The Darién Gap: Where Dreams Die
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Hey, everybody. Robert Evans here, and I wanted to let you know this is a compilation episode. So every episode of the week that just happened is here in one convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to listen to in a long stretch if you want. If you've been listening to the episodes every day this week, there's going to be nothing new here for you, but you can make your own decisions.

It's me, James. And before we listen to this episode today, I just did want to make you aware that I conducted these interviews in French and Spanish, mostly Spanish, and then transcribed and translated them. So what you're hearing is a translated interview that's been edited for brevity and content. I hope you enjoy the episode. The most difficult part of the journey is when you are trekking and you meet dead bodies on the road. It makes you weep. It makes you cry.

But there's only one focus in the forest. Ahead, you have to keep going. You see mothers, children, they're crying just to have a sip of water. It is not easy. A few weeks ago, I found myself sitting beside the Tukesa River on a warm afternoon in late September, making silly faces at a two-month-old baby as we both marveled at the cloud of yellow butterflies.

Anywhere else on earth, it could be an idyllic summer day, but in these final steps of the journey across the Daliangab, it's hard to open up your mind to experience joy. I'd only been in the tiny Embara village of Bajo Chiquito a couple of days, and I'd already seen the lifeless body of a little girl as other migrants carried her into town. The river I was sleeping around in with this group of migrants resting here in the shade had swept sleeping children to their deaths earlier this year, and upstream of me there were at least three people's remains.

Here, it was shindeep. But crossing upstream, where it's above head height and radius down out of the mountains and steep ravines, was, the migrants I walked back to town with told me, the stuff of nightmares. The voice you just heard was a migrant from Cameroon who called himself James. That's not his real name, and astute listeners will have noticed that it is my real name. But for the protection of James and his family, it's a name we'll be using.

When I met James, we were in a migrant reception centre called Las Blancas, to the north of the Dallian Gap. To get there, one has to take a dugout canoe called a piragua from Bajo Chiquito. The voyage takes five hours, and for that five hours migrants are packed 15 to a boat wearing bright orange life jackets. I share the boat with Nembara Piraguero, who sits at the back, driving the boat with a two-stroke motor, and a guide who sits on the front, using a pole when necessary to push the boat through shallow sections.

The Embara people are indigenous to the area that's commonly known as the Darien Gap, or at least to this part of it, and the tiny Embara village of Bajo Chiquito is the first settlement migrants encounter as they emerge from the perilous crossing of the jungle that divides Central America from South America and thousands of people from a better future. There's a morale patch that the Panamanian Border Patrol and military wear on their uniforms that reflects a slogan in a government messaging campaign. "'Darien no es una ruta, es una jungla,' it says."

The campaign was launched in August, and it translates to that Darien isn't a route, or maybe a road is a better translation. It's a jungle. Obviously, it's actually both, but this is like no route most of us would be familiar with. The dark and foreboding jungle I saw in Bahajigito is one of the most impenetrable on Earth, and the crossing of it is among the most dangerous land migration routes. In the 1970s, the British Army sent its most experienced explorers to find a way through the gap.

Their commander called the gap a "gold-forsaken place." Today, migrants have their own names for it: La Ruta del Muerte, or sometimes, the Green Hell. Here's a group from Cameroon explaining why they didn't see a future there and they decided to take this dangerous route. We are coming from Cameroon. My name is Powers. There's a lot of crisis in our country. There's a civil war going on in Cameroon right now because our president, President Pompeo, has been in power for over 42 years.

So all the Anglophone, we started revolting for him to step down because he doesn't develop the Southern American, sorry, the English section of Cameroon. Yeah, the Anglophone. Yeah, the Anglophone section. So we revolt. Instead, he was sending the military and he was killing the citizens of our country. There's a lot of hardship, a lot of debt. I, for one, I've lost everybody. I lost all of my family, my mom, my dad, my two brothers, and I'm the only one left.

So things are normal. There is no job. I've completed school, but there's nothing for me to do. So that's why I decided to migrate. To get to Bajo Chiquito from Colombia, as James and other migrants did, there's no road you can take. You can't even take a boat or a train. Instead, you have to walk the Darien Gap, an area of rainforest and mountains that is one of the most dangerous migration routes in the world.

For anywhere between 2 and 15 days, migrants trek through waist-high mud and rivers deeper than they are tall. They must climb giant boulders, cross perilous ravines and traverse sheer cliff faces. All of this with barely any water other than what they can carry. Little to no food, inadequate clothing and terrible footwear and no medical attention. They must walk past dead bodies and past people who might soon become dead bodies as they beg for help.

They carry their children, their dreams, and sometimes each other across mountains and rivers. And in Bajo Chiquito, they take what for many of them will be the final steps of this part of their journey. It's a journey that few of us can imagine, and that we're lucky to be able to avoid. My own migration to the US 16 years ago was much simpler and safer. But for migrants like James, the journey's worth it, because what they're leaving behind is worse. Here's James describing the situation in the state of Cameroon.

The situation in Cameroon is, how can I put it, very, very difficult, especially in the Anglophone part of the country. Because for about five to six years, there's a war, ongoing war in the Anglophone crisis. So there has been fighting.

There have been shootings, killings. I myself speaking to you here, I've been targeted. My cousin was shot and with his husband, we were shot together. Both of them were nurses and they were shot by the army that were there to protect the people.

So the situation back at home is very, very tense. Yeah. It's very, very tense. When you see most of Cameroonians traveling, taking the rigged path from Colombia, Brazil, right up to where I am, it is not because they like it. It is because of the situation back at home. And most of it, and most of the time,

It is the Anglophone population that is suffering. Most of them, they choose this path because they will not have a direct visa to America. Yeah, it's very hard to get one, right? Yes, it's very, very difficult. So they have to use the hard way, which is the only way. The truth is that dead bodies, terrible stories and families celebrating the end of their walk is nothing out of the ordinary in Bajo Chiquito.

The Embara town, with a population of just 590, is a place I've been trying to come to for almost as long as I've been writing about migration. There are a few stories in my time as a journalist that I've been pitching for close to a decade. Most of the time, I give up if there are no bites after a few months.

And that's why you won't see me write about the people who tried to hire mercenaries to intimidate voters in 2020, or the Burmese rebels who funded their revolution with co-op-produced tea, or a surfing team in the Gaza Strip, and on reflection, you probably won't hear about that last one anywhere now. The media cycle has a way of coming around to these stories eventually, sure, but I'm not really one to go back to editors who didn't give a shit about people before and only care about their stories now because they get more traffic.

But there's one story I've never given up on. And that's the story of the Daddy N Gap and the people who risked their lives crossing it for a shot at the American dream. And at this point, I do want to acknowledge that I'm incredibly grateful to the people I work with for trusting me when I asked them to pay for me to disappear in a dugout canoe into the jungle and come back two weeks later with a story. The Daddy N looms in the stories of migrants I meet at the US border as a sort of heart of darkness on what is a very difficult and dangerous journey.

It's worse than the freight trains they hop on in Mexico. Worse than the crowded buses. Worse even than the months of waiting for an asylum appointment. I firmly believe that you can't really understand and write about things you haven't seen, smelt, and heard. So for years I've been asking the editors to send me to the tiny Embraer community on the banks of the river so that I could share the final steps of this horrific journey with the people who see little option but to risk their lives for a better future for their children.

Because the US refuses to create more legal pathways, people instead take the sodden pathways straight up and down the mountains of the Derry and rainforest. The journey will take them past the corpses of people who never left. The terrain is too fierce for anyone to carry their remains out, so they must simply rot there as a reminder to migrants that they must keep going. It's a sort of deterrent through death that has been the unofficial and official US border policy for decades.

Determined or not, once you're in the Darien, there's no turning back, and the lack of escape routes has made the gap popular among criminals, who commit untold numbers of sexual assaults, murders, and armed robberies every year in the jungle. Despite this, more than half a million migrants made the perilous journey last year, and if many, if not more, will do so this year. To understand the Darien, you have to first understand US immigration policy, which is something I talk about a lot on this podcast.

I want to include here a clip from Amos, a migrant from North Africa who met my friends and helped them build shelters in Okumba last year, explaining his journey to the United States. So another route right now, which is a difficult route, is through Brazil because Brazil has, I don't know if you guys know, and I think they do that for Americans too. Yeah, so Brazil has sort of...

I don't know the word, but equivalency. That means if you impose a visa on Brazil, Brazilians will impose a visa on you. They do that to Americans too. So where I'm from, they don't have a visa as far as for Brazilians. So a lot of Africans can go to Brazil and from Brazil take the visa.

Like Amos, James couldn't fly here directly. But he was able to get a little bit closer to the US by flying to Colombia. I'll let him explain how he pulled that off. For me to have a pass to Colombia, it was not easy. So we had to... There was a female under-20 World Cup that was taking place in Colombia.

So we had to go to Colombia as football fans. That's why they had to give us our visa. All right, from Colombia, we'll find our way out of the airport to where we are today. Most migrants from outside of continental America will have to travel to Brazil, just like Amos. Here's one account. I'll let the speakers introduce themselves. My name is Somayem. I'm from Iran. My name is Mohadese from Iran.

My name is Ali and I'm from Iran. They told me why they left Iran, but I'm sure many of you can work that one out for yourselves, so we won't include it here. How did you come from Iran to here? Did you go through Turkey? It was so difficult and we came from Iran, Tehran, to Dubai, after that Sao Paulo, Brazil, and after that Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, Nicosia,

and jungle, Panama, here Panama. And it was so difficult for us because we are young, we just leave our family, my sister, my mother, father. It was so emotional. - Yeah. - And it was so hard for us, but because of the freedom, because we can speak in our country, you know, if you speak in your, in the street, something like this,

When I talk to migrants, I always want to offer them the chance to share their stories in ways that they want to share them.

I asked them what they would want to say if they could talk directly to Americans. It's a question I ask a lot because in all the coverage of migration I've seen in this country, I rarely see migrants' voices. I'm very familiar with being the only journalist in the place, and I would be lying if I said I didn't prefer it that way. I do always feel obliged to use the platform I have here to give people a chance to share their stories, their voices, and their struggles. So here's their message to you.

We love you, hope to you love us. It's hard question. Yeah, I think that's very good. It will be our next home and we should be proud of that. We should be work for that. We should be

be a real American for the country. They know women are in a very bad situation, have a bad situation in Iran. For all people that is

Same, but for women it's very, very, very hard. I think American people know about Mahsa Amini. Yeah, I understand. And they really, they kill us. Really, they kill women for simple things.

I heard hundreds of stories like this in my time in Bajo Chiquito and the Las Blancas Migrant Reception Center that migrants travel to after they arrive in Bajo Chiquito. People left horrific things behind them and saw horrific things on their journey, but they all remained hopeful for a better future in America. These journeys, in some cases, can take a year or more. One Nepali man I met in Bajo Chiquito had spent 30 months just to get that far.

and among his group, his journey had been the fastest. As long as these journeys are, the Darien often stands out as the hardest part. To understand why, I want to take you back to that shady spot by the river, just a few minutes south of Bajo Chiquito. So what I'm doing right now, as you can hear from my footsteps, is I'm doing what they told me not to do, I'm walking along the migrant trail. There's lots of like vines and creepers. Oh, fucking hell. That's me nearly eating shit.

There's little bits of tape marking a trail. I think they just come down the river here. Some local guys are pushing out wheelbarrows along the trail to dump trash. There's trash everywhere. It's a fucking mess. There are little wood arrows that they've carved just outside town to direct people into town. And up ahead I can see migrants making what's probably, hopefully, their final crossing of the river here. One thing I noticed was that as soon as I got out of sight and earshot of the town, the jungle seemed a lot more intimidating.

I'm someone who spends a lot of time in the mountains, and I grew up playing in the woods. I'm comfortable outdoors, and I frequently camp and hike for days on my own. I like it better that way, and I'm honestly more comfortable 40 feet under the sea freediving or three hours from the nearest road than I am in a busy city sometimes. But in the jungle, after all the stories I'd heard that week, I was afraid. I get scary. I don't know why. I mean, everything's new to me. I'm...

relatively comfortable in the outdoors but fucking there's new animals, there's new plants, I don't know what's poisonous I don't know what's going to kill me, I don't know who's going to try and hurt me. Got another fucking horse, Jesus wept. I'm jumping out my skin at everything now. It's funny, I'm in a place that's beautiful, you know, like these bird of paradise plants are just growing here. It's gorgeous and there's horses that belong to people of the

Embraer community, I suppose. Having snacks, you know, eating jungle horse food. And here I am at the river. It's wide here. It's sort of shallow and it's been dammed up a little bit with rubbish. It's like flocks of magette, some kind of stuff. And then this is where people cross because of that little dam, but it's still got some force to it. Like, you wouldn't want to fall and crack your head. You know, a lot of these folks can't swim. Even without the fear, it's hard going.

If you've only hiked on trails, you perhaps don't realise how much work goes into making that surface possible. There are no trail crews in the Darien, and as a result, every step has the potential to result in a sprained ankle or another injury, which might sound trivial, but can be fatal in such a remote and challenging place. Trail is all rocks, like maybe rocks the size of a fist. And then there are sort of, in this area we only have the lower canopy, so we have ferns, we have reeds,

bamboo plants growing really tall and straight, that's what they use for poles for their piraguas. And then sort of low grassy kind of plants. And then where the migrants walk is just this muddy trail that every time it rains just turns into like ankle to knee deep mud. I could see them making pretty slow progress along the trail towards me.

At the end of the day, as I took a peragua back to Maraganti, where I'd be staying the night, I reflected again on this and the incredible tenacity it took for people with little outdoor experience and terrible equipment to pass through the jungle. You know, I'm a fit person. I run ultramarathons. I used to exercise for a living. And it's fucking hard. It's wet. Everything's wet all the time. If you're wet from the rain, then...

you're wet. If you're wet from the sweat, then you're wet. If you cross rivers, you get wet. You just can't stay dry. And everyone's feet are just fucked when they get into town, like the size of the blisters I've seen. Like one lady had a cramp today where like it just locked up her whole leg. Like I grabbed her as she was falling down and I was able to like hold her up. But people are really pushing themselves physically as well as psychologically.

That river crossing south of Bajo Chiquisú was as far south as I was going to be able to get without being forcibly ejected from Panama. And my request to take a boat or walk further south was denied by the Panamanian Ministry of Security. So the only part of the migrant's journey I would share with them was the last kilometre or so of their walk.

Even then, I wasn't really supposed to be leaving town at all. So several times over the days I spent in Baja Chiquito, I would look over my shoulder, hop down the riverbank, jump across a stream, and lightly jog out of town. Once on the trail, I'd start to walk slowly and try and wave at groups of upcoming migrants. I didn't want to scare them. I offered to carry their bags and lent any help I could supporting them as they walked towards their first meal and clean drink of water in up to a week.

Just getting to Bajo Chiquito was a journey in itself for me. I took two flights, a five-hour drive, which was evenly split between paved roads, roads that aspired to pavement, and dirt roads. At the end of our road journey, the Pan-American Highway that links Alaska to Argentina seems to give up on fighting the jungle and peters out. Asphalt turned to worse asphalt, which turned to dirt, which turned to mud, which led us to a river. Our driver, however, was prepared for this.

the drive here was mad. Like, that road was fucked. We're in this tiny little car. The driver took off his shoes and socks to conduct the more technical section of the drive, which I thought was quite amusing. And, yeah, really steep. Lots of holes. Lots of potholes. You know, just really rutted out. Kind of dirt road. And then we got here and

Talked to some guys, negotiated a price and told them where we wanted to go and they said, yeah, sure, buy some water. You know, there's no water on the way, about three hours. And so we bought some water right there and yeah, here we are on the boat now. As you can hear, I recorded this on a Piragua. It's a kind of dugout canoe with the hull made out of a single tree and a two-stroke motor bolted on the back. It's the only way to travel here other than on your feet.

and it's the only way the Embarra can get the produce they grow to market. The skill of the piragüeros, the people who drive the piraguas, is incredible. They navigate parts of the river so shallow that they have to pull up the two-stroke motor. And I noticed all the motors have propellers that are covered in chips and bashes from smacking into the rocks at the bottom. In the bow of the boat, I sat on top of my giant rucksack, marveling at the birds, insects, and foliage of the jungle.

And occasionally I jumped up to make fairly useless contributions with the boat's bamboo pole, under the close supervision of Marcelino, our driver and our soon-to-be host. Hermosi just laughed at me as I leaned my whole weight into the pole, which nosebleed slipped, and I tried to avoid falling face-first into the chocolate brown water. On the way to Bar Chiquiton, we passed several small Embaral villages. Little children waved at us from the banks or from the shallows of the river where they washed and played.

