The population of an entire U.S. city has trudged through the Darien Gap so far this year.
Complicating matters is the accusation of a Panamanian official who claims that Colombia isn’t doing its part to help stem the record-breaking flow of migrants, most of whom are heading toward the United States.
Panama’s director of the National Migration Service, Samira Gozaine, told reporters that Colombia “does not want to cooperate with closing traffic, with minimizing traffic ... Panama is the only country that invests effort and money in caring for this population that arrives almost dying in the Darien. ... Nobody wants to invest in these people.”
During an Aug. 4 news conference, Ms. Gozaine said, “More than 260,000 migrants have crossed the jungle bound for North America.”
Earlier that same week, the deputy director for Panama’s migration service, María Isabel Saravia, said that the number of migrants who crossed into Panama this year as of Aug. 1 was 248,901.
While the data clearly changed in those three days, they paint a vivid picture regardless. Both numbers surpassed 2022 migrant flows by a wide margin. The total migrant encounters at Panama’s southern frontier for all of 2022 was 248,284.
But according to Panama’s migration service, nearly 30,000 illegal immigrants arrived—heading north—in June alone. That number was almost 40,000 in May.
Passing the Buck
“Any impact to control those flows has to involve coordinated border controls by all governments,” Evan Ellis, a Latin America research professor at the U.S. Army War College Strategic Studies Institute, told The Epoch Times.Mr. Ellis said the Darien Gap poses a unique challenge for border control agents. The highly rugged terrain and the presence of drug cartels profiting off of illegal immigrant trafficking complicate patrol efforts.
As in Panama and other countries in the Americas, the sheer number of illegal immigrants passing through as they ultimately try to reach the United States leaves little incentive for a country such as Colombia to try to stop the flow.
Mr. Ellis doesn’t believe that Colombian officials are being deliberately negligent, but instead that it’s a matter of resources and other priorities for the administration of Colombian President Gustavo Petro.
Mr. Ellis said that there’s generally good cooperation between Panama and Colombia on migration, but that it isn’t solving the problem. He called U.S. support for the crisis a “drop in the bucket” amid such overwhelming migrant numbers.
In May, senior Biden administration officials rattled sabers to send U.S. troops to support security initiatives in the lawless jungle between Panama and Colombia. Army Gen. Laura Richardson, the head of the U.S. Southern Command, traveled to the Darien Gap on May 22 to assess the situation. However, no specific timeline was established for the arrival of U.S. troops after a meeting with the Colombian National Police.
He said that officials in Latin American countries, including Panama and Colombia, have adopted a sort of pass-the-buck mentality when it comes to the staggering numbers of illegal immigrants arriving.
Disappearing Act
On May 19, U.S. Department of Homeland Security official Blas Nuñez-Neto said that illegal immigrant encounters along the southwest border dropped by 70 percent the week after Title 42 ended. Another CBP report confirms a drop in encounters through mid-June.But Panama’s migration officials reported tens of thousands of migrants entering their country in May and June. So with that many arriving and leaving Panama, the question becomes: Where did all those U.S.-bound migrants go?
“Customs and Border Protection may not be tracking all the encounters. The data management system could be faulty, and the environment could be chaotic. ... Also, making a claim that numbers of encounters are reduced is not the same as saying the number of entries is reduced,” Irina Tsukerman told The Epoch Times.
Ms. Tsukerman, a national security lawyer, regional analyst, and the founder of Scarab Rising, said that many things could contribute to the discrepancy between the record amount of migrants in Panama and a simultaneous decrease in CBP southwest border encounters.
“Given that the Title 8 policy was publicly announced, it is entirely possible that everyone benefiting from the open border policy would have time to prepare and to find routes where they would be less likely to run into law enforcement,” she said.
“It is also very likely that, despite efforts to reach the U.S., many of these migrants are rerouted ... and never reach the border. Satellite imagery could be one way of providing accurate data about the mass movement of these groups. Tracking information from neighboring countries could also reveal more of the story.”
Ms. Tsukerman said that Colombia is dealing with its own laundry list of challenges and has struggled to keep up with just the number of Venezuelans who have entered the country.
But if the migrant flow heading north can’t be filtered or stopped at the source, Ms. Tsukerman said that it spells trouble for U.S. officials.
“If Colombia cannot be relied upon to stave off an influx of these migrants, U.S. border security, already overwhelmed despite recent restrictions, could face an unprecedented crisis,” she said.
Meanwhile, Panama is caught between a rock and a hard place on the other side of the remote jungle that it shares with Colombia. And as the caravans continue drifting north, no one seems to be in a hurry to stop them.
