Migrants haven't just stopped coming to the U.S. — they’re going back to their home countries

Since President Donald Trump took office, the border between the United States and Mexico has been all but abandoned. What had been packed with record numbers of migrants coming to the U.S. to seek asylum under the Biden administration not long ago is now largely empty, as migrants have pretty much stopped coming.

Daniel Gonzalez, who covers immigration for The Arizona Republic, has been to the border and documented that decline. But, he also wanted to see what happened farther south.

Gonzalez went to two main gateways along the migrant route to the U.S. — between Guatemala and Mexico, and the Darién Gap between Colombia and Panama.

He expected to see the same drop in migration that he saw reporting along the U.S. and Mexico border, and he did. But he also saw something else that surprised him: People going back.

Full conversation

DANIEL GONZALEZ: These changes practically happened overnight and, really, it owes to the power of social media. So people were aware that the border had been shut down when the Trump administration went into effect back in January. They knew that people who were crossing the border were being arrested instead of being allowed into the United States, which is what was happening under the Biden administration.

But what was really driving this change was the images that people were seeing on TikTok of people being arrested, these very heavy-handed, military-style arrests taking place in the United States. Those take place one day, and they're on social media within hours. And that was what was surprising to us to see that people were seeing these images on TikTok, and that was discouraging them from — if they were en route, it was encouraging them to turn around and go back.

It was encouraging people not to leave their countries. And also, what was surprising is how many people we met who had actually made it to the United States, were living here and were now headed home; had left, self-deported.

LAUREN GILGER: Wow.

GONZALEZ: And were headed home.

GILGER: I mean, the Trump administration has talked about encouraging people to self-deport because of their strong-handed approach. So I mean, from what you saw, it's working.

GONZALEZ: Yeah. So I was surprised to see how many people we met who had actually been in, living in the interior of the United States. We met a guy who was living in Kingman for example, and met people who were living in Kentucky; many, many states throughout the United States who had actually seen ICE raids taking place in their own communities, or on television or on social media and said, "you know what, I don't want to take the chance of being put in detention and flown home. I'm going to try to get back on my own."

GILGER: OK. So going home, the big question there, and you profiled a lot of people in this series who were on that route home. What are they going home to? I mean, they fled for a reason, right?

GONZALEZ: They're going home to the exact same conditions they left. And ... that kind of raises the question ... these policies have been very effective in not only stopping people coming to the United States, but encouraging people to go back. And also, people are being deported in large numbers.

But the situations in these countries like Venezuela, Colombia, Haiti, Cuba, Nicaragua, those are all the countries, some of the main sending countries, the conditions there have not changed, and if anything, they've gotten worse. So people who are going back, they're going to face a lot of uncertainty, difficulties finding jobs, economic crises, violence, political upheaval. All those things haven't changed.

So it raises the question: How effective are these policies going to be in the long term? We've seen this dramatic decrease in the number of people coming, and also an increase in people returning.

But the experts that I interviewed use this term "the ballooning effect." What's happening now is that there will be this pressure that will start to grow in these countries. People either will try to go back to their own countries or go to other parts of Latin America, waiting for that opportunity down the road to maybe go back to another country or possibly the United States.

So will we see those waves of migrants in the future? I think it's very likely. Will that be in weeks, months, years down the road? That's what we don't know.

GILGER: Yeah. So some of the people you profiled here were being flown back to kind of very far south parts of Mexico, often where they were not from, right? And you have this quote in here: These are people who are basically gringos at this point, and they're undergoing this really big shock because they might be from these countries, but they might have been in the U.S. for a very long time, it sounds like.

Tell us about some of those folks.

GONZALEZ: Sure, sure. So this is a new policy that's under the Trump administration. We've always deported people to Mexico, both at the land ports and also by planes, that's been happening for a long time. What's new is the United States is flying — the majority of people who are being deported to Mexico — are being flown to the most southern tips of Mexico, the farthest that you can get from the United States, 2,000 miles away in many cases.

And the idea is that those folks will be less likely to come back to the United States if they're so far away. But many of the people that we met — this was what was really shocking — there weren't people who had recently crossed the border. There were many people who had been living in the United States for decades.

For example, we met people who had lived in the United States. They had left Mexico when they were 7 or 8 years old, and they were getting off the plane, and really, it was like a foreign country to them. They had never been there. They had no recollection of being in Mexico. They spoke English much better than they spoke Spanish.

I remember this one guy I went up to, fluent English speaker ... and he was from somewhere in northern Mexico, and he was arriving in southern Mexico, and he had to figure out, "How am I gonna get back to, you know, where I'm from originally, and what am I gonna do when I get there?"

GILGER: There's a program, though. Mexico is sort of prepared for this. So many people are having this experience that they have, like, systems in place to try to handle it.

GONZALEZ: Yeah, like the place that we met folks — so, when people arrive, they land at the airport there in Tapachula, and then they put them on buses, and they bring them to a reception center that's been set up outside their main soccer stadium. It's basically in a parking lot. And when the migrants arrive on these buses, they go inside, and they're basically reoriented into their own country.

And you have to imagine, if you haven't lived in a country for decades, you don't have something as simple as an ID. So that's one of the main things they do there, is they look them up in their system, and they try to find some records of them, and then they give them an ID so that that allows them to travel in Mexico, wherever they're trying to get to.

They give them some food, they give them some clothing. They give them a chance to take a shower. They do health screenings. They give them just — it's really just a couple hours that they're in there, but it's a chance to kind of reorient themselves into Mexico.

GILGER: Tell us about the Darién Gap. I mean, this has been a big part of the story around migration from South America and Central America for a long time, because it's this incredibly dangerous stretch of jungle, basically, that all of a sudden, lots of people were coming through to try to get north and get to the United States eventually

You went to a town there, Bajo Chiquito, which has been a center point for this and kind of has been bolstered by this migrant rush over the last many years. And now it's what, it's empty?

GONZALEZ: Totally empty. So the very first town that migrants would encounter coming out of the Darién Gap was this town called Bajo Chiquito. It's a town of less than 400 people. And this whole economy developed around the migrants that were traveling through. More than a million migrants passed through the Darién Gap during the four years when Biden was the president.

But when we were there, there was zero migrants in the town. If we had been there just, you know, in January, there would have been several thousand migrants living there.

GILGER: Wow. So you were witness to these major shifts, these big changes in the migration patterns that are happening right now, which are a direct result what's happening in our government. And these things happen in migration. Like, we see changes in these patterns, but not often changes this big.

I just wanna ask you lastly, Daniel, what your biggest takeaway was, like, was there a moment that stands out to you that you can't stop thinking about in all of this reporting?

GONZALEZ: Well, I think the biggest thing that stuck with me is to see the look on these people's faces. These are people who were fleeing very, very horrendous conditions in their own countries. These were people who had left their countries many times, sold everything that they owned to finance these trips to get to the United States.

And to see their faces, you know, it was a look of utter despair, going back to their home countries, having given up on their American dream.

GILGER: Yeah. Alright. Daniel Gonzalez is an immigration reporter for the Arizona Republic, joining us. Daniel, thank you so much. Appreciate your reporting here.

GONZALEZ: Thanks for having me.