Adults looked on, and doubtless wondered what a nurse-to-six-foot-three white dude was doing going the wrong way on the river for a migrant. But they smiled and waved back anyway. After an overnight flight, a five-hour drive, and three hours in a dugout canoe, we rounded a corner in the river, and Bajo Chiquito came into view. Over the last few years, it's reoriented itself from a tiny indigenous village to an unofficial reception centre for migrants. On my hopelessly outdated topo map, the area has nothing but contours and green shading.

No roads, no trails, no markers of human existence at all. And perhaps that's how the state sees this place. The Darien is as real to most Panamanians as Sesame Street or Jurassic Park. But for the Embarras, this has been their home since long before Panama and Colombia and even maps existed. The few dozen houses in the village, mostly built on stilts to avoid the seasonal floods, now offer up their rooms as hostels for the migrants. Some of them have enclosed their bottom floor using plywood or cinder blocks.

Others have strung hammocks from their support posts. For four or five bucks, migrants can get their first good night's sleep since they left Necocli in Colombia as much as a week before. Along the main street, which is really just a raised concrete footpath about a meter across, you can buy a meal at any of half a dozen places for five bucks. You can get an hour of Wi-Fi for a dollar or charge your phone for the same price. Cold drinks for a dollar as well are one of the many front rooms that have turned into small kiosks.

And that's where the migrants I had been sitting down with at the river went when they arrived into town. I let them be for a while and went off to interview more migrants. About a thousand of them arrive in this village every day. Each year since the pandemic has seen record numbers arrive. And the little village on the side of a hill, surrounded by palm trees and full of smiling children in their traditional brightly coloured palumas, chasing chickens and dogs, has welcomed every single one of them. About a thousand of them arrive in this town every day.

To get here, they also take a boat. From Necocli, across the Gulf of the Darien, they cross on small motorboats to Capogana or Candil. Those are both towns on the western side of the Gulf of the Darien. From there, they begin their walk. Even though they're now north of the Gulf, they're still in Colombia. And on the Colombian side of the border, they're guided by guides, to whom they pay several hundred dollars, and in return receive protection, and a wristband that ensures they can walk without being robbed.

Nobody I spoke to had made it this far without paying a guide. The area is largely under the control of the Gulf Cartel, several members of which were sanctioned by the USA while I was in the jungle. The migrants I spoke to didn't really have much bad to say about this part of their experience, but universally acknowledged that the next part was where they really confronted their fears and nightmares about the Dalian.

Here's one Venezuelan migrant sharing his experience. That's nothing compared to what comes from the border to here. Yes, the road is better. And I say that the danger is less too. And they have everything you need there. You come prepared, you have, you come with water. And there are also many ravines where you can drink water. Oh, there are springs that come from the mountain. But from the border on, it's pretty ugly. It's a stretch from the Colombian-Panamanian border.

at a place that they call Las Banderas, which means the flags, to Baja Chiquito, where migrants suffer the most. There, they can't drink from the river because the human waste and human remains that constantly fill it make the water deadly. They must walk on unmaintained trails that often turn into deep mud. They only have the supplies they carry, which often run out or they jettison to stave weight on the incredibly steep mountain path. They climb and descend those mountains across rivers,

often without eating or drinking for days at a time. On the trail, they pass by the bodies of their fellow travelers as a constant reminder of the risk they're taking. If you ask people in Panama City, they'll tell you that Dalian is closed now. New President José Raúl Molino was elected on a promise to shut down the gap, end the humanitarian crisis, and deport more migrants with U.S. funding. And that funding has certainly arrived, with more than $6 million already spent since he took office in July.

Since then, Panama has deported more than 1,100 people to Venezuela, Cuba, Colombia, and India. Each of these has been funded by U.S. taxpayers. Obviously, the jungle isn't closed, and it can't really be closed. But in an interview before he was elected, Molino said that the border of the United States, instead of being in Texas, has moved to Panama. And that is something he can do with U.S. support.

I spoke to some Venezuela ladies that helped me carry their bags because it's a steep hill and they were saying that no one had seen any barriers. They don't know anything about any barriers or any fences in the Darien. And like they hadn't heard it was closed. Evidently, it's not. I'm standing in front of 100 people who just got off a boat from the Darien. Hubris aside, the rhetoric of closing the Darien signals a turn, not just in Panamanian politics, but in the way the world sees and handles migration.

The U.S. has always sought to externalize its borders, from U.S.-trained Border Patrol officers in Dominican Republic along the border with Haiti to DHS agents deploying to Iraq and Afghanistan. As migration has become more politicized, the U.S. has sought to move its enforcement away from prying eyes and from compassion and instead brought more trauma to a place that is already so hard. I have spent much of the last decade of my life watching the state try to bring the mountains and desert close to where I live under its control.

I've stood with Kumeyaay people as the government dynamited their graveyards. I've found border wall contractors lost deep in the mountains. I've driven the impossibly steep concrete roads that they built, worried about my truck turning end on end. I've seen billions of dollars thrown at these mountains. And I've seen people with $20 angle grinders or ladders made of old pallets defeat the wall in moments. Trying to close borders doesn't work at home. And it won't work in the Daliang Gap either.

Just building the roads to get the construction equipment into the gap is a gargantuan task. And any attempt to create a barrier across a 60-kilometer-wide wilderness area will simply push migrants onto other, more dangerous routes, into places where you can't build, and the places where nobody can rescue you if you fall down or break your leg. That doesn't mean there's nothing the U.S. can do.

I saw firsthand the impact of American spending here. As migrants at a reception center called Las Blancas had their families torn apart, men, women, and children cried as their parents and partners were taken away for a flight back to Colombia, Cuba, or Venezuela that my taxes helped to pay for. I consoled the children with toys and stickers and something to eat as their dads were loaded into a flatbed truck. Our government didn't send money to feed these children, but

It seemed to have the funds to fund their parents' deportation. By deporting people from Panama, the US effectively deprives them of much of the due process they should, in theory, have the right to in the United States. And the US can easily deport them back to places like Cuba and Venezuela, which it considers to be dictatorial regimes. The US does not and cannot stop migration. People have always moved, and people will always want a better future for their children. What it can do is make it as painful and dangerous as possible.

But the razor wire barriers in the Daliang Gap, which I've seen posted on social media, didn't exist for the hundreds of migrants I spoke to. No one I asked had even seen them. But what they had seen was far worse. There are many rivers that you're forced into all the time.

You're putting your life and everything else on the line there. I was worried that the indigenous people would come out and do something to us. In the nights, I was worried that any of the children, God forbid, would have an accident. The same for me. It's horrible to think about it now. This mother had crossed with a 5-, 6-, and 16-year-old child, the baby of six months. They'd all made it in one piece. But the journey clearly had its impact on the children.

There are many people who are left out there without food and do not have anything to give to their children. We had food until last night. Nothing left now. And we had to, each one had to just eat a little bit because we had nothing else to give them. You can't find anything there. It's in the middle of nowhere. People died right now, along with those who came with us yesterday. How many died yesterday? Three? I think three died yesterday.

One drowned in the river. Yeah, it's really tough, this. No, no, nobody should do this. Nobody. We do this out of pure physical necessity, to look for a better future for our kids. We can't stay in our country. We couldn't stay any longer there. Here are a couple of the kids I spoke to, or in some cases, the kids who took my recorder and conducted interviews with each other.

The mountains. I was so tired and I couldn't climb anymore. And when I fell in the river, I was really scared. Apparently, the whole thing was like an adventure she'd seen Peppa Pig having, which at once made me giggle and also, on reflection, is one of the saddest things I've ever had to record. I'm sure her mum told her that, to make it easier for her to pass through a terrible place. They're really sure to be at home watching Peppa Pig and playing with her friends.

No walking past three dead bodies which are currently decomposing on the trail. She seemed remarkably resilient. She said the long bus rides she'd taken to get there weren't boring because she enjoyed looking out the window. And the whole journey was, well, I'll let her say it. Her mum gave us a different account. I was terrified and at one point I didn't want to cry because I didn't want to cry.

I didn't want to cry because I didn't want her to see me crying. But sometimes I would explode because it's hard for your child to ask you for water, to ask you for food, and you don't have any. To be in a place where you walk, you walk from 5 in the morning, it's 5 in the afternoon. You're walking, you don't know what to do. Going through more than 100 rivers and asking God not to rain and not wanting it to get worse.

It rained and the girl got a fever. She got a fever. But while God is good that we pray a lot, I say that we don't know God so much in the church. And the process, and the process that we are in, and we don't know we can be so strong until we go through that storm. And we see that he protects us. He knows that he was always there watching over us, taking care of us at all times. Parents being amazed at their children and drawing strength from them and their faith was a common message I heard from migrants.

Here's a migrant from Zimbabwe telling me how her daughter inspired her to keep going when she felt like she couldn't walk anymore. My daughter, she was strong. She was strong, but she was crying also, but she had got wounds all over the body. Even me, I was crying myself. I was like, I want to just put myself in the water, then I can just go. Both the chain was tough.

Really, really tough. The mountain, the stones, the river. It's not easy at all. I don't even recommend someone to say, use Daddy and Gabe. No. And even myself, I did know about it. I was regretting myself. I was crying. I was like, God, I don't know my family. And my family, they don't know where I am right now.

But like so many other migrants, when the governments of the world abandoned her, she found strength in the strangers along the road who wouldn't abandon her. We didn't even eat anything. We just asked people, "Can I have a piece of biscuit?" They just helped us. That's nice. The other migrants helped you? Yeah, the others. Do you think that they treat African people differently?

Very nice. Especially these Spanish people, they are very nice. I don't want to lie. Because if you need help, if you call them for help, the other ones, they might run away, but the other ones, they just come for help. They even give us tablets on the road, give us energy drinks, give my daughter sweets for energy. They push us like, let's go, guys, let's go, let's go, you make it. And we really make it.

The journey over the mountains to Panama has become more and more popular in recent years, as other routes have become more dangerous or closed themselves off to migrants entirely. It's a route, the Embraer tell me, that started with people leaving India and then Haiti. It grew as conditions in Venezuela became more unsustainable and people found themselves too poor to stay home and too poor to travel north by any other means.

And so they chose a deadly jungle over a future in a country where their votes don't matter. Last year, as many as half a million people crossed the jungle. This year we might see more. Migrants arriving in Barra de Jiquito spend the day in the village before taking off in a piragua of their own up to La Has Blanca, the migrant reception centre I mentioned earlier. They register with Panamanian Border Patrol, known by the acronym CENAFONT, and they call their families to say they survived. Then they dry out their blistered feet

Enjoy the cooking of several of the families who have turned their homes into sort of ersatz restaurants. They sleep on the floors of the houses or underneath them. Charge their phones for a dollar a time. Certainly, migration has changed this town, and I want to talk about that more in tomorrow's episode. But despite more than a million people passing through this route, you don't find anti-migrant sentiment here. Right now, despite the gap being a deadly deterrent, numbers are expected to reach a record again this year.

Maybe 700,000 people will walk the gap. But despite these numbers, which may seem high for a small country, I didn't really find much anti-migrant sentiment in Panama as a whole. There's plenty of it in the US, though. And as the United States winds down its war on terror, it needs a new nebulous enemy to justify its military spending and to keep the security and surveillance companies donating to politicians in their millions.

In part, it is found that by simply opening a floodgate of weapons and funding, they can spew forth genocide and death in Palestine and keep some of its income streams. But it needs a more long-term solution. There are only so many Palestinian babies it can bomb, and we'll run out of Palestinians long before we run out of bombs. The USA's new enemy, one it must seek out all over the world, is a migrant. It's the woman I met carrying her child across the mountains.

The little Venezuelan girl throwing bottle caps into a cinder block with me to pass the time as she asked me questions about America. It's a 21-year-old man whose remains my friends found at the border on a hot day this September. The U.S. will stop at nothing confining and destroying the migrant. And just as it did in the war on terror, it will find fast friends in states desperate to avail themselves of the seemingly unlimited flow of resources the U.S. dedicates to keeping its conflicts out of the sights and the minds of its citizens.

The USA's open hostility to migrants isn't something that's unknown here. Everyone I met knew about it. Several of them had watched with horror as Kamala Harris and Donald Trump argued not about how to treat migrants, but about who could turn more of them away in a recent presidential debate. Every migrant I met had questions about CBP1, about US asylum policy, and about how they could get to the US before a second Trump administration. Despite this, they all clung to their versions of the American dream.

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Every day for the past two years, the population of Bajo Chiquito has more than tripled. At six in the morning, piraguas come from other embarras villages along the river, dozens of them, all filled with orange life jackets. Migrants form a line so long that it stretches from the beach north of town all the way through the village and out the other side. And in groups of 15, they hand over their $25 each and get onto the piraguas. Each one puts on their bright orange life jacket

sit with their legs around the person in front, and they take off for the first official migrant reception centre in Las Blancas. As the last boat leaves, those who can't afford the trip begin a walk which could take eight hours. I couldn't walk with them, but I handed the group my water filter and one of those overpriced energy bars that are basically trail mix in a rectangular format, and wished them the best of luck, as they force their tired legs and sore feet to walk again. The population of Bajo Chiquito dropped back to 500 or so indigenous people who live here.

and the usual background noise of chatter in dozens of languages gave way to crowing chickens and barking dogs. By the next morning, as migrants came walking in from the south, it would grow again to 1,500. For the last 10 years or so, fewer than 2,000 people crossed in a year. But numbers have been steadily increasing, and now the residents of Bajo Chiquito see the numbers that they saw in a year in a single weekend.

While you listen to this series, thousands of people will take their lives into their hands as they leap into mud-colored rivers, ascend towering mountains in the pouring rain, and desperately fight the urge to drink from a river polluted with human waste and decaying corpses. All of those who survive will walk out of that jungle, up the riverbank, along a muddy path, and into Bajo Chiquito, where they'll buy themselves a cold drink and enjoy the hospitality of the locals for a night before leaving to head north.

At first, the locals told me they didn't charge people at all. They were shocked to see the migrants and wanted to help them. But as numbers grew, they had to start asking for money as they couldn't afford to feed and house all the migrants arriving. Over time, they said, the costs rose. And now a bed costs about $5 for a night and a meal's about the same. As they pointed out, that's less than half what I paid in Metati, the nearest town. And Metati doesn't have to haul its supplies up a river in a canoe using $7 per gallon fuel.

In Bajo Chiquito, I sat down with an older man, whose front room I just had lunch in. I wanted to get a sense of the change he'd seen over his lifetime in his community and how he felt about it. We saw how they arrived, injured, sick with vomiting, diarrhea. Then there was no healthcare here. What did we do?

We had to speak for the government. It wasn't easy. It was not easy. We told them that we needed a doctor. And finally, now, thank God, we have doctors here. The community, which has long been socially and economically marginalized and acutely under-provided with government services, had built a house themselves for the doctors and another house for migration officials. It was the only way to help migrants access services, which in turn allowed them to move on with their journeys quicker, he said. However…

Like almost every other Mbara person I spoke with, he felt that the government should be doing more here. Even after all these years serving as the first Panamanian village many thousands of people enter every year, they still don't have electricity or a road that's accessible year-round, both of which would make their lives and the transit of the migrants much safer. But that doesn't mean the state's totally absent here. It used to be possible for migrants to take a piragua from Comegalina, a little further south upriver, and avoid some of the most dangerous river crossings.

Bonillo told me that authorities in the Comarca, which is like a state in the USA, have prohibited this. I wanted to see more of what was going on further south and what made it so dangerous, but I wasn't permitted to join a centre-front patrol going out that way despite my request. I asked Bonillo what made things more dangerous in that part of the river. First, he explained that the wide and low-lying beaches often seemed like good points for migrants to sleep, but that any rain in the mountains above would result in a rapid increase of the water level, turning those beaches into rapids in minutes.

He told me, looking down at the table, that not so long ago a storm had washed away sleeping migrants, drowning them in their sleep and washing their remains towards his village. But, terrible as it is, that isn't the only risk. You know very well that there's not a single country that does not have criminals. In every country there are criminals, yeah? So what happens at that point in the river?

As I was saying, at that point, and clearly it is not everyone, but there are some certain young men who engage in robbery and even rape. So that's why in this community, in this village, in coordination with the community and the leaders, we, while the leader, spoke to the national government to ask for a chance to transport people from Comegaina so that nothing would happen to them. The government talked and talked, and for a while it was possible, and it was safe, and nobody died, nobody robbed.

It was all going well. But what happened? We have a leader, a cacique. I don't know if you've heard about it, but the regional leader, he put a barrier. He stopped it. Look, to be honest, these people with their degrees, this class of person, they're not humanitarians. Despite the struggles and the relative absence of the government, overall he felt that the migration had been a positive for his community.

He'd learned a lot from the migrants, he said, and enjoyed learning about their cuisines in particular. There's a common narrative in media that mentions Bajo Chiquito that this village has been somehow stripped of its culture or ruined by migration. But the locals don't seem to agree with this. I also spoke to the village's leader. She's the first woman in the whole comarca to hold such a position. I'm chief of the community police and leader of the community.

