This story was supported by the Pulitzer Center. It is part of a project on reverse migration by Arizona Republic reporter Daniel Gonzalez and El Paso Times visual journalist Omar Ornelas.
PALENQUE, Panama — A man in a white T-shirt and surf trunks stood on a small pier calling out names from a list.
Rows of men, women and children, sweat trickling down their faces in the sweltering tropical heat, stepped forward one by one. Each received a wristband and a life preserver, then climbed into an open-air fishing boat until the boat was jammed with passengers seated shoulder to shoulder, their belongings stuffed into black plastic bags.
The 40-plus passengers were from Venezuela, migrants who originally fled economic and political turmoil in the South American country to seek a new life in the United States.
But they were no longer en route to America. They were headed back home.
Their journey was part of a new and growing phenomenon of reverse migration taking shape in Latin America in response to the Trump administration’s punishing border and immigration crackdowns.
The boat’s captain fired up the twin 200-horsepower motors and floated slowly into the clear blue waters of the Caribbean Sea, then hit the throttle.
The same scene has played out at 9 a.m. daily for months from the palm-shaded pier of this quiet fishing village off the eastern coast of Panama, a two-hour drive from the shiny high rises of Panama City, the country’s pulsing capital.
After traveling hundreds of miles on foot through country after country, including a multiday trek through the deadly Darién Gap jungle, thousands of northbound migrants in recent months have given up midstream.
Astonishingly, they have turned around and headed south, abandoning their American dream for an uncertain future.
“They spend weeks, sometimes months in these journeys from south to north, and now from north to south,” said Giuseppe Loprete, chief of mission of the United Nations International Organization for Migration in Panama.
Some of the migrants are headed home after being deported from the United States. Others self-deported, voluntarily leaving on their own rather than risking removal by force.
The migrants said they have abandoned their goal of reaching or remaining in the United States after hearing frightening stories on the news, on social media and from family and friends of masked, heavily armed federal immigration agents storming worksites in U.S. cities and hauling away immigrants in handcuffs.
The Trump administration’s tough new border policy, which shut down most access to asylum requests, prompted arrests and prosecution of illegal border-crossers and sent armed troops to the border, further spurred the decision to turn around and head home, migrants said.
Darwin Valbuena, 34, an asylum-seeker from Venezuela, said he no longer could handle the stress and the pressure of feeling like he was being hunted by immigration authorities.
“The whole time it felt like the immigration police were looking for you as if you were a criminal, a prisoner,” Valbuena said, clad in a long-sleeved hoodie and a face mask to protect his skin from the sun.
Valbuena said he had been working since 2023 as an electrician in Peoria and Kingman, Arizona. He decided to leave on his own after his work permit expired under the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown. Employers fearful of Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids wouldn’t hire him without the document, he said.
Valbuena was returning to Venezuela, where nearly 8 million people have fled since 2014 under the repressive government of autocratic President Nicolás Maduro, according to the United Nations International Organization for Migration.
Valbuena had not seen his wife and two children, ages 7 and 9, since he left the country in 2019, when the youngest was 9 months old. He said he lived in Colombia for five years before heading to the United States during an unprecedented surge of migrants from Venezuela who entered through the Southwestern border during the Biden administration.
Valbuena was returning during white-hot tensions with the United States. Under Trump’s direction, the U.S. government in September and October carried out multiple military strikes against boats officials accused of being involved in drug trafficking in the Caribbean Sea and eastern Pacific, killing several dozen people and drawing outrage from the Venezuelan and Colombian governments.
“I feel happy because I’m going to see my family,” Valbuena said. “But I’m also anxious because I don’t know what the situation is like in Venezuela. Has it gotten better? Has it gotten worse?”
Migrants such as Valbuena learn about return trips to Colombia on TikTok, where entrepreneurs cashing in on the growing reverse migration trade promote travel packages for $250.
