Within the north of Costa Rica, an irregular filth path runs parallel to the freeway that connects the nation with Nicaragua on the Las Tablillas border publish. When torrential downpours flood the Río Frío and drench the encompassing lowland forest, the path turns right into a viscous paste that sucks on the sneakers 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 lots of of discarded sneakers, sun-bleached and caked in mud. However I used to be shocked to see that they have been piled up on the southern aspect 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 unprecedented reversal in human migration: For the primary time in current historical past, the individuals passing by means of Central America are principally transferring south. The brand new migration move 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, hundreds of thousands of migrants from Latin America, the Caribbean, Asia, and Africa have carved a path from South America by means of the treacherous Darién jungle and into Panama en route north to the US. However that large move is now dwindling.
Costa Rica is consultant of the pattern. For many years, lots of and typically hundreds of migrants crossed the nation by bus each day, touring the roughly 300 miles from Paso Canoas within the south to Los Chiles within the north; in response to the UN-affiliated Worldwide Group for Migration, from 2021 to 2024 greater than 1.2 million individuals entered the nation heading north from Panama. However after peaking in August 2023 at about 84,500, the variety of individuals migrating north by means of 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 individuals 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 date this yr. 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 night time 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 they’d resided whereas awaiting asylum interviews with U.S. officers that by no means came about. Help employees I spoke with mentioned that bus firms had not too long ago begun organizing further routes from Los Chiles to inside cities farther south, equivalent 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 have 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 might get into the US. Asylum claims started to fall through 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 mentioned that they’d waited as much as 9 months for his or her appointments and determined to show again when these appointments have been canceled. Though some migrants proceed to cross the border illegally, they typically need to pay smuggling sums that almost all 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 individuals, typically focusing on these prone 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 have been worse than people who impressed them to go away their residence 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 change for meals and shelter, he advised me, he labored 12-hour days, seven days per week for a $15 weekly allowance. He mentioned that earlier this yr, he, his brother, sister-in-law, and 5 nieces and nephews have 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 would like my cash!” they shouted at his 4-year-old nephew. Abismael and his members of the family have 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 mentioned that they deliberate to use for asylum in Costa Rica and settle there. “Once you take a breath right here after Mexico,” he mentioned, “it’s completely different air. It’s a distinct world. We will take walks on the streets. They offer us meals right here, water, loos.”
“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 wish 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—aren’t any higher than in Mexico. Early outcomes from an unpublished IOM survey in Costa Rica present that 22 % of polled southbound migrants plan to remain, whereas 73 % 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 rapidly turning into overwhelmed. Once 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 individuals was at the moment processing greater than 200,000 asylum purposes. 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 amount 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 have been detained by Mexican safety forces. Ought to a big fraction of these individuals transfer southward within the coming months, a humanitarian disaster will come up in Costa Rica and probably 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 don’t seem to be absolutely 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 sooner or later they’ll 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 assets to construct short-term shelters and supply meals, medical help, clothes, and toiletries for migrants. “We shouldn’t have the potential,” he mentioned.
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 US is compounding the humanitarian disaster in his nation. However he mentioned that Costa Rica “sadly” stays closely reliant on the US on issues together with safety and public well being. In February, President Rodrigo Chaves Robles mentioned that the nation would cooperate with its “economically highly effective brother from the north” by accepting flights crammed with migrants deported from the U.S. Human-rights litigators have filed swimsuit towards each Costa Rica and Panama for allegedly detaining the migrants, together with kids, and violating their rights; the instances 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 Celebration received 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 social gathering, which faces an election in 2026, solely stands to lose from a nativist political backlash like people who have displaced average governments in Europe and the US in recent times.
The Trump administration would possibly 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 various might be elected instead. In the meantime, the shutdown of the U.S. asylum system will strain extra migrants to flip to smugglers to cross the border, and depart migrants susceptible 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 individuals trying to find freedom and human rights, and will embolden different nations to undertake related ways in violation of worldwide regulation.
Trump has proclaimed that his border restrictions will probably 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.