She explained to me that Bajo Chiquito was just one of several communities along the river, each with its own leader. Those leaders meet in a council and answer to a cacique of the comarca. She also explained that, as the first woman in the position, she'd made sure to advance the cause of women in her community. Since I've had my administration,

which has been seven months as NOCA or leader, I have put some women to work. They are waiting for the migrants there. After that, I asked her to explain to listeners what exactly a migrant encounters when they first set foot in her village and the various steps that they might go through before leaving the next morning. There is a check-in at first, verification of whether they have a crime in their country.

From there, they go to immigration. Their documents are checked and then they are free to choose where they're going to wait and rest for the next part of their journey. On behalf of UNICEF, we have free toilets. From the community, we also have a free place where they can camp or rest. That's theirs now. If they want better things, better rest, they can find accommodation available in almost every house here.

The next day we prepare everything together with the center front security. We go to the beach there and at the beach we also coordinate with a coordinator from each village. I also want to make it clear as well that the boat driver must have their ID and be of legal age. From there, the migrants pay $25 a head and take the five-hour boat trip north to Las Blancas, which is the UN and government-run camp and the first official migrant welcome center outside the Darién. Having boat drivers who are of age is important.

Migrants who can't swim trust their lives to these boat drivers in high water. Once they're at Las Blancas, they're close to the Pan American Highway and the beginning of the rest of their journey north. They don't have to walk any further, unless they run out of money for buses. I asked what happened when someone couldn't afford the ride to Las Blancas.

What does the community do? The community takes responsibility for sending them not the state. The state, migration, center front. They don't pay for the fuel or the transport of these people. Specifically, she told me, the community sends three free boats a day. Mostly these are filled with women and children. And in my time there, it seemed that these people paid whatever they could. Those left over, usually men.

would have to make the walk on their blistered feet and tired legs, and risk further sickness, robbery, and heat exhaustion. I also wanted to ask Alida about the problems with theft and sexual assault that the migrants encountered on their walk into Bajo Chiquito. And she was pretty forthright that this was an issue for the state, not for her community to fix. But then, where is Senafront? Aren't Senafront supposed to be on all the banks of the river? Yes. So where are those thefts?

Despite being able to prevent the Embara from using their boats on their river to transport migrants, the government at any level above the village isn't really present in Baja Chiquito. Centerfront, Panama's combined border patrol and military receive migrants and register them there. But all the services provided to the migrants come either from the Embara or from non-governmental organizations.

This pattern of the state failing to provide basic services, Bonil told me, is one that goes back a long time before the migrants began arriving here. So now, before the migrants began arriving here, we had a town. A town that the government is supposed to give what it has to give us as Panamanians, but it doesn't. It was a town without anything.

All we did was sell our products and sell stuff here for us. We grow rice, corn, plantains, everything. Well, it was a lot, but products that we grow are not enough to get by. Even today, in late 2024, the village doesn't have mains electricity, nor does it have a connection to telephone networks, or a road that it can take year-round to connect it to the rest of the country. And the few clean water taps in the town come from UNICEF, not Panama City.

Doctors here come from European NGOs, and even the policing of the community is largely done by the community, via a group called the Zara. In an effort to better understand the Barau communities, both with and without migrants, I wanted to visit another M'Barau village. And after the break, we'll hear about that. All right, so I'm just in my hammock now, kind of the end of the day. We're staying in another M'Barau village today, just probably...

I mean I bet it's a kilometer or two kilometers away. You know probably a decent walk but it was pretty fast in the Peragua. Just it's a little more peaceful here and our boat driver asked us to stay at his house. We said we would. You can probably hear like I don't know how much of this is getting picked up.

It's a nice little village, you know, the... I'll fucking wait till the dogs have stopped, I guess. When I wasn't in Bajo Chiquito, I took a boat every evening to Maragantí. Maragantí is only a couple of kilometres away on a different branch of the river, but the walk might take hours through the thick jungle. A perraguero had invited us to stay with his family and to see another Embarra village. I'm always down to sleep outside, so I gladly accepted his invitation and slung my hammock across his front porch.

After a long discussion on whether the Dyneema cordage I was using would actually hold my weight and, on my part, a probably ill-advised free solo onto the roof of his house to find a good anchor point for my hammock. In my time in Maraganty, I found myself growing fonder and fonder of this little community. Everyone's doors were open, and the village's children enjoyed unsupervised playtime everywhere.

There was never not a pick-up game going on at the concrete football and basketball court, and despite the fact that they were on average several feet shorter than me and playing on concrete without shoes, local kids humiliated me at a wide variety of sports.

With no electricity other than generators, one Wi-Fi connection in the whole village as far as I can tell, and a few hours to myself in the evening, I happily settled into a routine of washing in a river along with everyone else in the hour before sunset, walking around town chatting with the inhabitants, who seemed surprised but happy to see a gangly British man ambling around their neighbourhood and petting their dogs.

Once it got dark, I'd spend my evening sitting in my hammock as the grandchildren of our host asked me how to say various things in English. I played with the little toys I always bring along in case I run into children on my work trips. Being in Maraganti made me think a lot about my own life, and the US in general. I certainly have a lot more possessions here, but my neighbours don't let their kids run around in the streets, and cars would hit them if they did.

People in my community, if the Nextdoor app is anything to go by, spend seemingly countless hours bitching about the unhoused and other people's children. But here everyone had a roof over their heads, and other people's children ran in and out of my host kitchen without anyone batting an eyelid, aside from laughing at my paleness when I was washing in the river. Nobody here seemed that concerned that I was different. They let me hold their babies while they cooked. They didn't overcharge me for the bottles of water or snacks that I bought from their front room convenience stores, or seem that bothered about sharing their meals and their homes with me.

At night we sat on tiny plastic chairs and talked about our shared interest in woodwork and what they wanted for their children. We talked about their boats and the river and about how terrible things must be for migrants to risk their lives and abandon their homes making the journey across these mountains that the Embara and their Kuna neighbours call home. Ever since I left their village I've been thinking a lot about the part of The Dawn of Everything in which Graeber and Wengro detail how many indigenous people were adopted into colonial society

but chose to return to their communities. However, settlers in indigenous communities often chose to remain among the indigenous communities. I don't wish to romanticize the very real struggles the Embara have with their economic marginalization and lack of access to basic services compared to other Panamanians. But I just want to reflect on the fact that there was something really special about the Little River community where dogs and chickens and ducks woke me up in the morning. Little children welcomed me back every evening. They told me what they did at school or tossed a little ball back and forth.

and seemed entirely comfortable chatting to an adult from across the world. The people of Bajo Chiquito have shown that same hospitality to migrants, and indeed to me. And so I wanted to ask the village leader how migration had changed her community. Like everyone else I spoke to, she insisted they had held on to important parts of their culture, which she illustrated by giving me a history lesson. The town of Bajo Chiquito was founded in 1965. At first, there were three families.

The Vaporizo, the Rosales, the Chagos. They came here for education reasons. Before, everyone lived on their own. The education came, and that is why we grew this town. It was the education, she said, that had changed town, not the migrants. They have night school now for adults, and a school for all the children with seven teachers.

The children speak Embara and Spanish and have a chance to get more education in Meteti or even in Panama City. Yes, it's due to education, not because the migrants travel all through here. Let this be clear, that is not because the migrants came here. Clearly though, the perception of change in their community is a concern. She told me that the local woman marries what she called a Latino man. They can't live together in the village. And she wanted to make sure I knew that the children learn in Embara as well as Spanish.

They also still knew dances and ceremonies, Bonilla told me. But some of the changes, she said, were positive, including one in gender relations. It's an ongoing struggle, I'll say, to show that we women have the same capacity for thought and creativity as men. We are fighting every day, and as you will see, it's not easy. One thing that surprised me was that the Embarra would always remind me that they themselves had been migrants.

They migrated to Panama City sometimes, they said. And they have little choice if they want post-secondary education or higher-level medical attention. Some of their kids even make the journey to the USA to study. What kind of hypocrites would they be, they said, if they looked down on people making the same journey? I'm going to tell you that before the immigrants arrived here within this community, we lived in the same way. I mean, we came from the countryside, we worked in agriculture,

And we still continue working in the agriculture stuff, fishing, hunting, so on. We liked it a lot. Now, after the immigrants started to come, we are still the same. And it doesn't affect us, having them within our community, because they are, they're people. They're humans. The journey that the immigrants make is out of need. It is a need.

So really, we too, for example, if we were to deal with problems like them, since we are just like them, we also have the right to emigrate as well. This is not the first influx of migration into Embraer, Guna land.

In 1501, a wave of undocumented immigration from Spain, in the form of settler colonia like Francisco Balboa, arrived in the Guna and Embaral territories. Ever since these Europeans first saw for themselves what the Embaral really knew, that this area was part of a narrow strip of land between two great oceans. People from around the world have been coming to what is now Panama as part of their journeys from north to south or east to west. The thin strip of land that joins the two American continents has been at the crossroads of the world for half a millennium.

Archaeological digs in the region show that there were once roads, and that gold and jade came here from afar. This rich civilization is one that Vasco Núñez de Balboa first encountered, and it was they who first told him that their land lay between two oceans. It was somewhere just to the south of where I was staying that exactly 511 years ago to the day, Balboa became the first European to set eyes upon the Pacific.

Since Balboa, many other colonisers have come to Dalian to pit their notions of superiority against the might of the rainforest. The Kingdom of Scotland sent a group of settlers here in the 17th century. Mounted to the side, this isn't a place with any similarity to Scotland, and it's easy enough to see why the plan failed, killed three out of four colonists, and essentially bankrupted an entire nation in two years, forcing it into a colonial relationship of its own with its neighbour to the south.

After the Scots left, having failed to create what they'd hoped would be a "Scottish Amsterdam of the Indies" and the Spanish found a flatter and easier connection between the Pacific and Caribbean, the Darién region returned to its indigenous people, whose home it remains. But over the course of several hundred years, many empires have come to the Darién to die. The French tried to build a sea-level canal not so far from here, a canal without locks, but they ultimately failed.

The US tried in the 1850s and 1870s to forge a route to build a canal to get east coast banks access to west coast gold, before eventually finding an easier route further north. A century later, the US and Panama openly discussed dropping nuclear bombs on the jungle to make it passable and to allow the construction of a road. The US offered to shoulder two-thirds of the cost of building such a road, and hoped to have the Pan-American Highway completed in time for its 1976 bicentennial.

But the Gap's hostility and the growing environmental movement, as well as a desire to protect US livestock from the foot-and-mouth disease that's endemic in South America, won the day. The Gap remained a Gap, largely without the influence of the state. In the 1970s, a British army expedition traversed Adyane in two Range Rovers, assisted by horses, parachute drop resupplies, and a team of engineers. They crossed the jungle in 96 days. They had to make their own bug nets for their horses out of the parachutes that were used to drop corn cobs for the animals and rice for the humans.

Expedition leader and seasoned explorer, as well as possibly the most British man in history, Lieutenant Colonel John Blashford Snell wrote, "Without doubt it was the hardest thing I've ever done in my life", calling the Darien a "god-forsaken place". The Darien is one of the wettest places on the planet, a particularly cruel twist for the would-be colonisers from Scotland.

In the months before I came here, I spent hours trying to work out how to waterproof my podcast equipment. And most of what you're hearing is recorded on a voice recorder that I sealed up with gasket maker, shoved inside a condom, inside a dry bag, inside a pelican case. This rain causes flash flooding, the kind which sweeps whole villages away. The rivers in the gap aren't bridged largely because they simply wash away bridges after a storm. On our journey to Bajo Chiquito, I saw the remains of bridges that had dared to try.

That's why my hosts built their houses on stilts. And it's on those stilts that I slung my hammock in Maraganti. Ever since the failed Daliensky, the gap has been constructed in the Western imagination as the deepest and darkest jungle. The gap today is home to every type of malaria and numerous other diseases. There are deadly vipers, deadly spiders, big cats, and as if the natural threats were not enough, the US dropped bombs here in the Cold War to test its destructive might against one of the few areas of the planet that hadn't been made amenable to capitalism.

Many of them remain unexploded in the mountains. Certainly, the physical geography of the Dalién poses a challenge, but I would argue that it's the imaginative geography of the gap which is a greater impediment to travellers. In Spanish, they call it the tapón, the stopper. Local legend has it that a Spanish conquistador, one of the first to take his last breaths in the waters of Dalién's rivers, carved a phrase into the rock which has endured long after he expired.

When you go to the Darien, entrust yourself to Mary, for in her hands is the entrance, and in God's the exit. It doesn't sound that different to the things I heard from migrants, and in the modern day they'll tell you about the horrific tick-tocks they saw before they entered the Gap, and the decaying remains of fellow travellers they saw as they passed through. Media reports on the Gap consistently refer to it as a nomad's land, but of course it's very much someone's land, the land of the indigenous people who have been here long before countries, borders or reporters.

While it may have remained hostile to capitalism and the state, and it can be deadly for inexperienced travellers, it's supported life for thousands of years. On our way to Bajo Chiquito, I was reminded of just how comfortable my hosts were in a place where I felt so out of place. So as we were coming, we got caught in a huge rainstorm, just absolutely bucketing it down suddenly, and...

Pulled in to a little sort of, well, just a flat area of mud, really. I hopped out, tied out the boat, and next thing I know, our boat guide just ran into jungle, chopped some huge palm leaves down and brought them back to me to cover me in my bag. While the Embraer might have preserved their comfort and culture, it's undeniable that migration has made a huge economic impact. 959 migrants left on one of the days I was able to get numbers from Seneflint.

Each of them pay $25 for a piragua, about $10 for food and lodging and maybe Wi-Fi, and perhaps a few bucks more for clean clothes or a pair of off-brand Crocs to let their feet heal from three days of being constantly wet. At a conservative estimate, that's a little more than $33,000 per day, roughly the GDP per capita of Panama. That's a lot of money down here, especially for a community which has been alienated and exploited for so long.

Using this money, people have enclosed the bottom floors of their homes to provide more space to house migrants. All around the village, they're building better homes. Some of them have satellite internet now, or Starlink, or bigger and more reliable generators. This money has been spread around the Embarra communities in the area, and every morning, each of them sends paraguas to transport the migrants, as almost 60 are needed every day.

Rolling out with Madaganti at five in the morning, as almost the entire adult male population of the village joined us in a huge flotilla of two-stroke smoke and dugout canoes, and the morning mist still sat in the river was an incredible experience, and this is doubtless an industry for the whole area now.

If Molino or Mallorcas ever successfully stops migration here, it will be a massive economic detriment to the people already marginalized for centuries. But despite the economic benefits, the people of Maragantí don't seem to want to become like Bajo Chiquito. On our last day there, as we set off back towards the dirt road that brought us here, we saw that they were building little cabins outside of town. These, they said, were for the migrants. They wanted the migrants to be safe, and their community to stay the same.

They might not be able to sell meals to the migrants this way or charge them for Wi-Fi or phone charging, but they will be able to live a little more peacefully. The Amaral have gone out of their way to ensure migrant safety. They're the ones who mandate life jackets, and the ones who build a house for doctors, and they're the ones who send free boats for women and children. Of course, they have an economic incentive to do this, but in nearly a week living with them, I didn't hear them badmouth the migrants, and nor did I hear the migrants complain about the way they were treated in the village of Bajo Chiquito.

But before they get to the village of Bajo Chiquito, migrants aren't safe. And if you ask them, they'll tell you it's indigenous people who are robbing and threatening them deeper into the jungle. Undoubtedly, robbery, sexual assault, and murder are not uncommon in the Darién Gap. You can hear anecdotes of these on a daily basis in Bajo Chiquito. And some of the stories I heard and things I saw are among the most horrific experiences I've had in years of reporting on pretty terrible things. I haven't included a great many of them here because I think it's hard for people to meaningfully consent in those kinds of circumstances.

But yesterday you heard about the human remains that almost everyone featured in this series had to walk past. This is a problem that's getting worse, not better. In just one week in February, Médecins Sans Frontières, the NGO that Americans call Doctors Without Borders, treated 113 people, including nine children, after they were sexually assaulted by criminal groups in the Dariennes.

This number is close to the 120 people treated during the whole of January. These figures are double the monthly average treated in 2023, when 676 people were treated for the whole year. As you heard before, this is a problem that people in the community sometimes acknowledge. And as the village leader mentioned, it's one that could be solved if the state would live up to its obligation to protect migrants within its borders. The leader also shares with me that the community has its own punishment mechanisms. The punishment is the sepo.

