In the north of Costa Rica, an irregular dirt path runs parallel to the highway that connects the country with Nicaragua at the Las Tablillas border post. When torrential downpours flood the Río Frío and drench the surrounding lowland forest, the trail turns into a viscous paste that sucks at the shoes of migrants crossing the border by foot; they often leave their ruined sneakers behind once they make it across. On a visit to the area last month, I saw hundreds of discarded shoes, sun-bleached and caked in dust. But I was surprised to see that they were piled up on the southern side of the border—a sign that the migrants who’d once worn them had crossed into Costa Rica from the north.
This was a monument to an extraordinary reversal in human migration: For the first time in recent history, the people passing through Central America are mostly moving south. The new migration flow seems to have been triggered by the Trump administration’s crackdown on both legal and illegal crossings at the southern U.S. border. And it is already disorienting the region.
In recent years, millions of migrants from Latin America, the Caribbean, Asia, and Africa have carved a path from South America through the treacherous Darién jungle and into Panama en route north to the United States. But that massive flow is now dwindling.
Costa Rica is representative of the trend. For decades, hundreds and sometimes thousands of migrants crossed the country by bus every day, traveling the roughly 300 miles from Paso Canoas in the south to Los Chiles in the north; according to the UN-affiliated International Organization for Migration, from 2021 to 2024 more than 1.2 million people entered the country heading north from Panama. But after peaking in August 2023 at about 84,500, the number of people migrating north through Costa Rica began to decline—dipping to 14,400 in November 2024, then 1,600 in January 2025, the month Donald Trump was inaugurated; it was 1,600 again in February, then zero as of mid-March. Meanwhile, during a six-week period in February and March, IOM estimates that some 1,200 people moved south into Costa Rica.
Other countries in the region, including Guatemala and Colombia, have also seen a reversal in their migration flows, and have recorded even higher numbers of southbound migrants so far this year. The Panamanian government has reported about 5,100 such migrants since the beginning of 2025. Like Costa Rica, Panama has seen a dramatic decrease in the number of northbound migrants—from 110,572 in the first three months of 2024 to 2,838 in the first three months of 2025. (IOM data in Costa Rica don’t include migrants who enter the country at night or over the weekend, and don’t always cover every point of entry.)
In my conversations with more than two dozen migrants in Costa Rica last month, all but one was either halting their northbound journey or returning after a period in Mexico, where they had resided while awaiting asylum interviews with U.S. officials that never took place. Aid workers I spoke with said that bus companies had recently begun organizing additional routes from Los Chiles to interior cities farther south, such as Quesada and the capital, San José, to account for the new migration flows. At the bus terminals in Los Chiles and Las Tablillas, I observed coyotes, the exploitative human traffickers who once facilitated migrants’ movement northward, offering to guide migrants back down the route if they chose to turn around.
The migrants I spoke with were broadly aware of the Trump administration’s hostility toward immigrants, including its highly publicized deportations. Most had reversed their course simply because they didn’t think they could get into the United States. Asylum claims began to fall during the Biden administration, after it imposed restrictions. But the Trump administration effectively ended consideration of asylum claims at the southern border when, hours after Trump’s inauguration, the White House shut down an app that the Biden administration had set up so migrants could schedule screening appointments. Migrants I interviewed said that they had waited up to nine months for their appointments and decided to turn back when those appointments were canceled. Although some migrants continue to cross the border illegally, they often have to pay smuggling sums that most of them can’t afford; El País recently reported fees between $6,000 and $10,000 per person in Tijuana.
Some migrants told me that another factor, one that predates Trump’s second term, is driving southbound migration too: the grave danger to would-be asylum seekers idling in Mexico. In January 2024, the Mexican government began helping U.S. officials move migrants and asylum seekers away from the U.S. border. In southern Mexico, where corrupt public officials often overlook cartel violence, criminals have extorted and kidnapped people, sometimes targeting those likely to have U.S.-based relatives willing to pay their ransoms. Several migrants told me that they wanted to escape conditions in Mexico that were worse than those that inspired them to leave their home countries in the first place.
Until recently, Abismael, a 25-year-old Venezuelan car mechanic who withheld his full name because he fears retribution, worked for an auto shop in Tapachula, Mexico. In exchange for food and shelter, he told me, he worked 12-hour days, seven days a week for a $15 weekly allowance. He said that earlier this year, he, his brother, sister-in-law, and five nieces and nephews were kidnapped by gun-toting cartel members. “Plata o plomo”—money or lead—their captors repeated, at one point striking Abismael on his back with the barrel of a rifle. “Fuck your mom, I want my money!” they shouted at his 4-year-old nephew. Abismael and his family members were ultimately released when his mother sold the family’s refrigerator in Caracas and wired them its value.
