The Great Reverse Migration

This article was produced in partnership with Rolling Stone and the Marguerite Casey Foundation.

As soon as they take off from the Panamanian coast, there is a sigh of relief. Surrounded by 30 other Venezuelan migrants, packed inside an overloaded midsize speedboat, Edinson holds on tightly to the edge. The 37-year-old is tall and slender and has a presence that stands out as he towers over everyone. Over the past couple of weeks, he’s become the de facto captain of a group of migrants making their way back to Venezuela.

At this point in their long journey, they sit in silence under blue skies and a blazing morning sun. The end is in sight. Sporting a black Los Angeles Dodgers baseball cap and a blue T-shirt, Edinson stares out to the crystal clear Caribbean Sea. He knows these waters can be deadly. A couple of months ago, a boat carrying 19 migrants capsized not too far from here, but Edinson tells himself he has survived worse.

The boat is being piloted by two local operators, also known as lancheros, who constantly scoop water to avoid flooding. Dressed in black from head to toe, these lancheros now make a living transporting migrants from Panama’s Colón province in the central, northern part of the country to La Miel, a small town close to the Colombian border. This 12-hour sea route is the only way for migrants to bypass the dense, swampy, deadly Darién jungle that connects the two countries — the only spit of land linking North and South America via Central America. Each person making the voyage had risked their lives once to trek north through the jungle in their attempt to reach the United States. This time, on their way back to Venezuela, they want to avoid it at all costs, even if it means facing those rough Caribbean waters.

It’s 9:19 a.m. by now, the warm water splashing into the boat as it travels parallel to the shoreline, where you can still see lush tropical rainforests in the distance. While Edinson grabs onto the metal handles, one woman in a light-blue plastic poncho, hair flying with the wind, locks arms with her young daughter. In front of them, a young father holds his five-year-old son in his lap, squeezing him tightly as we slam through the big waves. Everyone on board manages to suppress their fear with the simple prospect of returning home. “Solo pienso en llegar, llegar, llegar (I’m just thinking of arriving, arriving, arriving),” Edinson says.

Unbeknownst to him, Edinson is part of a growing trend of “reverse migration” emerging throughout the American continent. A year ago, this movement would have been unimaginable. In 2024, during the Joe Biden administration, more than 300,000 north-bound migrants traversed the Darién Gap. After Donald Trump effectively dismantled the asylum-seeking process during his first administration, hundreds and thousands of migrants, precipitated by the pandemic and critical conditions in their homelands, headed toward the U.S. Those numbers plummeted once Trump took office again and began doubling down on his anti-immigrant agenda. According to the United Nations Human Rights Office of the High Commissioner, only 2,831 people crossed the Darién between January and March 2025, representing a 98 percent decrease compared with 2024. In March, Panama’s President José Raúl Mulino declared that the Darién Gap was effectively closed, proudly noting that his country’s migration crisis was over. Yet that statement overlooks a new, invisible crisis slowly forming in plain sight, miles away from the Darién. Migrants are still risking their lives; they are simply doing it on their way south, not north.

As Reuters first reported in March, more than 2,800 U.S.-bound migrants in Mexico requested assistance from the United Nations International Organization for Migration (IOM) to return to their homelands in January and February, just weeks after Trump stepped into the White House. Many of those migrants had been waiting in limbo to enter the United States. By June, the IOM estimated that approximately 7,696 southbound migrants had traveled from Panama to Colombia since February. While tracking this data is challenging, the movements on the ground point to a monumental new chapter in the history of migration: the disintegration of the American dream.

“By turning a refugee population into priorities for enforcement, it’s ending a chapter the United States aspired to. It aspired to be a place of refuge,” Andrea Flores, vice president of Immigration Policy and Campaigns at FWD.us, a bipartisan immigration-advocacy group, tells me. “The American dream meant that, regardless of background, our Constitution protected all of these identities and believed that, through our immigration system and the concept of naturalization, you could become an American. That idea of the American dream is ending.”

So, what happens when migrants stop looking north?

Starting Over in the U.S.

Seven months ago, Edinson never imagined he’d be returning to Venezuela.

