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Treacherous Passage

Can Trump shut down the Darién Gap? Cerro Pirre in Darién Province, Panama. | Flickr

In January, shortly before Donald Trump resumed his post at the helm of the United States, incoming border czar Tom Homan informed NBC News that the new administration would be shutting down the Darién Gap—the notorious sixty-six-mile stretch of roadless territory and hostile jungle that straddles Panama and Colombia and constitutes the only land bridge between South and Central America. In 2023 alone, the Darién Gap saw more than 520,000 refugee seekers contend with its horrors as they pursued the hope of a better life in the United States, still over three thousand miles to the north. Countless migrants have died navigating the Gap’s formidable rivers, mountains, and armed assailants, and it is next to impossible to speak with anyone who has survived the crossing without receiving a tally of all the corpses they encountered along the way.

As Homan told NBC regarding the promised closure: “It needs to happen . . . Shutting down the Darién Gap is going to protect our national security. It’s going to save thousands of lives.” Never mind the fact that crackdowns on existing migration routes—and the criminalization of migration in general—have never exactly saved lives, instead forcing refugee seekers onto ever more perilous paths and leaving them more vulnerable to extortion by organized crime and security officials alike. The Sonoran Desert and the Mediterranean Sea come to mind, both of which locations have become mass migrant graveyards in their own right—all in the interest of maintaining a global order predicated on the have-nots remaining have-nots.

To be sure, the proposal to shut down the Darién Gap is of a piece with the Trumpian modus operandi of undertaking to redraw the world map with a flick of the wrist—or a fascist salute, as the case may be. And yet this is not the first time that the possibility of closure has been floated; in September 2023, Colombian president Gustavo Petro complained that the Joe Biden administration had requested the construction of a wall to halt migration via the Tapón del Darién, or “Darién Plug,” as it’s known in Spanish.

The month prior, 81,946 people had reportedly crossed the Gap, 77 percent of them Venezuelan. Speaking in New York on the occasion of the seventy-eighth session of the UN General Assembly, Petro described the U.S.-backed approach to migration in his region as being to “taponar el tapón”—to plug the plug. In addition to being “difficult,” he said, this strategy would be ultimately ineffective. A more straightforward move, he noted, he would be to lift sanctions on Venezuela—in theory a no-brainer, but only if one assumes that the US goal is indeed to save lives, as Homan claims. By the end of Trump’s first term, deaths from sanctions had surpassed 100,000; as of 2023, the US blockade had rendered 2.5 million Venezuelans food insecure.

Meanwhile, the Republican fantasy of Biden as an open-border fanatic fails to jibe with his track record of presiding over more deportations than his predecessor; laboring to dismantle the very concept of asylum; and repeatedly exerting pressure on Colombia and Panama to crack down on migration through the Darién Gap—all, of course, without addressing the decades of punitive U.S. policy that arguably caused much of this migration, sanctions being merely one of many things that complicate existence. The United States also has a lengthy history of backing right-wing dictators and death squads—not to mention overseeing the wanton destruction of livelihoods under the guise of “free trade”—all of which has contributed to making life unlivable for a whole lot of people in a whole lot of places.

On July 1, 2024, around six months before Homan’s pledge to shut down the Gap, newly elected Panamanian president José Raúl Mulino promised in his inaugural speech to do just that, stating, “I understand that there are profound reasons for migration, but each country needs to resolve its own problems.” That same day, Biden’s Department of Homeland Security unveiled an arrangement with Panama to fund a “removal flight program,” a costly and inefficient nonsolution to the country’s “illegal” guests—thanks to whom, it bears mentioning, Panamanian authorities had been making bank. When I first visited the Darién Gap in February 2023, migrants exiting the jungle were charged $40 per person for government-arranged bus service onward to the Costa Rican border; those who could not pay were detained indefinitely, and reports abounded of forced labor and sexual abuse by the officials running Panama’s migrant reception stations. The bus price quickly rose to $60 a pop, which multiplied by 520,000 is no small change.

A few short weeks after his inauguration, Mulino had apparently arrived at the conclusion that taponando el tapónwas easier said than done, reflecting perhaps further on his declaration that “each country needs to resolve its own problems.” On July 18, the Associated Press quoted him as announcing that “this is a United States problem that we are managing,” and that he could not “arrest” or “forcibly repatriate” migrants. However, following a friendly February visit to Panama by Trump’s new secretary of state Marco Rubio—and Trump’s friendly threats to seize the Panama Canal by military force if necessary—the Central American nation and former U.S. colonial stomping grounds has agreed to serve as a “bridge” for deportees from the United States, with the gringos footing the cost. Bridge service has already commenced, and many of the deportees are being held at the San Vicente migrant reception station that previously catered to arrivals from the Darién Gap.

Taking the credit for Trump’s current Panama policy is a certain exuberant sociopath by the name of Laura Loomer, a white nationalist and self-defined “proud Islamophobe” whom Trump once applauded as “very special,” and who recently claimed on her Loomer Unleashedshow that President Trump “actually called me one day, during the last election season, and was asking me about the Darién Gap. . . . He wanted my input on the issue of the illegal alien invasion taking place in the Darién Gap and Panama.” As per her recounting of the conversation, Loomer took this opportunity to advise Trump to retake the Panama Canal because, you know, the Chinese Communist Party has “an enormous presence” in the Canal Zone and is “facilitating illegal immigration” into the United States by “Chinese invaders” and others.