The place of punishment is the stocks. Three days ago, someone behaved very badly and we had to put them in the stocks. The man who mistreats women, we also put in the stocks. The woman who gossips, we also put her in the stocks. What she's talking about here is stocks in the old-fashioned sense, not in the Wall Street bet sense. We actually saw someone chatting them one day with their ankles locked in place. We didn't ask what they did or how long they were there, as it seems difficult again to consent to an interview when you're literally pinned in place.

But this kind of punishment comes from the community, not the state. Aside from these punishments, the community hasn't done much to stop the things happening in the jungle, and I'm not sure if it's really able to. They're Panamanian, they say, and the state's responsible for the safety of migrants within its borders. And while it does send centre-front patrols into jungle, the state doesn't appear to be doing much to protect migrants from sexual assault, robbery or murder. Earlier this year, the state did take decisive action to eject Médecins Sans Frontières after not reviewing their permission to work in the Dariennes.

This is quite a challenging permission to obtain. Even as a solo journalist, it took months for me to get mine, forcing me to rebook my flight several times. I heard various explanations for why MSF were not allowed to keep working. I couldn't get an official response, but it's probably worth noting that they published a report headlined Lack of Action She's Sharp Rise in Sexual Violence on People Transiting the Darien Gap on the 29th of February, and they refused permission to remain in the region in the first week of March. MSF was allowed to return in October of this year,

and wouldn't comment further than the following statement, which they emailed me in mid-October. In October of 2024, MSF resumed medical and humanitarian activities at Lajas Blancas Migration Reception Centre, located at the edge of the Darien jungle, after Panamanian authorities approved a three-month medical intervention. MSF welcomes its decision and advocates to collaborate closely with Panama's Ministry of Health to provide comprehensive medical care to migrants crossing this route, as well as to the local population of the area.

Right now, UNICEF, Medecin du Monde, Cooperación Española and the Red Cross are helping migrants in Bajo Chiquito. UNICEF installed showers and toilets. Global brigades and UNIFES provided taps and drinking water. And the medical NGOs provide healthcare, which is vital in saving lives and providing survivors of sexual assault with medical care in a 72-hour window where it can be most beneficial. It's worth noting that most migrants who are sexually assaulted won't stay to press charges.

I know of one case of sexual assault of a child while I was there, but the family wanted to continue their journey and so the charges won't be pressed. This makes it very hard to ascertain how many cases of sexual assault there are in Adalian every year, aside from through medical reports from NGOs, and those only include the people who make it to Bajo Chiquito or Lajas Blancas. The numbers are clearly high, and it's a fear that many migrants articulated to me. In the jungle, they're at their most vulnerable, they said.

Most people robbed, they tell me, are held by armed attackers carrying guns and machetes. But once a migrant set foot in Bajo Chiquito, they're momentarily safe from robbery and assault. For the first time in days, they can sleep without worry of being attacked or washed away. On the rest of their journeys north, they'll face that threat again. But that's not what's on their mind when they enter town. All they want is a cold drink and a warm meal and a chance to rest their aching feet. It's a chance that they have thanks to the Mbara people who receive them there.

And I want to end with Bonillo and his reflection on the suffering people endure on their way to eat rice and plantain in his little front room cafe. Truly, the migrants on this route are not here because they want to be. They are here because the economy in their countries is terrible or something. Everything is going badly in their countries. How could we mistreat them knowing that? We won't.

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Yeah, the journey is dangerous, but what can we do? We can't stay in a country where the economy is getting worse and worse. With a salary of $3 a month, you can't survive.

Like my friend said, if you have a job in other countries, maybe you can invest some money, but where are you going to get the money to invest if before you had a salary that fed you, paid for your car, your house, and your children to enjoy it all with, and now you can't even afford to put gas in the car? So it's true, yeah, the Darien is dangerous, but nothing is impossible. We walk hand in hand with God and with the faith that we will get there, but that doesn't mean it isn't difficult.

But I'll say it again, it's not impossible. You suffer, you cry, you go hungry, cold, but thank God we made it through. All around the Tuquesa River, the jungle rumbles quietly as you pass by on your boat. Insects, frogs, and birds all combine to make a sort of deep throbbing that emanates from the darkness between the trees. It seems at once to be calling you in and warning you to stay away. I've been in the jungle before, in the Rwanda-Congo borderlands and in Venezuela.

But I've never really felt the sense of foreboding I did as we rode down the river protected only by our hollow log, looking into the triple canopy forest and knowing that if I walked long enough in the shadows, I'd be confronted with the remains of people I might have interviewed if I hadn't been for a rolled ankle, a slippery rock, or a desperate sip of water. To understand what drives people to enter the jungle, with their children and their dreams, I think we also have to understand what drives them to leave wherever they're living. And that's what I want to talk about today.

The story of migrants crossing the Darien Gap is an American one. It's impossible to disentangle the people making this dangerous journey from the history of support for dictatorship, sanctions, and imperial plunder that ties the United States to its American brothers and sisters in the South. Sometimes, I play a game with myself at the border where I try and meet people from all the countries named in Washington Bullets in a single day. Since Biden bungled the Afghanistan withdrawal, it's become a lot easier. But Tibet can be hard.

For 200 years since President Monroe gave his State of the Union address, in December 1823, the US has seen the Western Hemisphere as its sphere of influence. While it's opposed old-fashioned colonialism, it has used less overt methods of control, as well as overt military force across the hemisphere.

For much of the last century, it supported and installed dictators, who would prevent what it saw as a threat of state socialism in its sphere of influence, and allowed them to create economic and political climates that were unsurvivable for the majority and extremely profitable for US-based corporations. The direct result of this policy has been economic insecurity, political instability, and state violence across South and Central America, resulting in people making the very natural human decision to flee to somewhere safer.

As in so many other empires, they've made the choice to leave the destabilized colonial periphery and seek safety and stability in the metropole. For more than a century, money and goods have been able to travel seamlessly up and down the continent, but people have not. The banana I ate for breakfast this morning made the journey in a few days.

But people take months, if not years, pay thousands of dollars, climb mountains, ford rivers, and risk their lives on trains and buses that cost a lot more than the flights I took to Panama, but offer considerably less comfort and safety. As climate change has ever greater impacts, more and more people are forced to leave their homes as their livelihoods become less sustainable. The Guna, the indigenous people of the Panamanian coast in an area called Gunayala, are having to withdraw from some of their islands because of sea level rise right now.

Agriculture across the world is increasingly threatened by extreme weather and rising temperatures, and our oceans are less able to sustain life than they once were due to pollution and overfishing. Forced to leave their homes, as people have been for millennia by weather patterns changing, people head to places that have at once caused much of the issue and tried to insulate themselves from its consequences. Their American dreams are modest, to overcome the crippling low pay they received at home.

To bring their children up in a place where they have a good chance of surviving their 20s. To work and get paid enough to get by. They want to be able to protest and not get shot. And to look forward to the future, not fear it. These aren't guaranteed in the USA. And as many of you listening will know, it can be hard for us to make ends meet here as well. But despite what you see on social and legacy media, things are unlikely to become as bad here as they are in Venezuela, Cameroon or Iran anytime soon.

I've lived in Venezuela, specifically in the formerly Chavista neighborhood of La Pastora in Caracas, and I've seen how hard it is for my friends who still live there. Even for people with no other disadvantages, making rent and feeding your family can be a challenge.

That's part of why Venezuelan people make up the majority of the folks I met in the Darien. So much so that I slipped back into using Venezuelan slang in Spanish. And after a few days of seeing the same people, engaging in the kind of friendly mockery and banter that I remember well from Caracas, mostly this took the form of asking them why they crossed a Darien gap in Man United shirts, or worse yet, in a Chelsea shirt.

It's important to steal moments of humour in these difficult times, to laugh a little among all the suffering. And that's something people in Venezuela have done very well for a very long time.

But despite their humor, I could tell the journey had a serious impact on the people I spoke to. You have to go through a lot, a lot of jungle, a lot of hills. There are people, there are dead people on the road. So it's something you cannot really explain. It's complicated because everything can be explained in a fashion, but it's not the same as living it. It's insanity, three, four days without food and nothing.

One thing is to live it. Explaining it, talking about it, that's different. It's hard to put into words. This interview is one I conducted with one group of Venezuelan migrants. With my voice recorder in the chest pocket of my shirt and whatever bags they'd let me carry in my hands. We walked along the last part of the trail, discussing what they'd seen. For a while, we joked a little. One guy had crossed in a Man United shirt. I talked to him about the team and the universal dislike non-ManU fans have for ManU fans. Then, after a while, they opened up more about their experiences.

They had, they said, seen dead bodies. And they couldn't stop thinking about what would happen if they'd fallen. And they wanted to know how, when, or if the dead people's family would ever find out. The family waits for that person to come out to hear that they made it. Because if not, who's going to let you know? There's no signal. And nobody's going to grab the body and you're not going to carry them out.

The person stays there and eventually years and years go by. The family won't know where they are or how they died. Those are the sort of things that one doesn't expect to see. And it makes you just want to hurry past. Not that you wouldn't want to get the documentation from the body and deliver it and tell them how this person had passed away. But how dare you just go grabbing a dead body? Venezuelan elections were held on the 28th of July this year. Venezuelan presidents have a six-year term. And the incumbent, Nicolás Maduro, has been in office since 2013.

I let the Venezuelan people I met introduce themselves and explain the result of the election. Now, there's a bit of background noise here, but that's because we're walking along the trails, and it's hard to avoid. I am coming from Venezuela, migrating through the jungle for a better future for me and my children. I'll tell you it's hard, but it's not impossible. No, that was electoral fraud, and I tell you what, one day you just have to leave.

Maduro was opposed by Eduardo Gonzalez, an opposition candidate who represented a wide coalition, including groups on the left and right. While Maduro might have support among Western socialists and even communists, the actual Venezuelan Communist Party's youth organization formed part of the Popular Democratic Front that opposed him. Despite poll watchers tallying a massive victory for the opposition, Maduro controls the National Election Council and proclaimed himself the victor. People protested, and Maduro responded with bullets.

Gonzalez fled to the Dutch and then the Spanish embassy, and later claimed asylum in Spain, where his family lived. But for regular working-class Venezuelans, there's no option to hop on a flight to safety. Instead, they have to begin the long walk north. As many Venezuelans I spoke to told me, in addition to the electoral fraud, Venezuela is undergoing an economic collapse. At least under Chavez, they said, most people could eat. When I lived in La Pastora, I was able to access medical care from Cuban doctors. Now, they say, things have become unsurvivable.

Well, I would say that Venezuela, you know, yeah, you can live, but not on a minimum wage.

I would say that, for example, working independently in an independent business, maybe you can live. Good. But working and surviving for a minimum wage? No. The truth is that it doesn't work. And that's serious. Things are still bad with the new elections and the new government. Everything is ugly, yeah? The streets of Caracas are full of protests every day. People went out to protest. Sometimes they shoot people.

The government mistreats people, but if you can live with it, you can live with it. But it's ugly. Well, that is why we left there, for a better future. We will keep moving onward. Onward. This group were young men, traveling in advance with their families, hoping to earn some money, save it up, and send it home. They knew what they were getting into when they got to the USA, that migrants were often underpaid and might struggle to make ends meet.

But they still thought it was better than staying home and watching your children's future disappear. If you don't have papers, you don't have a work permit. You have to work for what they want to pay you, not for what you demand or anything. I met lots of Venezuelan families with children who had different illnesses or disabilities, things they couldn't obtain or afford treatment for in Venezuela. They were traveling to the U.S. in the hopes of finding a better future for their kids, or any future at all.

I met young men who left their children behind, but carried the children of strangers, even those with whom they didn't share a language. Christian, who we heard from earlier, showed me how he'd carried someone else's child on his shoulders until he fell and hurt his knee. We all help. I put little children up here on my shoulders to carry them, but it isn't easy. In the jungle, they'd form chains using their arms to cross rivers and carried little children on those who couldn't swim. In Bajiquito, I saw a group of men from Angola receiving hugs from Venezuelan women they'd helped in the jungle.

Without the help of the Angolans, they said, their children wouldn't have made it. One slip or a loss of grip, they told me, would be fatal. And the remains of those who had done just that served as a grisly reminder. Later, little boys, maybe eight or ten years old, gleefully recounted seeing a dead body on which the head had, quote, exploded while their parents winced in recollection. I wanted to understand a bit more of what they were fleeing that made it worth going through all this.

Well, I left Venezuela because I worked in fishing. But right now in Venezuela, despite the fact that it is a country rich in oil, there's not enough gasoline for the fishermen to go fishing.

And since I did not have the ability to even buy basic things, such as food, the situation was, well, it was a little complicated. I had to immigrate. I had nothing else to do. They didn't rob me. Well, they were going to rob me because I didn't have anything to steal. We passed by and the group that was behind us got robbed. They raped women in that group. Almost every Venezuelan migrant I spoke to shared a similar story. One said he'd installed security cameras, but nobody could afford them now.

as they had to choose between rent and groceries or medical procedures that they needed but couldn't afford. Overwhelmingly, they said the same thing. No hay futuro. There's no future. One group said to me that they couldn't wait for their country to become like Cuba, as decades of embargoes took their toll on the population. But others reminded me and them that at least the Cubans seem to have doctors. Venezuela has an 80% poverty rate now, and though it sits on one of the largest oil reserves of any country on earth, it's been plagued by plummeting oil prices and years of hyperinflation,

Which got so bad at one point that shops stopped putting price tags on things and relied on staff to give up to the minute prices. Today, alongside a regime that lacks legitimacy, a state that readily uses horrific violence against its people, and an election that was essentially ignored, Venezuelans must also deal with shortages of basic goods, poverty, and malnutrition. Unlike Cubans, who have a relatively good political lobby in the USA, Venezuelans coming to the USA do not benefit from special laws.

Cubans under the Cuban Adjustment Act have a path to citizenship and permanence once they set foot on U.S. soil. Venezuelans do not. They're covered by something called a temporary protected status. But this does not afford them much in the way of stability, protection, or a secure future. Here's Erika Pinheiro of Alotrolado, an incredible organization that does valuable work with migrant legal aid, advocacy, and humanitarian relief, explaining just how temporary a TPS is. So temporary protected status is

is it's basically a form of protecting individuals who are already in the United States when their countries have experienced a natural disaster. If they are in war, there's some kind of situation going on that makes it difficult for them to return. And so temporary protected status was first created in 1990. And the first individuals who

receive the status were from El Salvador. And since then, I think there's been a few dozen countries that have been designated. But basically, the way it works is they designate a country. And so if you were in the United States before that designation date, you can apply for temporary protected status within a designated time period. And you get a work permit. It's valid for 6, 12, or 18 months.

And then two months before it expires, the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security has to say whether or not they're going to reauthorize TPS. So there's like 860,000 people in the U.S. who have temporary protected status. And it's not a path to citizenship. So basically people are just in limbo sometimes for decades.

They just have to reapply for this work permit every 18 months. So I have quite a few Salvadoran friends who've been in the United States since the 90s. They have kids, some of them have current kids who are U.S. citizens, and they can't become permanent residents or have a path to citizenship unless they leave the country and either come back with another type of parole or apply through a consulate, which many of them are just not willing to take that risk.

What makes things even more complicated for the Venezuelans is that many of them are traveling without documents. It costs 300 bucks to get a passport, they told me, and the wait's considerable. This makes their journeys even harder, as every country they enter has to approve them to enter without a passport. Getting a visa, they said, would be nearly impossible, and just trying might result in the government coming after them.

Such things, they said, are reserved for the wealthier citizens. People like Gonzalez, whose asylum claim and stays at the Dutch and Spanish embassies, and whose right to join his family in exile are all luxuries that most of his country people can't expect. Instead, most Venezuelans must ride buses through Colombia, then walk north through the jungle, then ride buses, stowaway on trains, or walk again all the way to the border.

They all lamented the Darien crossing and said they wouldn't advise it. But without other options, they all made it anyway. Because unfortunately, we don't have much in our country. You don't have another option when you're dying of hunger and you don't have a future. You can't even study.

So yeah, it's worth it. The economic situation is dire in Venezuela. Many families can't make ends meet. Their currency is almost worthless and the Madrid government seems to have successfully installed itself for the foreseeable future. This will mean a continuation of embargoes and sanctions, which will harm the people more than the regime. Sadly though, economic hardship is not a criteria for which one can be granted asylum in the USA.

Here's Erica again. So severe economic deprivation can be persecution if it's linked to one of the other protected grounds. So race, religion, nationality, political opinion, or membership in a particular social group. So for example, if someone...

participated in anti-Maduro political activity and then were blocked from getting a job or just denied economic opportunities to the point where they're starving, the economic deprivation could count as persecution. But it's a very difficult case to make in the United States. In Mexico, you can get protection based on generalized conditions in your country.