Like millions living under President Nicolás Maduro’s authoritarian regime, Edinson, who is the father of two young boys, struggled to provide for his family as a street-market seller of secondhand goods. For decades, Venezuela has undergone a sociopolitical crisis that has stripped citizens of basic civil rights and economic opportunities. Since 2014, close to 8 million Venezuelans have left the country, making it the largest recorded forced-displacement crisis in the Western Hemisphere, and one of the largest in the world.

Edinson watched neighbors pack their bags and flee to the United States, but the idea of leaving his children behind kept him anchored in his hometown of Caja Seca, a small, rural community. He was at peace with the idea of leading a simple life and found joy in the small things — playing basketball with his kids, taking his eldest to practice, and eating dinner with his mother every night. Miles away from Caracas, surrounded by forests, Edinson managed to stay away from the capital’s political turmoil, even as massive protests against Maduro’s crackdown erupted in that city.

“Turning refugees into priorities for enforcement ends a chapter the United States aspired to.”

But in the summer of 2024, Edinson’s three-year-old son got sick. To help pay for hospital visits and medicine, Edinson traveled to the capital, almost nine hours away, where he sold used clothes and sneakers for quick cash. A couple of weeks and many trips later, Edinson’s savings were gone and he could barely afford to buy groceries. Blaming Madu­ro’s regime, Edinson recognized that the only way for his family to survive was for him to leave Venezuela and go north.

Jorge, one of Edinson’s childhood best friends, had left Caja Seca a couple of years ago and, after receiving humanitarian parole under the Biden administration, ended up working at a tire shop in Indianapolis. Jorge told Edinson about what better opportunities looked like, what it could feel like for Edinson to have enough money in his pockets to help his son. Things weren’t perfect in Indiana, Jorge would tell Edinson, but that sense of suffocation and paranoia was gone, and that was enough to inspire Edinson to start planning. Suddenly, the motivation wasn’t just economic, but the realization that life could be different — free of misery and oppression. He would join Jorge, send cash to his family and, eventually, bring them to America. “That’s the only solution I could find,” Edinson says.

On Oct. 1, 2024, Edinson left Venezuela, beginning a trek north as the United States was in the midst of a heated presidential election with Vice President Kamala Harris’ lead over Trump slowly shrinking. The day Edinson left, Trump held a campaign rally in Milwaukee, warning the crowd about a “mass migrant invasion.” By that point, Trump calling Venezuelan migrants “criminals” and “gang members” had become a core part of his stump speech.

While Trump bet on his nativist, anti-immigrant rhetoric to mobilize voters, Edinson held onto the hope that Americans would be able to see past the fearmongering and baseless attacks. “A lot of people in Caja Seca told me not to go [to the U.S.], and to wait until the election results,” Edinson says. He was convinced that, like previous generations of Venezuelan migrants, he would eventually find a pathway to legalization. Regardless of the political outcome, Edinson trusted the American system.

During 2024, at the height of the migration wave toward the U.S., an average of 3,000 people trekked through the Darién Gap each day. Known as “the world’s most dangerous jungle,” millions of migrants and refugees risked their lives and attempted to cross it during the Biden years, despite the administration’s attempts to restrict asylum. Still, Edinson thought he would have the chance to start a new life in the U.S.

The American Dream

In October, it took Edinson almost four days to cross the Darién Gap by foot, passing four corpses during the last stretch of the jungle: the emaciated remains of a mother and daughter who died hugging; a woman who looked like she’d just been shot in the head; the decomposed body of what appeared to be an elderly man; and many, many human bones and skulls lined the edges of the swampy, overgrown paths.

As soon as Edinson emerged from the Darién Gap and reached the small Panamanian town of Bajo Chiquito, he called his mother back in Caja Seca. “Don’t ever do this,” he told her. He rested for a few days in the town’s makeshift migrant camp full of asylum seekers who had just braved the jungle and were in dire need of urgent care. From there, Edinson would take several buses through Central America to Mexico, where he would begin the process to request asylum in the United States.