The packages resemble the same sorts of arrangements used by criminal organizations to smuggle migrants to the United States, only in reverse. They include bus transportation from the border with Costa Rica or from Panama City to the Caribbean coast, a hammock to sleep and a plate of empanadas before boarding boats that depart every morning from Palenque and, less frequently, from the neighboring village of Miramar.
From there, the migrants travel six to eight hours along the coast of Panama in boats Panamanians call lanchas until they reach Necoclí, a seaside city on the northern shoulder of Colombia, this time avoiding the slog through the perilous rainforest of the Darién Gap.
Once in Necoclí, the migrants are on their own, free to return to Venezuela, the country they fled, or seek opportunities in Colombia or another South American country.
From January through September, more than 18,100 migrants have traveled on boats from Panama to Colombia, according to Panama’s National Migration Service.
The flow of migrants south comes while the number of people traveling north through the Darién Gap in Panama has plunged by 98% to nearly zero, according to Panama government data. More than 1.2 million migrants crossed through the jungle from 2021 to 2024.
The plunge in migration through Panama helps explain the massive decrease in migrants arriving at the U.S. southern border, where Border Patrol encounters have plummeted from record highs during the Biden administration to the lowest levels in modern history under the Trump administration.
A boat ride filled with mixed emotions
A reporter from The Arizona Republic and a photographer from the El Paso Times, part of the USA TODAY Network, spent two days in Palenque and Miramar interviewing migrants and traveling part of the way in one of the lanchas, a blue-hulled boat named Barracuda 11.
As the migrants boarded, a man hoisted one of the passengers in the air, a fussing 8-month-old baby whose face was flushed red from the heat. The man passed the baby, the only passenger without a life jacket, to another man, who lowered the child into the outstretched arms of her mother already seated in the boat.
To try to quiet the baby, the mother and another woman took turns bouncing her on their knees. To quench her thirst, the women served the baby sips of water from the plastic cap of a gallon water jug.
Once the boat was loaded, the man in the white T-shirt waved his arms like a bandleader, leading the migrants in a chant for one of his TikTok promo videos. Migrants seated in the bow unfurled the yellow, blue and red flag of Venezuela and raised the banner in the air.
“Hola, ladies and gentlemen, how is everyone?” the man yelled over the rumble of the boat’s motors. “How was your trip? How was your food? How were you treated?”
“Bien,” good, the migrants chanted in Spanish to each question.
Before setting off, many migrants wrapped T-shirts around their faces as protection from the blistering sun. Others wore caps adorned with the logos of U.S. baseball teams and brands: LA Dodgers, N.Y. Yankees, Chicago White Sox.
Giovani Cedeño, 38, a migrant from Venezuela, sat on one of the bench seats near the bow with his 7-year-old son, Gioruan, on his lap.
Cedeño said he had been working at various jobs for two years in Cincinnati, Ohio, delivering food for Uber Eats, working in construction and fixing cars, while his son attended school.
He said he decided to leave on his own after the wife of a friend was arrested by immigration authorities when she went to pick up her son at school.
“They grabbed (her) and took her away,” Cedeño said moments before boarding the boat. “After seeing that, I decided to leave. I didn’t want to take the risk.”
They traveled by bus from Cincinnati to Panama, crossing the border into Mexico through El Paso, Texas, Cedeño said. Before reaching Panama, they traveled through Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua and Costa Rica.
He said he had decided not to return to Venezuela. He was originally from Guatire, a city outside Caracas, the capital. “The situation (in Venezuela) is still very bad,” Cedeño said.
Instead, they were headed to Medellin, Colombia, where he had lived before heading to the United States in 2022.
“On one hand I feel sad,” Cedeño said. He had abandoned his dream of building a new life in the United States so that he could take care of his family. “But with what this president (Trump) is doing, that’s almost impossible,” Cedeño said.
“On the other hand,” he said, in Colombia, “I will be with my family.”