I met Abismael in the Los Chiles bus terminal, three miles south of the Nicaraguan border, where he was pitching a plastic baseball to his nephew, who swatted line drives with a tree branch. With local shelters full, he and his family have been sleeping in the corridors of a local market, but he said that they planned to apply for asylum in Costa Rica and settle there. “When you take a breath here after Mexico,” he said, “it’s different air. It’s a different world. We can take walks on the streets. They give us food here, water, bathrooms.”
“Honestly, we just want peace,” he added. “I don’t care what we do. I just want honest work.”
For migrants heading south, Costa Rica—a middle-income nation and the only stable democracy in the Central American corridor—is a natural place to seek refuge. Some migrants want to avoid crossing Panama’s jungles back into South America, and conditions in the rest of Central America—Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, and Nicaragua—are no better than in Mexico. Early results from an unpublished IOM survey in Costa Rica show that 22 percent of polled southbound migrants plan to stay, while 73 percent plan to continue farther southward. (As a migration researcher, I advise IOM’s Costa Rica office on data collection in an unpaid capacity and have access to its findings.)
Costa Rica is quickly becoming overwhelmed. When I met with him last month, Omer Badilla Toledo, a vice minister who oversees migration policy for Costa Rica’s government, told me that the country of about 5.1 million people was currently processing more than 200,000 asylum applications. According to IOM officials I spoke with, the country’s asylum system had a nine-month backlog. None of the seven shelters I visited had any vacancies.
The volume of reverse migration from Mexico could swell even more. From January to August 2024, Mexican authorities reported more than 900,000 instances of people in the country without legal status. In the last quarter of 2024 alone, approximately 475,000 such “irregular” migrants were detained by Mexican security forces. Should a significant fraction of those people move southward in the coming months, a humanitarian crisis will arise in Costa Rica and possibly elsewhere in Latin America. In 2019, when 60,000 Nicaraguans fled civil conflict, Costa Rica’s asylum system was overloaded.
Costa Rican officials acknowledge that they are not fully prepared. “We expect a wave—a gigantic wave,” Badilla told me during an interview in his San José office. “We think they”—migrants—“are staggered between Mexico and Nicaragua, and at some point they are going to explode into Costa Rica.” With sober certainty, he told me that the country would have to declare a state of emergency to authorize the release of state resources to build temporary shelters and provide food, medical assistance, clothing, and toiletries for migrants. “We do not have the capability,” he said.
The office of the country’s ombudsman—its top accountability officer who also oversees the protection of human rights—recently criticized government “failures” associated with Costa Rica’s treatment of migrants in detention, including people who had passports and other documents confiscated.
Badilla fears that by turning away even asylum seekers and pushing them south, the United States is compounding the humanitarian crisis in his country. But he said that Costa Rica “unfortunately” remains heavily reliant on the United States on matters including security and public health. In February, President Rodrigo Chaves Robles said that the country would cooperate with its “economically powerful brother from the north” by accepting flights filled with migrants deported from the U.S. Human-rights litigators have filed suit against both Costa Rica and Panama for allegedly detaining the migrants, including children, and violating their rights; the cases are ongoing, but U.S. expulsion flights to both countries have since stopped. (The governments of both countries have denied that the migrants are being detained against their will.)
Badilla—an appointee of President Chaves, whose centrist Social Democratic Progress Party won the country’s 2022 election with an anti-corruption campaign—says that xenophobia is already on the rise in Costa Rica. He believes that his party, which faces an election in 2026, only stands to lose from a nativist political backlash like those that have displaced moderate governments in Europe and the United States in recent years.
The Trump administration might welcome the news that migrants are turning back, but a more unstable Central and South America could hurt U.S. interests. Should Costa Rica’s Washington-friendly government fall, a weaker state or a more Beijing-oriented alternative could be elected in its place. Meanwhile, the shutdown of the U.S. asylum system will pressure more migrants to turn to smugglers to cross the border, and leave migrants vulnerable to exploitation by the Mexican cartels that Trump promised to attack in his campaign. Trump’s policies are tarnishing America’s legacy as a refuge for persecuted people searching for freedom and human rights, and could embolden other nations to adopt similar tactics in violation of international law.
Trump has proclaimed that his border restrictions will be loosened after he determines that the “invasion at the southern border has ceased.” But even with thousands of migrants now turning south, humanitarian challenges in the Western Hemisphere will persist.