And so, you know, Venezuelans fleeing economic collapse or even Central Americans fleeing extreme violence have a much easier time gaining protection in Mexico than they would in the United States because of that extra category of protection in Mexico. The issue with Mexico is just the very limited capacity of the asylum system overall and the very dangerous conditions in which people are forced to wait while their cases are indicated.

Going forward from the Darién, they'll face an enormously difficult journey. The US does have a program for Cubans, Venezuelans, Haitians and Nicaraguans that in theory allows them to apply, be pre-approved and fly straight to the USA.

But it's so delayed and broken, it's just not an option for people who barely have enough money for food, let alone a plane ticket. Their H&V program is for Cuban nations, Nicaraguans, Venezuelans who have not crossed into Panama or Mexico in the past few years. You do not qualify if you've done that.

or have not been entered at sea if they're Haitian or Cuban. You have to have a sponsor in the United States who have some kind of legal status. You have to be able to pay for the flight. You have to have a passport. And you have to be able to wait for however long it takes for your application to be approved. And the Department of Homeland Security just announced that they are not renewing parole for people who are already in the United States. So people...

from those four countries who were in the U.S. had up to two years of humanitarian parole, which is not being renewed. So they either would need to apply for something else or go back to their country or just, I guess, stay in the United States undocumented until they're caught.

I heard the same story hundreds of times that week. Sometimes off mic and sometimes on mic. Sometimes holding my voice recorder and notebook. Sometimes just sitting on the ground or walking on the trail or enjoying a bottle of cold water in Bajo Chiquito. Crippling poverty and bad governance in their country made it difficult to see a future there. They wanted better for their children. So they brought them across the mountains and risked their lives in the jungle to give them a chance in life.

I prepared a lot for this trip and I tried to search for everything I might experience on the internet. But one thing I really didn't expect to learn in the jungle is just how much it's possible for parents to love their kids. I watched exhausted mothers hoist their babies onto their shoulders to keep walking and somehow come up with a story that made the whole thing an adventure, not a tragedy. Then do the same thing again the next day without sleeping or eating. I watched fathers carefully lay out their sleeping mat so their children could rest while they tried to do the same on the dirt or hardwood floors.

Every day, as their savings grew lower and their outlook more bleak, I watched parents try to smile for their kids. The sacrifices I saw them make, starving for days to give their kids something to eat, or spending their last remaining dollar on clean clothes for their kids while they walked barefoot and couldn't afford shoes, really brought home for me the desire these families had for a better future and the sacrifices they were willing to make for one another.

Weeks later, it's still hard for me to accept that I'm home safely. They're still in as much danger, if not more. Our walk lasted five days. Thank God I was always strong enough and able to get back up when I fell, because if I fell and my children had to see me fall and not get up, imagine how bad that would be. My children want more in the future, but they despaired in the jungle. They said, tell me, mommy, when are we going to get there, mommy?

What could I say to them? My dear, we have to have patience because we have to make the crossing. We have to move forward. If not, we can't get out of here. Even among such difficult times, the Venezuelans always greeted me with a laugh and a smile, especially after a few days of running into each other. When I used Venezuelan slang or my accent slowly reverted to the Spanish I learned in Caracas nearly two decades ago, they'd laugh at me. As they noted, at that time Caracas had attracted plenty of migrants to its own.

Some of them, like me, didn't stay. But we came because we wanted to see a revolution in the flesh, and they welcomed us. For a while in Caracas, I lived in a social centre in La Pastora. I didn't pay rent, but there was a small empty room and no one seemed to mind. Every day I'd talk to strangers, make friends, and try and learn something new. The situation there wasn't ideal. For one thing, we didn't really have showers, and also I got robbed at gunpoint. So, for most of my time in the country, I stayed with the Chilean family I'd met.

They welcomed me, a more or less total stranger, into their homes and lives. In the evenings, we'd spend hours talking, and they'd tell me stories about how they'd suffered under Pinochet, the hopes they'd had for their country, and how they'd had to flee to Caracas like tens of thousands of their fellow Chileans. They introduced me to Victor Jara and Jolly Pan. I introduced them to Chamba Wamba, and we shared an affection for George Orwell.

The song you heard after the adverts was not in fact Chambawamba, but Chilean leftist folk musician Victor Jara. He's playing El derecho de vivir en paz, the right to live in peace in English, and it's one of his most famous songs. It confronts the US war in Vietnam. Later, after Jara was tortured and murdered by the Pinochet regime, it became an anthem of protest in the country.

Jara and his friend Pablo Neruda were both symbols of the cultural power of the Chilean people and the brutality of the Pinochet regime who broke the hands he used to play his guitar before they killed him. Jara and Neruda both moved in the same revolutionary artistic circles as my Chilean hosts in Venezuela. At night, they'd tell me stories about the time they spent together. We'd have to speak loudly, as the man who'd adopted me as a sort of surrogate grandson had permanent hearing damage from the torture he'd endured under the same regime.

Luckily, he'd been able to flee with his wife to Venezuela, where they were welcomed. They never returned to Chile, and happily lived out the rest of their lives listening to their Victor Jara records in Caracas and living the ideals that had seen them persecuted. Their kindness to me, a 19-year-old stranger with terrible Spanish for nowhere to sleep at night, reflected the kindness they'd received, and I've tried to reflect it in turn ever since. One. Not very good. Oh.

I never once heard any children crying in Las Blancas or Baja Chiquito. Well, not until the deportations took their parents away on my last day there. Most of the time, the kids entertain themselves. One day in Las Blancas, when migrants couldn't wait and spend weeks or months if they don't have the funds to move forward with their journey, I left my fixture while she made a call and bumped into some little children playing a game where they'd throw water bottle caps into half a breeze block from various distances.

each of them counting how many they could land. I sat down next to them, put my recorder on the ground, and asked nicely if I could join them. Like a tiny pit boss, one of the kids bought me a pile of bottle tops, and I chatted with them as we threw our bottle caps at a broken piece of concrete. "What's it like in America?" they asked.

They also had a lot of questions about Africa, having probably met African kids in the casita just across the way. Do they have big buildings in Africa? Does it rain there? How long does it take to get there in a bus? Then they tested my Venezuelan legitimacy by drawing me a repo in my notebook and asking if I knew what it was. Once I passed the test, they asked me how to say some things in English, and they showed me the toys they bought with them, which were very few. One of them had a small plastic cow, of which he was very proud.

After a while, they asked what I was doing, and I showed them how I record interviews. At which point, they began recording themselves and each other, and wildly stabbing at the buttons on my recorder, which I will admit scared the crap out of me. But I didn't have the heart to take it off them. They stroked the fluffy wind protector I use on my microphone. It told me it was like a tiny teddy bear.

Eventually, I was able to trade my recorder for several small wooden animals I'd bought with me as gifts, which seemed to be a deal that left all of us feelings that we'd come out ahead. They seemed unbothered by the suffering around them, but Las Blancas is no place for children. They should be in school, learning the English phrases they kept repeating to me every time I saw them. But for a chance to use their English, they first had to endure a month more danger and deprivation. We have to keep recording. Hello? Yes, we're recording now.

Some slightly older children made the journey alone, or almost alone. They were accompanied by a spaniel called Chanel. I saw her a few chihuahuas people had carried with them through the Darien Gap, but to my knowledge this is the first spaniel that has made the treacherous crossing. I'm from Venezuela.

Like everyone else, they had terrible memories from the jungle. The truth is you have to fight a lot to be able to get out of there because not everyone gets out of that jungle and it's even more difficult with small children. There are times when one goes without food and it's very stressful because all around us,

All we saw was the jungle, and we never saw the way out. But it is complicated. The truth is that it is very hard. The jungle, well, I would really recommend that people never go there. All our feet are hurting. We can't walk properly. Our whole bodies hurt. We went days without eating. They were traveling, they said, to join their parents. And because in Venezuela, they told me, they were always hungry. They saw people sleeping on the streets and worried that would be their only option one day if they didn't leave.

I want to see mom. I haven't seen her in three years and I want to have my American dream too. I want to see my dad, my aunts and my uncle. I haven't seen them for three years either. Despite the hardship, they didn't blame their parents for leaving. We know that we made it because of them. They are the ones who sent us money for the things we need. We were able to get a few things, not everything we needed. But it's all thanks to them.

At the end of their interview, as I always do, I asked them if there's anything else that they wanted to share. I don't know, but our parents, we love them a lot and hope we can see them soon. Like many of the Venezuelans I spoke to, their American dreams were pretty modest. For most of them, though, they'll be unachievable in the current immigration system. They'll end up stuck in Mexico, in Mexico City perhaps, or further south. Perhaps in Tijuana, or Juarez, waiting to cross the border if they're lucky.

But if they cried across between ports of entry, or get caught travelling without registering in Mexico, they'll risk being deported or relocated back to southern Mexico.

Here's Erika explaining that process. The Mexican National Guard has been detaining people who are trying to cross the U.S.-Mexico border, and they had been sending themselves to Mexico City and Chiapas to Tapachula. Now there's been this huge effort to stop people from waiting not only at the U.S.-Mexico border, but even in Mexico City. So we're seeing...

Mexican Immigration and National Guard doing sweeps of migrant camps, of apartment buildings. It doesn't matter if the person has a CBP-1 appointment. Sometimes they'll just send them south to either Chiapas and increasingly Tabasco. So Villa Hermosa, which is where people are arriving in Tabasco, has one shelter. And I think the capacity is around 250, 300 people.

And earlier this year, they were sending 20,000 migrants a month there. And then they posted the military up so that people can't leave. And it's very dangerous there. It's a drug trafficking area. So it's, you know, not only are people sleeping in the streets, but they're sleeping on the streets of some of the most dangerous cities in Mexico with very few services there to help them even get their next meal. This, of course, didn't happen without the influence of the United States.

In many ways, Joe Biden has done exactly what Donald Trump promised to do. Not only has he built more wall, he's also forced Mexico to pay for a significant amount of the US's immigration enforcement. But when people are sent back to the south of Mexico, they'll just make their way north again, only this time with fewer resources and even greater risk. They're all proud of where they're from. About half the groups I saw had Venezuelan flags on their caps or backpacks. But they're also very aware of the betrayal they get as Venezuelans in the US media.

And many of them made the very valid point that if Americans are afraid of Venezuelan gangs, they ought to consider how much more afraid people are in a country where they actually exist. I'm 13. Please don't believe that because one person from Venezuela does crime, that all Venezuelans do crime.

But at least they get a portrayal in the US media. Many African migrants don't even get that. Of course, that doesn't mean they don't know about the USA, his powers and her Anglophone Cameroonian group again, talking about their impressions of America, where they'd like to live when they arrive here.

So if I may ask, if you don't mind me asking, what do Americans, how do they...

trick or how do they see immigrants? Well my friend it's changing a lot. African migrants in particular will struggle with a lack of resources, the absence of solidarity structures and obvious anti-blackness along the journey. Along with this people they meet along the way simply lack context for their journeys, why they're leaving, what they're fleeing. Language barriers may exclude many of them from using CBP1 which is only offered in English, Spanish and Haitian Creole.

Less than 15% of asylum cases are conducted in English, but the app ignores huge swaths of the world outside the Western Hemisphere. In Barra de Quito, I use French to speak to migrants who don't speak English.

and began to notice the complete absence of signage in anything other than Spanish, and sometimes English and Creole. This is likely an issue throughout their long journeys. Here's one migrant from Angola. And I should probably note at this point that Angolan people tend to speak Portuguese as their national language, but French was the language I shared with some of them, as I don't speak Portuguese. It was too much, very complicated.

Like me, I did a week in Brazil. I left Brazil and for Peru. Peru to Nicolclí, then here. I did... We did four days, four days walking. There are many mountains, many risks. There are many animals along the route. You have to follow the path for four days and there's no food. But we are glad to arrive today. This is the first group. There's the second, third, fourth, fifth group. They're still on the road.

I'm very proud of the fact that we made it despite the suffering. But God was with us. That is what is important. There are numerous instances of French-speaking migrants trying to approach the border near me in San Isidro and being turned away for not having an appointment on that that's not available in a language they can understand. These language barriers might stop the migrants getting information, but they don't stop them helping one another. Here's Powers' group describing the isolation they felt, but also the kindness they experienced. Do you think people on the trip...

treat African people differently? Yes, they do. They treat differently. They don't even communicate. They are just by themselves. They don't associate. They look at us differently. I had someone who supported me. I saw how kind the person was. Because of their obvious foreignness and perceived inability to communicate, African migrants are often targeted for crime in Mexico.

Since leaving Panama, I've heard from migrants who were raped, kidnapped, ransomed, and I even heard about one who was killed. Because of their difficulties accessing the CBP One app, many face longer waits in Mexico, which may in turn leave them open to extortion or see them decide to cross the border between ports of entry. I've met hundreds of migrants, mainly Mauritanians and Guineans, who have made this difficult choice since Biden's asylum ban came into force.

Due to the distance, African migrants also face a longer, more expensive and more dangerous journey. Here's Primrose from Zimbabwe, describing her journey just to get to Bajo Chiquito. The situation for me, it was tough. I just ran away to South Africa and South Africa was not safe. Sonophobia and they almost killed me and my boyfriend and even my wife.

My baby father was abusive, too much abusive. Because of the politics, I'm an opposition party. So it was difficult for me to live. So that's why I ran away. Even in South Africa, I was not safe at all. Because those people, they were like following me and my daughter. So I spent three months on the road coming here. I live South Africa, I think...

4th of July till now I'm in Panama. I'm still walking using buses. Jesus. How did you get off from Africa to America? Did you fly or take a boat? The thing is I fly from Johannesburg to Brazil. Then I seek asylum in Brazil.

Then I wanted to stay in Brazil. So people said, no, you're in Brazil, you can't because of language. Yeah, Portuguese. Yeah, Portuguese. So I started also using people's route, like let's take this bus from point A to point B. So we take a bus from Brazil to Bolivia, then from Bolivia to Peru, Peru to Ecuador, Ecuador, Colombia. Then we start walking using Darwin Gap to here in Panama.

African migrants will end up in different shelters that are more remote or have less connectivity, again making their asylum process harder. Unlike migrants from the Western Hemisphere, they might struggle to find solidarity networks even inside the USA. Without a significant diaspora, many of the migrants who met in the jungle have struggled to find sponsors. Lots of the people I spoke to here, including Primrose and her daughter, are still looking for someone to give them a helping hand as they start their new life.

We spoke a lot over the week I was there, and we've spoken most days since. It's heartbreaking for me to see her daughter going for months without education or even a safe place to sleep. I've seen photos of them sleeping on the street. They've ridden crowded buses north, and I've heard their frustrated attempts to comply with the arcane and complicated restrictions on their right to come here and ask for help.

And it's been really hard since I got home to reconcile this with a national discussion that seems to see migration as a number that we have to decrease. And migrants are something other than people who want to come here for all the same reasons I do, and live happily and peaceably as our neighbours. Now that they've come this far, migrants from outside the Western Hemisphere have to keep going. They can't even file their claims on CBP1 until they make it to Tapachula, which is hundreds of dollars and thousands of kilometres from Panama. They likely don't have the funds to go back home, even if they want to.

and they are far more likely to be robbed or kidnapped along the way. However, their stories often aren't told. Reporting on the border still largely focuses on Spanish-speaking migrants, with some space for Chinese or Haitians. But migrants from Africa rarely get much care or attention in the media. In part, this has helped them avoid the demonization that Venezuelan migrants are all too aware of, but in part, it also leads to a lack of concern for their needs. I want to end today with Gabriel from Equatorial Guinea, sharing his message for Americans.

Yeah, a lot of people get this confused. Africa is not a country. A lot of them think when they see you and you're black person, they say, are you African? And it's like,

There are lots of countries in Africa, Ghana, Nigeria. You got Guinea. You got the Mauritanian people. There are loads of countries. I wish people would know. How do I say this? I wish they'd take us into account because.

Really, they don't consider us when they say Africa is a country. They don't care about us the way we care about them. And this is the way of seeing things which doesn't consider us as human, not the same as them. Do you understand? They see us as Africans or animals, something like that.

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The General and Chief of the Liberating Army of the South, Emiliano Zapatista, manifesto Zapatista en agua. From Mexico to the peoples and governments of the world. Brothers, we were born in the night, in it we live. But the light will be tomorrow for the sea, for all those who today pray at night, for those who deny the day, we are the light.

Some of you will recognize the audio that we opened this show with. Many of you won't. It's a sample from the fourth declaration of the Lacandon jungle that Manu Chao used to open his shows with. It's a piece of music that's very emotive for me. Obviously, I'm a white leftist guy in my 30s who learned Spanish and decided to live in Barcelona. So I have a story about running into Manu Chao once while he was busking. But that's not what I want to share today.

