahead. The IOM workers hand out hygiene kits to women, but had run out of the kits some days earlier.
Across the Uraba Gulf in the staging town of Acandi, the Clan del Gulfo paramilitary controls the human smuggling operations into the Darien Gap. The cartel runs two migrant camps where the migrants are brought for final journey preparations.
The center gained permission to access one of the camps, “Camp 1”. Inside, the Center found NGOs providing medical services, legal counseling, and food.
Furthermore, Colombian banks also have been allowed to set up a money-wiring service so that migrants could pay their foot guides.
All involved could not possibly be unaware that the people they are assisting intend to break the immigration laws of a half dozen countries up trail, including, ultimately, illegally breaching the American border.
A Bright Future for Mass Migration?
The UN and NGO’s migration advocacy industrial complex is now preparing its 2025-2026 plan for the trails of Latin America.
A request for input from its NGO partners suggests an ambitious coming year of providing “cash and voucher assistance”, “food security”, “humanitarian transportation”, “shelter”, and most other basic human needs.
Who will be the recipients?
Refugees and migrants in-transit (of all nationalities) who cross an international border.
illegal immigration
Over 150,000 migrants marching in Mexico, await the outcome of the US Election
From The Center for Immigration Studies
By Todd Bensman
Washington, D.C. (October 24, 2023) – Recent Center for Immigration Studies field work reveals a growing crisis in the Mexican southern state of Chiapas.
Why are thousands of migrants bottled up in this area near the Guatemala-Mexico border, and why are caravans forming but only moving within Chiapas?
On-the-ground reporting by Todd Bensman, the Center’s national security fellow, highlights the impact of the Biden-Harris administration’s December 2023 deal with Mexico and the potential consequences leading up to and following the U.S. election.
Key findings:
Biden-Harris Agreement: In December 2023, the U.S. and Mexico reached a secretive deal to keep migrants in southern Mexico to reduce the appearance of a border crisis in the U.S. The deal has resulted in the Mexican military setting up roadblocks in the region, particularly around the border town of Tapachula, to slow the flow of migrants.
Migrants Bottled Up: Bensman visited Tapachula, where an estimated 150,000 migrants are stranded, with 500 to 1,500 more arriving daily. The city is overwhelmed, with high poverty levels and unrest.
Caravans and Military Escorts: Migrant caravans are forming, but they are not headed to the U.S. Instead, the Mexican military is escorting them to other cities within Chiapas to ease pressure on Tapachula. Bribes and mafias enable wealthier migrants to escape the blockade, but poorer migrants remain trapped.
CBP One App: The U.S. extended access to the CBP One app, previously only usable in northern Mexico, to allow migrants in southern Mexico to schedule appointments for processing into the U.S. However, delays and limited access make it difficult for most to advance quickly.
Upcoming Election Tension: Many migrants feel an urgency to reach the U.S. before a potential change in leadership. Those interviewed fear that a Trump win would mean a closed border and no benefits, while they believe a Harris win would maintain the status quo and provide access to benefits.
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