Back in 2021, a couple of days after Biden’s inauguration, I spent a week reporting from the Darién Gap. What haunted me wasn’t what I could see and hear around me — the dangerous wildlife, the gasps of pain from Haitian mothers as they carried their weeping children through the hills on bloody, blistered feet, the trails of abandoned backpacks — rather, it was everything I couldn’t see. What haunted me the most was migrants’ blind loyalty to the ideals that pushed them toward the U.S. Their capacity to face any risk — even death — in the pursuit of freedom, justice, and liberty. Having lived through authoritarianism, gang violence, and/or poverty, they understood how sacred America’s rights were, how vital our Constitution was, and the privilege our democracy represented. “Is the American dream worth this?” I’d ask along the trek. The answer was always a resounding yes.

In 1931, author and historian James Truslow Adams was one of the first to introduce the concept of the American dream in his book The Epic of America. Adams, who was born into a wealthy Brooklyn family, originally explained it as a “dream of a better, richer, and happier life for all our citizens of every rank.” Many scholars took issue with this limited characterization, pointing to its materialistic and capitalistic nature. Since, generations of ordinary Americans, presidents, politicians, and historians have continued to redefine the term, using it as an anchor to unify our perpetually polarized nation. For decades, the American dream has been framed as an open-ended quest that had yet to be fully realized.

Historically, immigrants trekking to the U.S. each day have carried the aspiration of that dream. From the more than 30 million Europeans who arrived between 1815 and 1915 to the birth of the Chicano movement and the rise of Cesar Chavez’s farmworkers to the mass mobilization of Dreamers, generations of immigrants have shaped America’s own commitment to that vision. But as hundreds of migrants begin to self-deport and as thousands of asylum seekers turn away from the southern border, choosing new paths for themselves, it seems that Adams’ American dream was just that — simply a dream.

Edinson came to that conclusion shortly after he arrived in Mexico, now just miles away from the U.S. After surviving the Darién jungle and crisscrossing through Central America, Edinson arrived in the Mexican city of Tapachula on Oct. 14, 2024, less than three weeks before the U.S. presidential election. He applied for asylum through CBP One, a controversial mobile application allowing migrants at the southern border to schedule appointments at designated U.S. ports of entry. This process became one of the only ways to legally enter at the U.S.-Mexico border under Biden, as the administration attempted to handle a surge of new arrivals.

Based on a lottery system, migrants would sometimes wait months for their appointment in extremely dangerous conditions. The cartels often run these border towns and have historically subjected migrants to kidnappings, extortions, and sexual violence. Yet, once migrants were screened and vetted by immigration officers, many were eventually released on parole in the U.S.

“Almost all of them have seen someone die or disappear … and now they have to return.”

“In Mexico, you live in fear every single day,” Edinson says. “There’s no peace of mind there. But the plan was always to wait and get to the U.S.” As Edinson waited in limbo, he got a job as a tire repairer. He shared a tiny two-bedroom apartment with 14 other Venezuelan migrants. Each night, he slept on a thin foam mattress on a floor, surrounded by strangers connected by the hope that America would reject Trump’s vision. Paralyzed by fear from Tapachula’s cartel violence, Edinson barely left that apartment.

By Nov. 5, Edinson understood that the land that lured him didn’t want him there. Like his roommates, Edinson found out about the election results through social media, as he anxiously scrolled Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook. In the immediate aftermath of the election, Edinson received conflicting advice. His friend Jorge encouraged him to continue his journey, even if it meant paying coyotes to get smuggled through the southern border. Edinson’s mom urged him to go back home to Caja Seca. With Trump in power, she no longer saw a pathway for her son.

Edinson stayed the course. He wasn’t alone. As the Associated Press reported, more than 2,000 migrants in southern Mexico began walking toward the U.S. the morning Trump was sworn in. By the time the sun set, his administration had declared a national emergency at the border, shut down the CBP One application, revoked key humanitarian parole programs, attempted to repeal birthright citizenship, and laid the groundwork for its mass-deportation machine. A couple of days later, as millions of immigrants went back into the shadows, American military planes started deporting dozens of migrants to Guatemala. As FWD.us’ Flores says, “Trump’s unique targeting of Venezuelans during the 2024 campaign was the preview of everything you are seeing now.”