Because I'm technologically challenged, I can't seem to get my phone to download songs. But I've managed to download the same Manu Chao playlist that I ripped off a rewritable CD when I was in high school and put it on the various headphones and Garmin watches that I've had over the last two decades or so. When I'm away for work, I like to run whenever I can. Obviously, I wasn't just going to go for a jog straight into the Derry and Gap. But once we were out of Bajo Chiquito, it gave me some time to run and think and process the things that I've seen.

And while I do that, I listen to the same dozen or so MP3 files. I was listening to this song one day after I got back from Las Blancas, as I sweated my way up a hill in the rainforest, hoping to see a sloth. I didn't see a sloth, but it seemed like an appropriate soundtrack. Manichal himself is a child of refugees from Francoist Spain. He sings in French and Spanish, Wolof and Galician and Portuguese, among other languages, often several of them in the same song. The product of growing up among other migrants of diverse backgrounds.

I like the way he plays with language because it reminds me of the way I so often speak to my friends. Spanglish, for example, or Franglais. It's the way people talk in border regions and refugee camps. Languages that don't have the support of a state or the academy, but nonetheless convey so much meaning for so many people. That song, in particular, reminds me of my first time reading about Zapatismo in a tiny anarchist café in the West Midlands.

I remember being struck as a kid from Europe who would frequently drive to France or Belgium to race bikes and buy cheap beer, though the USA still maintained a fortified border with Mexico. People couldn't travel freely, but money could. It was this realization, and the writings in particular of Subcomandante Marcos, along with my talks in Spain to old anarchists, that encouraged me to learn Spanish, which I pursued by spending months in Spain and Venezuela and learning thanks to the patience of the people around me.

It was a new anarchism, which came from the periphery, not the neoliberal core, which gave me my first serious politics. I travelled to Venezuela to understand the revolution there. I did a PhD to try and understand the revolution in Spain. It's all very well understanding things, but I think it's much more important to do things. And I tried to practice mutual aid as much as I can. Since I got back from the Darién, I've loaded up a heavy backpack and carried water into the desert, and spent hours trying to connect the friends I made in the jungle with services along the way.

In the face of so much cruelty, it feels good to be doing something to help. And carrying the water is a way I can make a material difference in a terrible situation. But in all my time reporting, I've really never felt as disempowered and helpless as I did in Las Blancas. Here, at the first official migrant reception center after Darien, the Panamanian government registers migrants, NGOs offer a few services, and the US-funded process of deportation for migrants from Colombia, Cuba, Venezuela, and India begins.

Some of those sent to India might well be Nepalese, who often travel on fake Indian passports. This little cluster of cheap tents, shipping container offices, UN shelters, and barbed wire fences is where the rubber meets the road for the USA's border and migration policy. And it's heartbreaking to witness. As migrants were called up to the security office to begin the deportation process, I tried to narrate the scene into my voice recorder. But I struggled, in part because their family members asked me questions, hoping I could help.

You know, planks on the side. In larger part, this was also difficult because I couldn't help, and I deeply wanted to. The best I could offer was an arm around someone's shoulder, and a promise to email anyone who I could think of and ask what was going on. This guy's just sobbing. Yeah, that's really tough.

Some people's parents, some people's partners, some... I'll explain exactly what was happening in a moment, but first I want to explain how I got here. On the day we left Maraganti, we set off at the same time as some migrants who were making their own journey to Las Blancas. Our piragua was carrying only myself and my fixer daddy, and our piraguero. So we were moving a lot faster than the boats full of migrants. On the way north, we passed them.

They smiled and waved as we rode by. Many of them had met me the day before. All of them were ecstatic to have survived the Dalien and be heading north. Yeah, it's a pretty busy stretch of river. There's probably three or four pedagogues full of migrants. Hello! There are kids shouting at me because I taught them some English words yesterday and they're shouting them back to me today, which is nice. We've got a family from Panama. Um...

They might be NGO people or something. They left a little shock to the whole scene. Here we are passing another piragua now. They're all waving at me. It's got to be uncomfortable to pack that down into a piragua. One, two, three, four, five. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen people, yeah.

Once the boats arrive, they disembark in Las Blancas. The next day I was there to meet them. We're just walking into Las Blancas. It's hectic here. So it's a new shop here and outside the shop they've made like a line of outlets to charge people. It's a dollar an hour to charge your telephone.

As we go in there are a row of like kind of sheds which represent shops and then further in every NGO has its own little kind of shed. They're all covered in tarps. They're like canvas and tarp tents. I see here, so I see UNICEF, I see OIM.

Yeah, they have their sort of little tent office here, I guess. So he has, for example, has route information, psychological support, safe space for women. UNICEF has some workshops for children and then their hours, I guess. Nice little chairs in there. And...

Yeah, you can't take photographs in there which is good. And then it's just crowds of people coming out. And there's also a little Mormon situation. I guess the OAM are supported by the Church of Jesus Christ and the Latter-day Saints. And the Red Cross has got a shipping container.

I've been hoping Las Blancas would be a better scene than Bajo Chiquito, with more organized sleeping arrangements and hopefully basic necessities like clean water, food and Wi-Fi provided by the numerous NGOs who work there. But if anything, it was worse than Bajo Chiquito. In Bajo Chiquito, migrants were exhausted but also ecstatic to be out in the jungle. They knew they'd be moving forward the next day, and for a few bucks they could get anything they needed in the village.

The locals told me that if kids didn't have the money to eat, they fed them for free. I didn't see this, but normally seem like they're having a very hard time in any of the days I visited the village. At least, not for financial reasons. Magos can get as far as Pahochiquito on a few hundred dollars in their tenacity. They pay Colombian guides a few hundred bucks to bring them across the ocean from Necoclí and to walk them from the border. And they paid Embarapiragüeros 25 bucks for the ride up the river.

But once they get to Las Blancas, for a good number of migrants, their journey grinds to a halt. Many of them told me they'd been stuck in the camp for weeks or even months because they couldn't get that $60 that they needed to pay for their travel north. There's no Western Union in the camp, and the only way to transfer money is via a local intermediary, who charges between 20% and 25% of the sum being transferred as a fee. In the morning, migrants arrive on their paraguas just as we did.

I jogged down the boat ramp when I saw them to help with their bags and ask about their journey. From there, they formed two lines, one for men and one for women and children. They have their bags searched and their passport checked. They're given a welcome kit from the Red Cross with some basic necessities, toilet paper, a toothbrush, some soap, stuff like that.

Or, some of them get a kid. When the kids ran out, it was long before the line of people did. By the time the men were finished, they were given little more than a shrug and good wishes by the Red Cross volunteers, and allowed to head off into the camp. Within the camp, there are a few rows of small casitas that are allocated to unaccompanied children and families. There are little more than four walls and a roof, but they offer a bit of privacy.

For most migrants though, there isn't space, and they have to search for a spot of empty ground in the crowded camp where they can pitch the same tents they bought in Necocli. The wifi, which the Red Cross usually provides, wasn't working when I arrived, so I had to let people hotspot off my phone all day. At least the promised food really was free, but the migrants told me it was far from good. Still, this is supposed to be a temporary camp. People register here, get any medical attention they need, and then move forward to Costa Rica. That's the theory anyway.

In practice, if you can't get the 60 bucks you need to move forward, or someone stole it from you in the jungle, or you were forced to walk to the camp because you didn't have the 25 bucks for the boat and then someone robbed you, then you're stuck. We have been here a month. You have people who've been here a month and a half. I've been 27 days here. Well, I thank God because we have three meals a day, we have water, but it still hurts the girls.

The food and water always make me sick with diarrhea. It bothers me. I vomit and the heat is so desperate. But we have to hold on because even though we don't have the resources, like we don't have enough to pay for a ticket, we have to hold on here a little longer. We don't have any family members that can give us support either. What's keeping the migrants here is money, or rather a lack of it. They need 60 bucks to leave.

Buses used to take five free passengers per bus, but under Panama's new regime, it seems like they don't. Instead, migrants just gradually amass in growing number of tents that populate the grassy areas of Las Blancas.

They might try and do some informal work. I saw one guy who was cutting hair for a dollar a time. But I couldn't really get a satisfactory response to what they're expected to do if they don't have the money and can't get someone to send the $75 they'd need to cover their travel costs and the 25% transfer fee. If you're short $10, they don't put you on the bus or anything. So things are terrible here. There should at least be support for migrants who at least come with few resources.

They don't have money or anything. They can search your bag so they can see that you're not lying, that you don't have money, because nobody wants to be stuck here. You have to move forward because nobody wants to be stuck here in Panama. The idea is to move forward, to get further ahead. We brought our children to look for a future, not to be locked up here in Panama as if we've been imprisoned.

The group even tried to leave on foot, hoping to begin walking north in search for a better future and a way to make money on their way.

But they were caught, they say, and returned to the camp. And they beat me hard. I gave myself up because they had caught her, a grandmother with my other daughter. I returned myself voluntarily, and they beat me up anyway. And from there, we lost the desire to walk back there. What can we do? Rights? They don't care about them. We are human beings, but we don't have rights here in Panama.

If they do have the money, migrants could take a bus to the Costa Rican border. When the buses first arrived, I tried to describe the scene as migrants rushed to buy food, not only for this journey, but also for their journey through Costa Rica, where food and other basics are much more expensive. I'm just here in La Hablanca, when the first buses have arrived. It's about noon.

The first bus is going to be full of people who had been waiting in line for hours already. So they're kind of lining up by the bus. And then the next bus is... People seem to be kind of rushing to get to them. They're rushing to buy food. I can just see this guy has an entire carrier bag full of pink wafer biscuits and Coke bottles. That's going to be his food for the next 11 hours, I guess. Other guys you see with bags of bread rolls and stuff. The first people are getting on the bus now.

These buses aren't entirely safe. In 2023, 42 people died in a bus crash. This year, 17 were injured in a crash in August. Now, migration officers ride in each bus with the migrants to check on safety protocols and make sure they don't get off anywhere else in the country. Just like everywhere else on their journey, people make money off the migrants. In Las Blancas, a bus costs $60 a head and has 55 passengers. $3,300 a bus. More than a dozen buses leave every day.

Even half of the thousand or so people who arrived use a transfer service to get their bus fare. That's $7,500 in transfer fees alone. Of course, not everyone in the community is making thousands of dollars off the migrants. I interviewed a local shopkeeper who still sits just outside the camp gates, and I asked him to explain his stock, which included the oddly popular I Back the Blue Thin Blue Line t-shirt that I'd seen several people cross the Daliangap in. First, tell me your name and your passport. Can you give me a little of that?

Yes, better. Thank you.

I asked him what was the most common shopping list for migrants. Yes, almost all of them come in by sets for $10, $15, $20. It depends. There are many who don't have them. I have children's sets for $5. I have sets for $5 that are pants and sweaters, which is what they're looking for the most. Those that are socks without underwear. Backpacks for $15 because the backpack is so worn out and they need it so much that it carries their belongings. No, mire.

Look, it's not really everyone who can buy. There are certain people who buy, of course, if everyone bought, but there are very few who can buy something to leave here. Almost 70% leave dirty because they don't have anywhere to get money.

And the little they can get often comes from selling their phones, their watch, a cap, or their sneakers to be able to get money to pay for their fare to keep going. I asked him how the migration had impacted the community. Were people making a lot of money, I asked? Were they mad about the trash and the pollution of the river? These are legitimate concerns, even if they're used in bad faith against the migrants. Nobody is perfect, but I can tell you one thing. Honestly, the migrants suffer a lot to be able to carry out this journey.

And there are many times when I've even had to give them clothes, some because they don't have any. And well, when a father and family with children comes, what can I say? Look, I have a family. I have to do this, yeah? I ask him what he felt the solution was to the suffering here, the damage done both to people and planet.

I say that oppressing people so that they don't go through the dairy end is not the solution. Because if you put it to the point, even if they don't know an exact percentage, the immigrant gives the economy of the United States a balance. Because the people born there, not to criticize them, people born there want a stable job.

And he doesn't want to feel like he's very, very low. However, the immigrant is there, and he's picking fruit, going to the fruit trees, going to the vegetable fields, going to the garbage dumps, going, picking up things that many Americans who live there don't do, of course. And so they need them to say that they don't go. They need the support of the immigrant to be able to have the balance that they have today.

Like a lot of Panamanians I met, he was broadly in solidarity with the migrants. I didn't really encounter anti-migrant sentiment at all in my time at Panama. In the capital city, which locals just call Panama, but we can call Panama City, migrants are not really physically present, nor are they present in conversation. I found the transition from the jungle and the refugee camps back to the bustling city pretty challenging in a lot of ways. I find I'm oddly comfortable amidst the chaos and trauma of a refugee camp.

It's a familiar environment for me and I know how to conduct myself. I feel safe with the migrants and I tend to find them very open and welcoming to me. I can talk to anyone and they can talk to me. I bring toys for children and try to bring resources for adults and sometimes I bring my harmonica if I'm being really cliche. In a weird way, refugee camps are a little safe space for me and even though I know it's bad, I can console myself that I'm helping a little or at least giving people some hope and some information and that can make me feel a bit better.

But in the city, I found it hard knowing that people were in a terrible situation and that nobody here seemed to care. I went for a run in the jungle near the city, trying to get some perspective and clear my head. But I just ended up screaming at an inconsiderate driver. I was angry at them for nearly hitting me, but I was just angry at everyone, all over the US and even here in Panama City, for their indifference at so much human suffering. Hello.

The lack of concern about migrants in Panama City made what I saw next at Las Blancas even more surprising.

An announcement over the loudspeakers called several Colombian passport holders to the migration office. At first, it seemed like they were just going to a little wooden shed with a couple of Senefront officers in it to return their documents. I'd already noticed that some migrants, and seemingly most of the African migrants, were being called to a different shed to do biometric scans. I wondered if this was part of the same process.

But shortly thereafter, a truck rolled up and several of the Colombians were loaded in. Apparently neither they nor their partners knew what was going on. They're taking some of the Colombian guys away to deport them. You can hear a little kid crying for his dad. You're going with them? My brother and his wife are there. Why do they say that? They're taking them to another camp, as if they're going to deport them.

They've taken his brother and his brother's wife. They've taken some other lady's husband, some little kid's dad. They're making them sit on the floor. I don't know why. Yeah, I don't know what they're going to do now. She's trying to give her husband the money and a SIM card so he can call her.

Are you going to go get some more food? Other migrants approached me to ask if I knew. Which I didn't. But one lady who'd been there for weeks told me that people who leave this way never come back and that they end up being deported. So we assumed that's what was happening here. Yeah, this really sucks now. They're taking the deportation bus. There's men crying because their wives are on there. Women crying because their husbands are on there. Kids are crying because their parents are on there. And they've just done this crossing and now they're going to send them back.

By the time I got back to the city, I was getting texts from migrants with photos of them in handcuffs. More and more of them were being deported, particularly the Colombians. One of them texted me after being returned to Colombia on a flight,

gave the following account of detention. They treated us very badly, verbally and psychologically. We all had to do our business in the same cell, and they threw food on the floor for us to eat as we were all in handcuffs. They told us that a Venezuelan had burned down the migrant detention center in San Vicente and that we would all pay for it, and that the Colombians didn't need to leave the country because the president there said it was doing well and there's plenty of work. None of that is true.

The migrant facility in San Vicente was burned down, and the people working there told me it was a Venezuelan migrant who did that. But none of that excuses any of this. We weren't able to access that facility, as the people who were detained there can't really consent meaningfully to an interview. That's a fair enough objection. But the migrant who was deported also alleged that they received no hearings or a chance to appeal their deportation. Instead, they were detained for eight days, spent their last US dollars, and were then kicked out of the country.

They were not detained or arrested upon reaching Colombia, which makes it a little more difficult for me to believe the claim that only people with outstanding warrants in Colombia were being deported. These weren't the only allegations of mistreatment I heard. Migrants came to me and whispered about the abuse of black migrants who were forced to walk to La Has Blancas because they couldn't afford the boat ride. I should note that it wasn't the migrants who had been robbed or abused that came to me. It was other migrants. It was a group of guys I'd given a water filter to while they were leaving to walk from La Has Blancas. I hadn't been able to join them.

But when they got there, we ran into each other again, and they came up to me to share their concerns for the black men who had walked with them. In one instance, one migrant told me he was robbed by what he called, quote, police dressed as thieves. The deportations, which seem to be increasingly commonplace, are being funded by US taxpayer dollars. The same day that Molino took office in July, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, himself the child of migrants, visited Panama.

Panama is a relatively young country, and one which the US occupied part of for much of the last century. But despite a real struggle for independence, the Panamanian government didn't seem concerned that the US Secretary of Homeland Security was present at the inauguration of a president in a country that is decidedly not the US homeland. The official DHS readout of his trip notes that the US has enjoyed a flourishing strategic relationship with Panama for over 100 years,

which is certainly one way to sum up decades of occupation, violence, and profit from the Panama Canal, and one of the more brutal dictatorships in the long list of authoritarian regimes that the US preferred to communist or even socialist governments in the Western Hemisphere. They also announced that the US government would, quote, help the Panamanian government to remove foreign nationals who do not have a legal basis to remain in Panama. Obviously, I should take this moment to note that under the United Nations Refugee Convention, refugees do have a legal right to travel through a country en route to another.

