Saudy Palacios crossed the dangerous Darien jungle, on the border between Panama and Colombia, with the hope of reaching the United States, having a job, a house and educating her son. Now she returns to Venezuela by sea with “broken dreams” due to President Donald Trump’s immigration policy.
Hundreds of migrants, many of them children, are boarding boats these days in Cartí, in the indigenous region of Guna Yala, in the Panamanian Caribbean. They are heading south, a journey of about 12 hours to the port of Necoclí, in Colombia, and then continue by land, most of them to Venezuela.
They seek to avoid the controls on land that unsuccessfully try to regulate the reverse migratory flow and, above all, the crossing of the Darien jungle, which many did a few months ago when they were heading north and where they managed to survive criminal gangs and the dangers of the jungle. But the danger has not disappeared. An eight-year-old Venezuelan girl died when one of these boats with about twenty migrants sank on Friday.
The migrants are sad and depressed. Since he arrived at the White House, Trump has applied a hardline policy against them, with raids and expulsions of people in an irregular situation to different countries and even to the US base at Guantanamo, Cuba. He also eliminated the CBP One mobile application that allowed migrants to schedule appointments to request asylum.
“That is dead. There is no American dream anymore. I waited nine months for an appointment and one gets tired. There is no hope anymore. Nothing,” Palacios, 27, said. She was returning from Mexico with her 11-year-old son and her husband.
Together with other migrants, they were waiting for the boat at the dilapidated dock of Cartí Sugdupu, an island where most of the inhabitants were moved to land last year because in the future it will be under water due to climate change.
In Cartí, Palacios and her family, who have spent more than $2,000 just on the return trip, are waiting for their relatives in Venezuela to send them $250 to pay for the boat.
“The worst thing in my life”
Most of them come from Mexico, without documents and in debt after spending between $5,000 and $10,000 on the trip. They have slept in shelters or on the street, they have gone hungry and sold candy at traffic lights to eat halfway and pay for buses or boats back to their countries.
When Astrid Zapata arrived from Mexico with her husband, her four-year-old daughter and a cousin a few days ago at the La Esperanza shelter in the capital of Costa Rica, the first thing she did was hang the Venezuelan flag in the small cubicle where they would sleep.
“There is no future in the United States anymore. But I am afraid. On this return it is very hard to go back into the jungle. “A mother lost two children there, I saw them drowned in the river,” she said at the non-governmental shelter.
Venezuelan Karla Peña, 37, her two-year-old baby, her daughter, her son-in-law and a grandson were among the 300,000 migrants who crossed the Darien River in 2024. The jungle “was the worst thing in my life,” she says at a shelter in Tegucigalpa where they arrived from Mexico a couple of weeks ago.
“Going back is hard. It has been hard because we come from country to country, without passports, and now to think that ahead of us the jungle or a boat awaits us,” she lamented.
But for these women and their families – part of the exodus of eight million Venezuelans in the last decade – staying in Mexico was not an option: criminal gangs kidnapped them, demanded payments to free them and that also led them to undertake the return journey.
“Starting from scratch”
Some are left behind. María Aguillón left a small town in southern Ecuador in December with her husband, three children and three grandchildren. “We had to leave because there is a lot of killing, I had lost a son,” sobbing, at the San José shelter.
They crossed the Darién, but her husband was deported from Panama and she continued with the rest. She wanted to reach the United States to join two other children who live there, but she couldn’t. Today, this 48-year-old woman is trying to find a job in Costa Rica to restart a life with her family.
“Starting from scratch,” Yaniret Morales sums up at the Tegucigalpa shelter. This 38-year-old mother returns to Venezuela with her 10-year-old daughter, but only “to save up some money and emigrate to another country,” not to the United States.
Broken dreams
Although the Central American governments say they are trying to organize reverse migration, there is chaos. Panama and Costa Rica confine migrants in shelters in remote border areas. “They promised humanitarian flights and nothing. Pure lies,” says Palacios. “We return to our country with broken dreams.”