From Indianapolis, Jorge kept Edinson abreast of the news. Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids were picking up, more deportation flights were taking off, and local police were starting to act like federal immigration agents. Even though Jorge had legal status, it felt like a matter of time until someone came knocking on his door. By mid-March, Jorge’s tone changed when the Trump administration invoked the Alien Enemies Act and deported 137 Venezuelan men to El Salvador without due process, accusing them of being gang members and national-security threats. Haunted by the demeaning photo ops of Venezuelan men paraded around El Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele’s mega-prison, Jorge told Edinson he was scared to leave his house and end up behind bars in a foreign country.

Few things can quell an immigrant’s determination. Some will hide in corners, others will walk with more caution, many will perpetually wait in limbo until better opportunities arise. I’ve met Cuban migrants who have waited more than two years along the southern border for a chance to enter the U.S. Immigrants have historically held on to a form of unwavering hope that dissipates only when their luck runs out.

While Edinson watched the way Jorge’s life was at the mercy of immigration officials, however, he decided the chance for a new life in America wasn’t worth it. “When I saw that they [the U.S. government] were taking away my own people, the same anxiety I felt in Venezuela started to sink in,” Edinson says. “To leave a dictatorship only to walk into that? It’s preferable to leave that behind.” After waiting in Mexico for six months, Edinson decided to turn back.

As Edinson thought through the logistics of his return home, he had one condition: No matter what, he wouldn’t go through the Darién Gap again. Dead people. Hills. Wild animals. Criminals preying on migrants. As he planned another way back, he came across a small group of Venezuelans also plotting their return. They spent weeks hustling for money around Tapachula. During the days, some worked as street vendors, construction workers, or in factories, packing mangoes. In the evenings, they came together to talk about the different routes around the Darién Gap. Through word of mouth, they learned migrants were boarding small boats by Panama’s Caribbean coast and taking a long sea route to Colombia that allowed them to bypass the jungle. They also heard that back in February, an eight-year-old Venezuelan child died after one of those boats sank. But Edinson suddenly felt the same way he did as he migrated north: The risk was worth it.

Against the Tide

On April 19, 2025, at 9 p.m., Edinson boarded a bus in Tapachula and began the first stretch of his trip, a three-day journey that would take him all the way to Costa Rica.

In Spanish, contracorriente means to go against the tide. The word perfectly captures Edinson’s journey through Central America on roads paved for migrants who fled in the other direction. From Mexico, there were those who rushed to California for gold or to the Texas farmlands for work throughout the 19th century; from Guatemala and Honduras, countless asylum seekers searched for new beginnings in Florida after escaping the maras and dangerous mudslides; from Nicaragua, its war-torn populous sought American democracy during the Cold War.

By April 22, after days on the road, Edinson made it to Costa Rica. That night, I met him for the first time, by a bus stop in Paso Canoas, a small town on the border between Costa Rica and Panama. Smoking a cigarette as he paced back and forth, he was surrounded by a group of Venezuelan men he had met on the bus ride to Paso Canoas. They were all young dads in their twenties and thirties who traveled solo to the U.S., now on their way back home to their kids.

“When the border with the U.S. closed, everyone’s dreams stopped existing,” says Edinson, whose tall silhouette covers the street lights shining over us. “One tries to forget about that, but the feeling remains.”

Luis, a 30-year-old father of three young kids, chimes in: “We’ve been talking about this the whole way here.… I think we are the beginning of a new wave. If they closed the door on us, we have to find a new horizon.”

That night, Edinson and his friends will rest in a nearby hostel mostly occupied by migrants and pay smugglers $40 each to be transported by charter bus from Paso Canoas into Panama in the late hours of the night, when Panamanian immigration authorities are more likely to turn a blind eye.

Paso Canoas has always been an important transit town for northbound migrants. During peak migration periods in 2023, the Costa Rican government, along with aid groups on the ground, implemented a relatively sound protection system that allowed for safe passage, opening a temporary migrant care center, adopting busing programs to transport migrants from its southern border to its northern one, and working closely with the United Nations to coordinate humanitarian assistance. During those years, the streets were bustling, there was a robust presence of aid workers, and local business owners kept their fresh-fruit stands open all day. Then, shortly after Trump took office, an eerie quiet took over the town. By the second week of February, aid workers noticed asylum seekers were coming through from America, instead of the south.

