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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.
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.
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.