Yoel Andres Rivas Ramirez was on his way back to Venezuela. He was deported to Mexico, he said, after an ICE raid at the construction site in Houston where he worked. ICE agents arrived in six trucks and arrested him and 50 other workers, he said.
Rivas Ramirez, 38, said he spent two months in a detention center waiting to be deported. During that time, his wife bought a small house in Caracas with money he had saved remodeling apartments.
“At least working in the U.S., I was able to buy that house and some other things, so I will have a place to go,” Rivas Ramirez said.
For some, the trip isn’t as easy
Boats that transport migrants from Panama to Colombia also leave from a fishing pier in Miramar, a five-minute drive up the coast from Palenque.
But the fishing village had become crowded with stranded migrants who had run out of money to pay for the trip. They congregated in groups on a street corner and on the beach behind a vacant building.
Francisco Matamoros, 32, and his wife, Kelly Vaco, 30, were living in a room on the second floor of the vacant building in Miramar occupied by several other migrant families. The building had no running water or electricity and the toilet didn’t work. The couple slept on a filthy mattress on the floor with their 4-year-old son, Stephano. They had strung a blanket across the doorway for privacy.
Matamoros said they were trying to get back to Venezuela after they were deported on a plane to Villahermosa in southern Mexico after attempting to seek asylum in the United States.
“The life of a migrant is very hard,” Matamoros said. “We’re just trying to continue on our journey and make up for lost time to someplace that will offer a job and opportunity” and some sort of stability.
What’s next? The reasons migrants left still remain
Some migration experts say the plunge in northward migration, coupled with emerging southbound migration, is fueling a “ballooning” effect as countries in Latin America become saturated with displaced migrants fearful of returning to the economic and political turmoil in their home countries.
“Migrants do not just disappear. They are still there in these countries. They are in Central America, they are in Mexico. They are wondering what to do with their future,” said Loprete at the International Organization for Migration.
What’s more, the dire economic and political conditions in countries such as Venezuela, Haiti and Cuba that drove migrants to leave in the first place remain unchanged, migration experts say.
“What we are seeing right now is a Band-Aid to the problem. It is not a solution,” said Caitlyn Yates, a University of British Columbia researcher who studies migration in Panama. “While in this interim the number of people crossing the U.S.-southern border has plummeted, it will not last forever. And in fact, the number of people being displaced is only growing, which is going to lead to more chaos in the future if there’s not a more comprehensive plan on how to manage migration at the Western Hemispheric level.”
Loprete said countries need to work together to create long-term solutions that facilitate orderly flows of legal migration.
“Migrants are essential to economies everywhere in the world,” Loprete said. “From our view, it’s not so much about stopping migration or curbing it. It comes down to managing migration in a better way and facilitating regular migration.”
Exchanging one dream for another
Once in the open water, the captain of the Barricuda 11 headed south from Palenque, the fishing boat loaded with migrants. The migrants lowered their heads in the wind as the boat picked up speed, the hull slamming rhythmically on the waves. Reggaeton music blaring from a portable speaker competed with the roar of the twin motors.
After an hour, the boat reached the island of Porvenir, where men in military fatigues from Senafront, Panama’s border police, tallied the number of migrants. They counted 45 total: 27 men, seven women and 11 children, including the 8-month-old girl.
The journalists hopped off the boat and stayed behind. The boat then pulled away from the dock to continue the journey by sea to Colombia. The migrants in the boat waved.
One of them, Juan Iguaran, a 46-year-old migrant from Maracay, Venezuela, texted a message a few days later via WhatsApp, along with a photo: “I’m home already with my children.”
Arizona Republic reporter Daniel Gonzalez and El Paso Times visual journalist Omar Ornelas spent 12 days in Mexico and Panama in August reporting how the Trump administration’s immigration and border policies are affecting migrant patterns. Both had spent years chronicling immigrants’ movements north. In a dramatic shift, this time they captured people heading south, often back to their home countries.
Reach Gonzalez at daniel.gonzalez@arizonarepublic.com.