Today, locals estimate that more than 100 southbound migrants pass through Paso Canoas each day. The majority are Venezuelans who left Mexico after waiting in limbo following the 2024 election. There are also a significant number of migrants who either self-deported or were turned away by immigration authorities at U.S. ports of entry.

Every afternoon, Sister Claudia Cuadra, a nun from Chile, posts up by the bus station and waits for migrant buses to arrive. She escorts as many people as she can back to a small church turned dining hall offering free meals and basic services. Paso Canoas is now mostly run by nuns. The Trump administration’s foreign-aid freeze suspended crucial regional programs that offered shelter, food, hydration, hygiene, and legal aid to migrants, forcing some aid groups to exit the region altogether. As Refugees International recently reported, in just four months, the Trump administration dismantled Costa Rica’s protection infrastructure. This spurred a number of faith-based organizations to fill the void.

One rainy afternoon, I see the nuns in action, opening their doors to a group of about 20 migrants lined up outside the church. Some nuns pass out lunch boxes, while others play with the fidgety children and offer single mothers an extra hand. While Sister Adriana Calzada Vazquez Vela hands out food, she tells me migrants arriving here from the north are often hungry, exhausted, and resigned. “There’s a sadness,” she says. “There’s disappointment because there was a dream that became lost or broken.”

Humanitarian experts say reverse migrating is a traumatic experience, perhaps even more so than going north. Caitlyn Yates, an anthropologist at the University of British Columbia and a volunteer with Refugees International, explains that grappling with the end of hope is the most difficult part. At this point in their journey, still operating on adrenaline and survival instinct, they’ve barely processed what they’ve seen along the way. “They carry the grief and trauma of having crossed through the Darién,” says Ivan Aguilar, a humanitarian coordinator for Oxfam. “Almost all of them have seen someone die or disappear … and now they have to return.”

“When the border with the United States closed, everyone’s dreams stopped existing.”

When I ask these experts if there is anything comparable, a similar pattern of reverse migration that has taken place in another part of the globe, they struggle to come up with an answer. Aguilar points out that after living in the U.S. for 30 or 40 years, some migrants choose to retire in their home countries. But this is different, he stresses: “The reverse migration we are seeing is due to the impossibility of reaching a final destination.”

A New Beginning

Sitting in the church’s dining hall, just miles away from the foot of the jungle, migrants weigh the same question Edinson had been pondering: how to avoid the Darién Gap.

Barajas Marquez, a 39-year-old Venezuelan playing with his son inside the church, doesn’t have the cash to pay for the boat. He’s trying to save enough money to give his family options. He says he knows of those desperate enough to consider going back through the jungle by foot. Edinson spent weeks working at the tire shop in Tapachula so he could afford the sea route, which is a little less than the $330 Edinson paid back in October 2024 to be smuggled by foot through the Darién jungle by the Gulf Clan, a Colombian paramilitary group. “It’s dangerous,” Edinson admits. “It’s unclear what can happen to us during so many hours.… What if the sea is choppy?” Luckily, he knows how to swim.

I meet Edinson at 2 a.m. by the same bus stop he had arrived at earlier that day. I knew this was the time that his group planned to make moves, when the town was asleep. Edinson and three other men walk briskly toward the border crossing with Panama, just a couple of feet away. A larger group of about 25 migrants quietly emerges from the surrounding streets and joins Edinson’s pack. They all move silently through a back alley that allows them to circumvent the Panamanian immigration authorities.

In the daytime, this intersection, which sits on the Pan-American Highway, is one of the busiest land crossings in Central America, as it’s a major hub for commercial traffic. Truck drivers sometimes wait in line for more than five hours just to get processed by immigration authorities. But at night, Panamanian immigration officials have mostly grown accustomed to looking the other way as migrants quietly tiptoe around the system.

A couple of minutes later, already on the Panamanian side, the group congregates by a charter bus stationed by the sidewalk, engine turned on, luggage-compartment hood wide open, ready to go. The silence turns into chaos as migrants frantically put their bags inside the bus and reach out with their cash — $25, the cost of being smuggled across Panama. I ask Edinson if he knows anything about the bus driver — who he is, who he works for, why he’s there. He doesn’t. The bus pulls away, taking the migrants to David, a city in western Panama. From there, Edinson will take several buses until he reaches the country’s eastern coast. That’s where the boats await.