Here's Erica describing that right. The refugee convention is complex and does afford a lot of rights to people who have fled their countries based on persecution. You know, you're supposed to be able to pass through whichever country you want, go to whichever country you want, not be criminally prosecuted for crossing the border between ports of entry and not be turned back to a country where you face harm. The U.S. allocated $6 million for a six-month pilot program of repatriations.

If the program meets the USA's goals, they might consider expanding it to other countries along the migrant route, according to reporting in Reuters. As of early October, they've deported 530 people to Colombia. That's half of the people I saw arriving in a single day in Baja Chiquito.

Because Panama's government and Venezuela's government have ceased relations after the election, Panama is now struggling to deport Venezuelans back to Venezuela and is actively searching for a third country into which to deport them. But even if the program resulted in one plane load a day, which it hasn't yet, that would be roughly 10% of the total daily in traffic, and far fewer planes are traveling. What it will do, like so many other DHS policies, is play into the hands of smugglers.

Already new ocean routes are being used, which see migrants, many of whom cannot swim, taking long journeys around Panama on ill-equipped boats. This doesn't help anyone, apart from the DHS contractors and staff equipping and training Panamanian personnel, and the human traffickers making more and more money from migration. I asked the shopkeeper his opinion on this. Look, I tell you, I consider that instead of...

Look, I'll tell you, I think that instead of giving them a reward for deportation, they should give them support, a lot of support, because it is a huge sacrifice to leave your country where you were born, your children, your family, leave it to be able to have a future, and you go with your mentality that your future is the United States, that

that will give you an opportunity to get ahead and give well-being to your children. Now, 10% of those who go are going to destroy the good name of the migrants. But what 90% of people really want to do is help their family. And this unbalances everything that is being done by good people because there are many good people who want to get ahead. And I think that the United States should support, give support to people who really want to fight and move forward, as I just told you.

They give a lot of benefit. They contribute to the country. After leaving Las Blancas, I felt pretty down about the fact that people were just hitting a wall that they couldn't overcome. Since then, I've stayed in touch with many of them.

For some, a friend or family member was able to send the money, and they made it to Costa Rica on the bus. From there, they crossed quickly into Nicaragua and Guatemala, before arriving in the Mexican border city of Tapachula, in the state of Chiapas, and ironically not so very far from where the Zapatistas made their revolution 30 years ago. Once they cross the southern border of Mexico, migrants can begin their application for asylum using the CBP One app that we've talked about so much on this show before.

They can use it in Tabasco and Chiapas, the southern border states. And then once again, when they're north of Mexico City.

To recap very briefly, the app is terrible in almost every way, including its inability to recognize black faces, its limited functionality on Android phones, which are the vast majority of devices used by migrants, its constant crashing, and an eight to nine month wait time for asylum appointments. Here's Erica explaining some of those problems. You have to have a relatively new smartphone. You have to have an address. All the people you're traveling with have to be with you, right? And you have to first...

get through the initial kind of registration phase, which doesn't always work. The program is very glitchy. You have to take a live photo and you have to wait essentially. So, you know, it's kind of random too. Some people will get an appointment within three months, but I would say most people are waiting nine to 12 at this point. You don't have any legal status in Mexico while you're waiting, unless you can apply for some other status in Mexico independently.

Not only is the app very poorly designed, it's also a de facto metering system on asylum. Here's Erika explaining that. We've been litigating against the use of CBP1 for a few years now, my organization, Alotrolavo and Haitian Bridge Alliance. And the reason why we are fighting against the required use of CBP1 is

is first because it is an illegal metering system. So we've already litigated the fact that there is no number limit on the amount of individuals who can seek asylum at the U.S.-Mexico border, and Customs and Border Protection legally does not have the right to turn people away.

And CBP1 essentially allows them to do that. There were physical metering lists at ports of entry before CBP1 was implemented as essentially the only way to access the U.S. asylum system at ports of entry. And now it's a digital metering list. And it's very limited. Recently, the Department of Homeland Security lost a court case which forced them to release records. In there were some of the app logs and data regarding CBP1.

I'm still in the phase of combing through that and asking my friends who know more about technology than I do to explain exactly what the limitations with the app are. But it doesn't really matter. DHS is well aware of the app's flaws, and it doesn't really seem to see them as flaws at all. The goal of the app is to make it harder for people, even those with very legitimate asylum claims, to obtain asylum in the USA.

As we heard yesterday, the CHNV program is no better. I recently read a Reddit thread of applicants who've been waiting nearly two years. What I didn't mention yesterday is a parallel program for another group of migrants, which I'll let Erika explain. I want to mention the fact that there is a cap, right? I think it's $30,000 a month or something like that for those four countries. But it's almost identical to the Ukrainian United for Ukraine program, which doesn't have a cap.

So there's no limit to how many Ukrainians can get the same benefit. And they are renewing the humanitarian parole for Ukrainians, which I believe was just announced almost within weeks of them announcing that they're not renewing for the other four countries. So it's really a very stark demonstration of how the U.S. immigration system, even when it's a relatively meager benefit, is based on race, is based on which country you're from.

What this means is that in practice, the migrants I spoke to face a long and dangerous wait in Mexico, while others skip ahead. I've got nothing against Ukrainians, and I don't think many of them do either. I tried to go to Ukraine and report, but the visas ended up taking so long that I missed the flights that I'd booked.

I have, however, a serious problem with the Biden administration, which left people who fought alongside its own US troops to die in Afghanistan and turned away migrants from all over the world, but then opened its arms to a country that just happens to have the majority of its citizens be the same race as the president. It's cruel and it's wrong and it's barely ever even mentioned in national media coverage.

For those not fortunate enough to be Ukrainian, here's what waiting in Mexico looks like. The incidence of crime directed at migrants is horrifyingly high. We had done a

electronic survey a few years ago, and this was during Title 42, when people were just being expelled to Mexico. And if I remember correctly, it was like around 25 to 30% of people had been either raped, sex trafficked, assaulted, kidnapped. I mean, the list goes on and on. We've seen a lot of people lose their lives just due to violence. And the kidnapping rates are through the roof.

Almost everyone you've heard from in this series is now stuck in Mexico. Some of them have been kidnapped, paid ransomed and released. Some of them have been sexually assaulted. Many of them have been robbed. Some of them have, after surviving one of the most deadly land migration routes on earth, been killed while waiting in Mexico for an app to stop crashing on their phones. Over the weeks since I got home, I've seen them go gradually more desperate and afraid.

Just to get to Mexico, many of them have spent several thousand dollars. Once there in Tapachula, they're faced with the astronomical cost for the trip north, often several thousand dollars more, and many of them, their phones exhausted, have slept on the streets. Those who didn't speak Spanish struggled to find refuge. Those who did wanted to move quickly north, but struggled to find the money. Here are the Iranian migrants you heard earlier in the series, explaining what they'd already heard about CBP-1.

It's so tough because some police in the way

took our money that we came from Iran it was so difficult for us and resume the way to Mexico Mexico is so difficult for us and something else CBP1 is not working for us for Iranian people I know the people who are in Mexico City for about three months

for three months. Yeah, CBP-1 is terrible. Because of that, Iranian people go to the wall and... Make God meet them in the dead. It's not our choice. We have to do this. We don't want them, but we have to do this. Yeah, it's good to explain that.

According to a study conducted at University of Texas, wait times are as high as eight or nine months on average now. Mexico announced on the 31st of August that it will provide security and food for migrants who have an appointment to travel north from the south of the country to the place where they have a CBP1 appointment. Migrants absolutely have been robbed or kidnapped on their way to their appointment and missed it as a result. But they're just as vulnerable in the eight or nine months that they have to wait for one.

migrants in Tapachula are at a very high risk for kidnapping, and are often held until their families pay ransoms. But without money or an appointment, they have little means of leaving the city. Some choose to travel a little further north, and then hop on a freight train known as La Bestia, the Beast, an extraordinarily risky endeavour that several of the people I spoke to for this series have undertaken. The only place to ride on these trains is on top of carriages, exposing migrants to freezing temperatures in the desert night.

Even on the train, they're not safe from kidnapping. Like many migrants, the Iranian group were well-informed about domestic politics in the US. And they said that when they made their journey north, they wanted to be sure to avoid the states where local law enforcement was likely to turn them over for deportation. In reality, that could be any of the states. But they're probably right that their life would be a little easier on the west coast.

Yeah, especially

Our money is very, excuse me, shit money in the world. And we have to pay a lot of money for this way. Because our one... One dollar is 60,000 human. Some, of course, will choose to cross the border between ports of entry as they become desperate to see their families or afraid of remaining in Mexico.

since President Biden's executive order earlier this summer. Doing this can result in expedited removal proceedings. And effectively, Biden's new ruling denies asylum by default to anyone crossing the border when daily crossings surpass 2,500. In fact, this is a continuation of extremely punitive and cruel politics that have been in place since he was finally forced to stop using Title 42, which, if you're not aware, is a public health law used by the Trump administration and embraced by the Biden administration as an asylum law.

It has already resulted in the deportations of people back to places where they have extremely credible fears of harm and created a system whereby migrants have no idea how they will be treated on any given day. Again, it's played into the hands of anyone seeking to smuggle migrants into the country undetected, while also harming innocent people coming to this country to ask for protection. Here's Erica's short history of Biden's asylum policy since last year. So when the Biden administration lifted Title 42,

they essentially imposed what I call a transit ban. So there's a couple of components to it. One is if you do not enter the United States at a port of entry with a CBP-1 appointment, you are presumed ineligible for asylum unless you fall under a few narrow exceptions, which are not consistently applied. So the exceptions are things like

You were having a medical emergency. You were running for your life. You couldn't access the app for some reason. But in practice, those exceptions are almost never applied at ports. There's been a few kind of...

Alternative programs run by shelters or local governments where people with extreme medical vulnerabilities, for example, can be let in without an appointment, but we don't know whether the ban applies to them once they enter without that appointment. Right. So it's like I said, inconsistently applied exceptions. If you enter between a port of entry, you're presumed ineligible for asylum again, unless you meet some narrow exceptions, right?

And what that means is you can still apply for other types of protection in the United States. So there's two principal protections.

types of protection. One is called withholding of removal, which is like asylum, but with a higher standard. And then the other is convention against torture, which you just have to prove it's more likely than not that your own government will torture you, which is more extreme than persecution, but isn't necessarily based on a protected ground. So the torture could be for any reason, but it's, it's a high hurdle. But the most important thing is

Those two types of protection are not path to citizenship, and they do not allow you to petition for your family. So, for example, if you get asylum in the U.S. and then you want to ask for your wife and children to join you, there is an avenue for that. And all of you can eventually become citizens with withholding of removal and prevention against torture.

You basically get a work permit. If conditions in your country change, they can deport you. And you can never leave the United States and you can never reunify with your family and you could never become a citizen. This won't deter people. I speak to people every day who crossed to Dalian, were kidnapped, robbed, and sometimes raped on their way here.

They're going through all of that because we refuse to give people a dignified or safe way to come here. They know it's a risk, and they continue to come because they think it's the only option. Here's Powers from Cameroon explaining that. It's deadly. I won't lie to you. It's 50-50 life and death, honestly speaking. But we had to take the risk because I think that was the only option that we had. If you can't imagine taking those risks, it's likely because you can't imagine the things these people are leaving behind either.

As a conflict reporter, I've been able to see a small amount of what they're fleeing. War, death, poverty, state violence. I don't know if I'd be brave or strong enough to do the same, but I have a lot of respect for people who can. Tomorrow, we're going to talk about the people who helped them along the way and what you can do to support them when the state works hard.

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Just you finding yourself there and seeing how the environment looks like, you feel like you should give up. I cried. It takes the grace of God for you to actually stand by and say, "No, I'll keep on struggling." There are a lot of people who gave up. There are a lot of people who started crying. We met people who were crying. We met people who were crying. They didn't know how they could continue. It's not an easy situation.

It's not really an easy situation. At least it's just the grace of God for us surviving. Because I can say it's by my strength. It's actually the grace of God. Because what we actually went through, we met people who were being collapsed. We had to help them.

You meet your brother, you give a lifting hand. It's not really an easy thing. It's not something that if we are fine tomorrow, we can advise any of our family members to go through because it's so deadly. It's risky. If your family member is in there and is not out, it takes the grace of God for you to even lie on your bed and close all your eyes. I, for once, I survived by the grace of God because I almost drowned. In fact, I was drowning.

By the grace of God, I was rescued. Who rescued you? Some guys. Some guys rescued me. I was already drowned. I was gone. I was gone. I was drinking water. All throughout their journey north, migrants have little choice but to rely on one another and the solidarity of strangers. I heard dozens of stories like the one you've just heard in my time in the Dali Inn. Total strangers who saved each other's lives and risked their own in the process.

Rivers that could only be crossed if people from three different continents joined arms to form a human chain that children and smaller people could hold onto to avoid being swept downstream. Not everyone can help. Just surviving the Dalian takes all of what many people have. But for the people who are in a position to, even in desperate times,

There's mutual support among the migrants. There are very few people who are able to help you. There are very few people. Only people who are kind can actually help. There are people who pass you by and there are people who, if you have lost your strength, it's not easy for another person to actually help. But though we can really appreciate those who help because having

your strength is another, you must help yourself before you can help another person. So if you can't really have the strength, it will be difficult for you to help another. So we don't really condemn them, but at least we are pleading on our brothers who are still behind that, if they meet people, if they have the ability to help, they should do so because it's not really an easy something. There are people who gave up. There are people who gave up there. Sometimes reporting on these places can paint them as bleak,

unwelcoming, or just miserable. And certainly very sad things happen in the jungle and in the camps, inhuman things. But just like war or a natural disaster, sometimes the horrible circumstances of the migration trail bring out the best in people. As I've said before in this series, I'm comfortable in the refugee camps, at least in part because people there are looking out for one another.

Kids don't stop playing the moment they become refugees. Nor do adults stop laughing. In fact, these things become even more important. They're how we keep our humanity in a system that's inherently dehumanizing. And people don't stop organizing or caring about one another either. It's not just the migrants, of course. One of the families who've been stuck in Bajo Chiquito for almost a month was given some money by a local centerfront member to take a bus. In Mexico, those who don't have enough money to take buses will hop onto freight trains.

And as they speed through towns and rail yards at night, local people will throw plastic bags of food, water, and clothing to them. In Panama City, I visited a Jesuit-run shelter for migrants called Fe y Alegría.

Alberto went down to Darien recently and we know from first-hand experience that the difficulty they have is moving. So...

Some don't go through the stations, but they stay. So they appear here in the city. And so they arrive here and some decide to stay and forego all the difficulty of moving forward.

Despite having been set up as a refuge, recent changes to Panamanian law had made that work difficult. We had to stop that service because the state literally prohibited us as agencies from providing shelter. And under the premise that if we gave them shelter without them asking for it, they could consider us as human traffickers. So what we do now is we give them food,

And if they decide to stay, well, we help them with certain processes that we can call humanitarian aid for sustainability. I've seen a wide variety of faith-based aid in my time at the border, and much of it has been fantastic. But with more than a decade of refugee camps and resource-poor settings, I've also learned to be a bit wary of faith-based charity. But something Elias said early in our talk gave me a great deal of respect for him. It's not just that he said it.

But he took the time to address his comments to me as a journalist because he saw this as a problem in part created by the media. And for what it's worth, I think he's right. It's something that, as we try and help migrants on a difficult journey, we must always keep in mind. He might come from a very different background than my mutual aid group, but we do seem to share the same belief in solidarity with the migrants.

Unfortunately, much of the media narrative, what they do is they victimize and ridicule people and family groups and turn them into pariahs and beggars. Then that is insulting to the dignity of the person. So the way they portray migration is shameful in some cases. And this is very difficult. Well, for this, yes, I think that's very important.

After this, I figured I'd address the issue head on. I'm asking about the many churches and Christians I see preaching hate against people coming to the southern border of the U.S. There is a sector in the Catholic Church and the Evangelical Church that opposes it and is more closely linked, okay?

And they are, in fact, they are the benefactors of Trump's campaign. So this one and this one are there. Well, well, those are like groups that are rejecting, let's say, the basic principle of the church, which is that we must welcome migrants and refugees. So they fundamentally reject it.