Loomer uncovered this and many other plots during her own descent, in February 2024, upon Panama’s Darién province, where she spent a crowdfunded week antagonizing refugee seekers who had just emerged from a deadly jungle. Accompanying her on the expedition was Michael Yon, a veteran of the U.S. Special Forces, intermittent Darién Gap tour guide for concerned Republicans, and the source of the opinion that migrants are perpetrating a “planet of the apes style invasion” for the purpose of subjecting the white race to “genocide and cannibalism.”

Among the highlights of Loomer’s jaunt to Panama were finding an alarming “Bank of China” sign near the Panama City airport; accosting a “bus full of invaders from Africa” in front of the San Vicente reception camp, including “several . . . wearing tribal outfits”; accosting a “migrant invader who was wearing an OBAMA hat” and who turned out to be Venezuelan; and accosting a “Chinese invader” who offered definitive proof that the CCP is “actively invading the U.S. via invaders.” As if all of this were not apocalyptic enough, some men from Afghanistan “openly admitted” that the purpose of their journey was to “escape the Taliban,” which the unenlightened observer might not realize indicates that it is “only a matter of time before we have another 9/11 style terrorist attack in our country.”

This, in other words, is the sort of mind-boggling delusion driving Trumpian efforts to shut down the Darién Gap and put an end to migration, although it’s anyone’s guess what will happen to the U.S. economy when there are no more invading invaders to perform the undocumented labor on which said economy depends. Of the myriad U.S.-bound refugee seekers I myself have encountered over the years in the Darién Gap, Mexico, and beyond, the vast majority are victims in one way or another of the United States’s own invasive behavior, from the screaming Venezuelan infant invader in the jungle whose exhausted mother had seen no other economic choice but to undertake the arduous journey to the United States, to the young Honduran lesbian invader fleeing the U.S.-backed homicidal shitshow in her own country. Afghan invaders know plenty about U.S. invasions, as do Haitians, whose country has for more than a century been variously subjected to U.S. occupation and forced labor, U.S.-backed torture-obsessed dictators, and U.S.-backed coups. In 2011, WikiLeaks cables revealed that the Barack Obama administration had agitated to thwart an increase in the minimum wage beyond 31 cents per hour for Haitian textile workers.

On the surface, Trump’s vision of closing down the Darién Gap would seem to be bearing fruit; in January 2025, Panama registered a total of 2,229 “irregular” arrivals from the jungle, compared to 36,001 in January 2024. But the substantial drop reflects not so much a closure of the Gap per se as a superficial closure of the U.S. border itself, via Trump’s spontaneous obliteration of the right to asylum and cancellation of the CBP One app allowing undocumented persons the ability to apply for legal entry to the United States by land from Mexico. The program’s cancellation left some 270,000 refugee seekers stranded in Mexican territory, while the ostensible shutdown of the border—coupled with Trump’s promised deportation frenzy—sent skyrocketing the price to be smuggled into the United States. When a week after Trump’s inauguration I paid a visit to Ciudad Juárez in the northern Mexican state of Chihuahua, which lies just opposite El Paso, Texas, I was informed by a stranded Venezuelan migrant that coyotes were now charging $10,000 a head.

And there is a brisk smuggling business in the opposite direction, too, as desperate migrants—many of whom have spent months or more in Mexico at the mercy of both extortion-happy Mexican officials and drug cartels, often operating in cahoots—attempt to head home. A twenty-five-year-old Venezuelan acquaintance of mine made just such a journey in January after waiting for ten months for a CBP One appointment, and told me that the return trip was hands down more “insane” despite the fact that she traveled by boat from Panama to Colombia and thereby avoided having to recross the Darién Gap on foot. Her three-day traversal of the Gap last year was marked by such episodes as witnessing armed men force women to squat so as to facilitate the search for money potentially tucked away in their intimate parts.

This time around, my friend said, she was extorted even more than on the way up, and in Panama she and her small group of Venezuelan travel companions were detained by the migra, who told them they would be held “until your country remembers you exist” unless they produced $5,000. She then befriended one of the female officials, who charitably passed her the number of a Colombian “guide” who would for another substantial fee ferry her on a harrowing two-day odyssey to the Colombian port of Necoclí—the very port where almost a year earlier she had caught a boat to the entrance to the Darién Gap. This “guide” presumably labored under the auspices of the Clan del Golfo, presently Colombia’s dominant drug-trafficking organization and the primary profiteer of the movement of migrants through the Darién Gap, all of which makes a giant mockery of perennial U.S. claims to be combatting nasty human smuggling operations by curbing migration. In reality, the United States is simply lining the pockets of organized crime, which has now detected a market in reverse migration, as well.

My friend now faces the prospect of existence in a place she left precisely because she could not make enough money to survive. Shortly after her homecoming, she confessed, she was overwhelmed by a compulsion to flee north once again, notwithstanding all she had just been through. Thanks to cumulative bipartisan efforts to render the terrain in the self-appointed U.S. backyard as hostile as possible for refugee seekers, folks who risked their lives in the hopes of reaching physical and economic safety in the United States are now being forced to risk their lives to return to the place they started from. And then what?

At the end of the day, the corpse-ridden Darién Gap encapsulates the inherent deadliness of borders—and, frequently, of life in general—for the have-nots of the earth, who must risk death to live and are criminalized for doing so. A microcosm of imperial hypocrisy and lethal inequality, the Darién Gap is the world. And in that sense, then, it won’t be shutting down any time soon.