Every day, hundreds of migrants like Edinson take off from the Panamanian province of Colón as they embark on their final stretch home. This may feel like a win for a Trump administration that prides itself on pressuring people into self-deporting and turning around. From up close, though, the act of leaving looks, for many, more like an act of freedom. That’s particularly evident in Colón, where there’s an emotional shift, when even those who feel defeated and terrified to return to the homelands from which they fled, begin to see more opportunities back in the south than up north. Perhaps it’s that their journey is almost over, that they are hours away from hugging their loved ones, or that they’ve had enough time to self-reflect. The region of Colón has a deep history of liberation.

This port played an important role during the transatlantic slave trade, when European colonizers forcefully brought millions of enslaved Africans to Panama. The enslaved people later revolted and eventually established settlements along the coast. Centuries later, the province of Colón is now inhabited by a majority Afro-Panamanian population.

Surrounded by rainforests, old colonial towns are filled with churches, squares, and ancient structures covered in a chipped, colorful, bright paint. Here, time moves slowly. After 24 hours on the road, cruising full speed toward the east coast, Edinson finally makes it to Palenque, a tiny beach town in Colón.

The morning of April 24, I meet Edinson by Palenque’s wooden dock. He’s still with the other young Venezuelan dads he’d met up with in Tapachula, but he’s now part of another, newly formed group of migrants waiting to board the two-engine boat. There’s Genesis, a 31-year-old woman who’d spent months in the Mexican border town of Matamoros, right by McAllen, Texas. She doesn’t know how to swim and is petrified to get on the boat, especially after hearing that one of them capsized in February. There’s Alessandro, also in his early thirties who, 10 days prior, self-deported from Ohio. His arms covered in tattoos, Alessandro is scared DHS would label him as a gang member and send him to El Salvador.

As we talk near the dock, I ask Edinson the same question I asked migrants in 2021 when we trekked north through the Darién jungle — was the American dream worth it? “I wouldn’t go back to the United States,” he says with certainty.

Edinson stuffs his backpack into a plastic bag. He puts on a life vest handed to him by one of the local Afro-Panamanian men organizing the boat rides. These men — coyotes of some sort, part of a well-oiled informal migrant-transportation machine — are collecting $280 per person. It will take about 12 hours to reach La Miel, Panama. From there, Edinson will get onto another boat to Colombia and continue his journey to Venezuela by bus. He hopes to be in Caja Seca in less than 48 hours. “Are you nervous? Anxious?” I ask him. “No, just anxious to get home,” he says.

Edinson knows Venezuela’s conditions haven’t gotten any better with Maduro still in power. He cannot wait to hug his boys, but what worries him most is not being able to buy his 12-year-old everything he needs for his basketball games. He’s not sure how long he’ll last in Venezuela. As soon as he gets home, Edinson will plot his next journey.

The migrants form two lines along the dock. Men on the right, women and their children on the left. The women enter the boat one by one and sit in the back, followed by the men, a couple of whom move closer to the engines to join their wives and squeeze their kids. Edinson and his friends sit by the tip of the boat, packed in with 30 people who are all part of a new chapter of history, the beginning of a new “Great Reverse Migration.” When they get home, they will tell their children, their grandchildren, and generations to come that America didn’t live up to its ideals, that the dream could be chased elsewhere. They will get out a map and look for new horizons. In turn, James Truslow Adams’ Epic of America could come to an end.

Right before the lancheros take off from the dock, a local Afro-Panamanian woman approaches the boat. She kneels down and prays out loud for them. The migrants begin cheering from the boat. The woman gets on her feet and yells “Hoy es un dia que se va a desatar algo” — “Today is a day when something will unleash.”

As the boat takes off, going against the tide, Edinson sighs as if a weight has been lifted.

A few weeks later, he’s back in Caja Seca with his family, making $50 a week as a delivery person, trying to save enough money to move to Chile. “I have life, health, and, more than anything, peace of mind,” Edinson says. “No one can take that away from me.”

Additional reporting by Miguel Fernández Flores and Sofia Villamil.