So they invent all these narratives that Haitians practice voodoo and they eat pets and this and that or that. And it's shameful. I mean, or like the Venezuelans, that the majority of them are from Tren de Aragua gang, or that they come from areas that are what you call problematic or chauvinista and that they are infuriating or that all the same narrative that was created when...

when the Maritos left Cuba and it's not that the Cuban government is sending all the prisoners on the Mariel boats to invade the United States. It's the same narrative. Then I asked, what he thought of the government's plans to close a Darien and if they could even do that. Do you think that the

People ask me, do you think the Darien Gap is going to close and that migration is going to disappear? And I say, ask the Mexicans and the North Americans if the Sonora Desert has stopped being a corridor for people after Trump. Because there was a time when all the media was focused on the migration that passed through the Sonora and everything continues to happen.

But then it became invisible and ceased to exist for them. But people continue to pass through and people continue to die. So as you say this,

This is going to continue. Maybe not a half a million people, but the flow is going to continue. It's going to continue. And then the question we should ask ourselves is, what are we going to do or how are we going to accompany this flow? How are we going to accompany these lives and in what way can let these people's lives impact us?

But like so many of us who work along the border, he says he is constantly fighting against negative messaging that encourages people not to follow their natural impulse to help and take care of one another. So it's not a question of how, I always say. And sometimes they tell me, oh, that you always speak so badly of Panama.

But it's not speaking badly of Panama. I love my country. And I feel that we in general, the Panamanian communities are very welcoming and very affectionate with the migrants. The problem is the narrative that is created. And then it generates stimuli that end up with a situation where are not seen so positively.

And consequently, last week, we had a meeting perhaps on national reality, and we touched on the subject of immigrants. And the first reaction was, no, it's not the state that pays the fare of the migrants. It's not that. I mean, they pay their own fare. After a week of my interview requests being declined by NGOs and government offices, I found my talk with Father Elias refreshing.

It's nice to know that you're not the only one who sees the system as it is, which is fundamentally flawed and entirely propped up by misinformation, hatred, and ignorance. But I don't want to get bogged down on that. Father Elias told me that when he sees migrants, he sees God in them, and that he experiences his faith by helping others. My early experience of religion came in high school, from a priest who was a teacher who had been part of the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa. I'm not a religious person in myself, but I can understand how seeing God in other people is not that far from my own politics.

And if it's seeing God and other people that impels people to stand up against apartheid, or to dedicate their lives to helping migrants, then I respect that. So after we come back, I want to try and answer the question that Padre Elias asked. What can you do? After getting back from the Darién, and hearing the migrants share their struggles as they waited in Mexico for an outpost designed to delay and discourage them,

I really struggled to come to terms with everything I'd seen and was hearing. I've been to plenty of dangerous places, and seen war, state violence and terrorism. I know the tragedy of death and violence, but the slow and deliberate suffering inflicted on migrants by people who lie to us every day on television is particularly hard to bear for me. As I mentioned at the start of this series, I've seen the grim reality of our migration system on my first day in Bajo Chiquito. Little girl's head hanging limply from a makeshift stretcher, as strangers carried her into town.

It's all so cruel, so deliberate, and so unnecessary. And it felt so disempowering. But that doesn't mean there's nothing you can do. It doesn't mean there's nothing I can do. So basically, what we're going to be doing is we're going to go this way. I mean, we're going to start, we're going to go down into this. But we're going to go that way and see where the light break is on the hill. In between those hills, we're going to cut up and go up in that area.

That's James Cordero of Border Kindness, sitting at the roof of a group of five of us, set out on a water drop in the mountains east of Okumba. It's an area called Valley of the Moon, where boulders the size of trucks stack up against each other, and where people have been crossing the border for decades. This is a remote area, and not unlike the Darién, much of it is nearly impossible to access in a car.

To get water out here, we have to walk. And if you run out of water or injure yourself so you can't walk out of here, it's possible you'll die just like the migrants do in the jungle. People get robbed here, just like in the Darién. And if it wasn't for the five of us with our backpacks full of water, people could die of thirst here, just like they do in the jungle. As I was packing water bottles into my frame pack, I thought about little kids I'd met in Bajo Chiquito. This isn't a place for children either.

But over the last 18 months, I've met hundreds of them out here. I've given them my jackets and hats, warmed up milk for babies in my camping stove, and even wrapped a little girl up in a Mylar blanket with me to warm her up last year.

Just like the Tarian, the suffering here is out of sight and out of mind for most Americans. And in a year where we're constantly being told democracy is under threat, I think it bears mentioning that migrants are treated as humans without rights even when they're inside this country, and that their lives are seen as dispensable so long as whoever is in office can look, quote, tough on migration and make TV pundits and big money donors happy.

There weren't any TV pundits or big money donors on our water drop. Just a few of us everyday people. Some people come out here because their family members have crossed the desert. Some come out because everyone who crosses the desert is part of our family. Like Bonio said in Bajo Chiquito, all humans are brothers. And none of us want our brothers or sisters to die in the mountains, whatever their passport might say. And so, nearly every weekend, people all along the border load up heavy bags with supplies.

On this drop, each of us filled our packs with water, cans of tuna, pineapple, soup, some warm clothing, and in this case, an audio recorder. And then I got a fat one in here. Recording. Recording in progress. Of course, this gave me an opportunity to discuss my life's calling, ensuring the correct fit of backpack harness systems. Yeah, you can release those. It just doesn't wrap, though, like the straps. Do you guys have to drop the waist belt, or...?

These have adjustable frames so you can make them fit. That's the back. With everyone suitably adjusted and ergonomically optimised, we switched on the audio recorders I'd attached to the straps of our packs and set off. I just feel bad for you because there's going to be a lot of dumb shit. What am I dumb shit for? From the edge of the dirt road, we took our first steps into the desert. This first part is going to be a little slippery. You eat shit, it's okay, don't be embarrassed, it happens.

This part of the border isn't that far from Hukumba, where this time last year James and I spent a freezing night trying to keep people alive, running our camping stoves on full blast, giving away our own jackets to people who needed them more than us. At that time, I'd just returned from a trip to north and east Syria, which was stressful in its own way, and seeing both what people are leaving and how we treat them when they arrive here really pissed me off.

A year later, with bags full of water, James and I spoke about things and how they got so much worse in the last two years. But press coverage and more importantly, donations have been way lower. It's the same story up and down the border. Record deaths, newer and harder migration routes, different migration patterns. And the people who cried outside ICE detention centers in Trump's first term, cheering for more walls and bigger DHS budgets.

Meanwhile, unlike the Trump era, we don't have the support of thousands of liberal people in California's big cities. After the Democrats cynically used migrant suffering in their 2020 campaign, they abandoned them upon acquiring power, and their supporters have mostly followed them. So that left five of us this particular morning to load up bags and do the life-saving work of dropping water. On top of all the state violence, there's been more and more interference with water drops. And as we got further into our route, we made the increasingly common discovery that

that someone had taken it upon themselves to destroy our supplies. Smirnoff Ice, sick. That's probably the... These ones are slashed. Slashed? Yep. Probably by the person drinking the Smirnoff Ice. Idiot. These are all... Yeah, they're all slashed. Motherfuckers. I mean, I'm assuming it's the person who brought the Smirnoff Ice, because it seems like a Smirnoff Ice activity. Classy feller. Yeah. I don't see a BP agent rolling through with a Smirnoff Ice.

This isn't unique to Border Kindness. Someone has been shooting supplies left by Borderlands Relief Collective half an hour west of here recently. Up and down the border, the combination of total liberal inattention and xenophobic right-wing hate whipped up by streamers who I won't name and pseudo-journalistic grifters who I will name like Bill Malugan. Malugan, of course, was previously famous for claiming that a cop had a tampon dropped in his coffee in 2020. Spoiler alert, if you're not familiar, this wasn't true.

Beluga now works as a quote-unquote border reporter for Fox News. Hey, Danny, good morning to you. We are in San Ysidro, a part of San Diego right now, where hundreds of illegal immigrants have just been mass street released from Border Patrol custody. This bus you see right here is apparently an NGO or volunteer organization bus. They've all just gotten off

a border patrol bus, two of them actually. They're now waiting to board this bus. I've talked to several of them from Peru, from India, from Colombia. The group from Peru told me they are here to work. They are going to Atlanta and Minneapolis. Let's see if we can talk to some of them real quick. Hola, Espanol. ¿De dónde son? Ecuador. ¿A dónde vas en los Estados Unidos? Nueva York. New York. Going to New York. ¿De dónde son? ¿De dónde son?

They say they want asylum, they don't want to work. Where are you from?

Senegal, from Senegal. We saw a lot of Senegalese in Lukeville, Arizona. Where in the U.S. do you want to go to? What city? Oh, he speaks French. I obviously do not speak French.

Maloogan's lack of language competency isn't the only issue here. It's a whole ecosystem of media built up of voyeuristically filming migrants without giving them a chance to humanize themselves. And it's not just a right-wing issue. This week, each day has been marked by new daily records of migrants both crossing the southern border and landing in custody. The federal government is struggling to keep up.

Three Homeland Security officials say Customs and Border Protection is holding about 27,000 migrants in processing facilities as of yesterday. President Biden spoke with Mexico's president about the issue earlier today. And NBC News Homeland Security correspondent Julia Ainslie joins me now to dig into this trend. So, Julia, first, just give us some perspective here. How is Customs and Border Protection operating right now? And what are your sources saying about this historic rise in migrants at the border?

Well, in some ways, there's actually a small victory here, Zinclay. When you look at the fact that CBP is seeing a record number of migrants, they've been at a record high now for three days in a row. They broke the record of 12,000, maintained that, and there are now almost 27,000 migrants in CBP custody. When we got to just about 20,000 in 2019 under the Trump administration, there were migrants who were there for weeks and couldn't lie down to sleep because they were so overcrowded.

But now because of the technology, they're actually able to not even hold people past 72 hours and very quickly release them. But the tragedy comes after that. There are a lot of migrants who are being released on the streets without being taken to nonprofits. And some of them don't exactly know where they're supposed to go, even though CBP does try to coordinate with the cities where they are released. That's definitely happening in the Tucson, Arizona area. And Eagle Pass, Texas, even though they are scrambling as fast as they can to release migrants, there are still migrants.

thousands who remain in the field, a lot of them crowded under a bridge in Eagle Pass, just waiting for CBP to take them in. The reason, a lot of people can give you different reasons. One, perhaps Mexico isn't interdicting as many migrants as they were earlier in the year. They're now lower on funds because of these record highs. Another reason, sometimes migrants will say that they're worried about a future Republican administration or a future Trump administration that might be harder. And so they think now is the time to come. Two minutes into this report,

and we haven't actually heard from a single migrant. All we hear is numbers. We also haven't heard about outdoor detention, which at the time this was released was at its peak. Again, it's just numbers and CBP statements. I should also point out that lots of people are held for more than 72 hours or three days.

The Department of Homeland Security Office of Inspector General report, published in November 2023, a month before the news segment that you just heard, said that 56% of people were held for longer than that, with some people being held for more than a month. This information is publicly available. It even had a press release. I found it very quickly and I reported on it at the time, but NBC chose not to. Seeing migrants as a, quote, homeland security issue, not as people, is fundamentally the problem. And the way we fix that is showing up

as people, to help. Despite the massive media focus on the border in the last year, I very rarely see other journalists actually at the border. To give him credit, Maloogan does sometimes show up, but he doesn't stay long. And he doesn't really have the capacity to interview migrants even if he wanted to. The border's vast and mostly empty. It's a place I've come to know and come to love in my time dropping water and recreating and doing other mutual aid projects out here.

Now that I have a better understanding of the journeys people go through to get here, I'm even more determined to make this small part of their trip less dangerous. And besides, I get to see cool rocks. Among the cool rocks, last weekend, I found a Minnie Mouse doll.

It reminded me of Noemi, the little girl I'd met in Bajo Chiquito. I'd given my number to hundreds of people before leaving Panama and heard from dozens. But up until then, I hadn't heard from Noemi and her mum. I'd heard of people being kidnapped, robbed, raped and ransomed. In Mexico, some of them had been caught by authorities and pushed back to Chiapas. And others had been unable to leave Tapachula after having all their money stolen.

I wondered which of any of these fates had befallen Noemi, and if she was still having a Peppa Pig adventure. Sadly, between where I met her, or where I found the Minnie Mouse doll, there's nothing else I can do. But here in the mountains outside San Diego, where the wind blows so strong sometimes you can barely stand up, I can do something. Without the ability to do something, something which I know is meaningful, I don't know how I'd manage to stay on this beat. It's just too heartbreaking to meet good people

share meals and laughter and deep conversations with them, and then see them fed into the teeth of a machine that robs, brutalizes, and kills them so that Joe Biden can stand on a podium and say that border crossings are down this month. They are down, and that's largely due to enforcement in Mexico. But I want to make sure that everyone who does cross the border can do so safely, and they don't have to die on U.S. soil after fighting so hard to make it here. This hasn't been the case for everyone this year. My friends up and down the border have carried far too many little memorial crosses into the mountains.

And depending on the election results next week, what we're doing might be illegal soon. But that'll never make it wrong. Since early September, nine people have died in a little part of Southern California alone. My friends have searched for them, sometimes found their remains, and undertaken the thankless task of sharing the bad news with their families, then constructed memorials in their memory. This is just one of the many dangerous parts of the migration route north, but it's the one that I can help with. If you're nearby or you're visiting for a while, there are several organizations dropping water on the border.

Border Angels, Border Kindness and Borderlands Relief Collective here in San Diego. Ajo Samaritans and No Más Muertes in Arizona. Groups you search and rescue as well. Obviously, not everyone lives here at the USA's southern border. But more than half of the population does live within 100 miles of a border. Even if you don't live in the USA. Or maybe you do, but you don't live anywhere near the border. I guarantee there are migrants in your community. In the last year, I've worked with migrant welcome committees in Maryland.

church groups in the rural south, Sikhs on the west coast, and Kurds on the east coast, to name just a few. Without a ton of fanfare, people all over this country are making space in their homes and their hearts for strangers, feeding them, housing them, and helping them get set up in a new place. For the most part, it doesn't get coverage. And under a democratic administration, it doesn't get much public support either. But that doesn't mean it isn't necessary. Aside from all the reasons it's important, dropping water on the border is also fun for me.

It's helped me learn more about where I live. I appreciate the desert and make new friends who generally share my outlook on the world. I love being outdoors, and I'd be outdoors anyway. But this way, my haiku is about much more than myself. Yeah, what's that mean when you get somewhere with signal? Yeah, please, to all of you, please share it. I'd like to follow your journey, if that's okay. And maybe we can talk again when you're in America. Yeah.

I gave my number to hundreds of people in the Dalian, as well as some websites they might find useful. One of their NGOs explained the CBP One app were the ones that might direct them to resources along their route. Last Sunday night, as I was absent by at least thumbing through a shotgun reloading manual in my living room, as I love to do, my phone started buzzing. It's done this so many times in the last month. Mostly, it's a photo of someone I met updating me on their journey.

or one of the little wooden animals that I give to children, which has made its way to Mexico and hopefully given them some comfort along the way. Often it's less positive news. Someone's been robbed, or simply run out of money and they need help. But I got two messages this Sunday which lifted my spirits. Noemi, the little girl who had an adventure like Peppa Pig in the jungle, wanted to know how I was doing, and she sent me a photo of the tiny stone bear that I'd given her. She also wanted to know if we could still go to see Minnie Mouse when she came to America, which I showed her we could.

I think it'd be quite apt to visit a place which bills itself as the happiest place on earth, with someone I met in one of the most desperate parts of the planet. The second message was from one of the migrants I'd met in the jungle, telling me she'd made it to America. Not just to America, but to a part of the border where I'd been dropping water with my friends just a few weeks before I left for Panama. She sent me a photo of a rock with a message on it, one with which I'm very familiar. She told me about her walk, one which I've made myself, and she told me how hard it was.

I said I knew, but really I don't know, because I wasn't carrying months of trauma with me on the mountain. She's the only person out of hundreds that I met who's made it here. Most of them are in Mexico now, and most of them will remain there, or maybe get sent back home, or maybe they'll make a desperate attempt to cross this week, as you hear this before the election. It made me so happy to see someone safely here, one person out of hundreds. For so many of the migrants I met, America was a dream and the journey was a nightmare.

Since this series began airing, I've seen videos of people I care about clinging to freight trains, their bruised bodies after being beaten. I've helped them find healthcare after they were sexually assaulted and tried to find room at overcrowded shelters. I've helped trans ladies navigate all of this, and transphobia, and misogyny, and tried to find resources in French and English and Portuguese for non-Spanish speakers. I'd hoped that I'd finished this series with a single good story.

A story of someone who made it, who's living the American dream that people died for in the jungle. But I can't, because even the people who made it here are here temporarily, and broadcasting anything about their journey would put them at risk, whoever wins the election next week. So instead, I want to end with how you can make a difference. And I'll start with a story on how little things can make big differences. One day in Bajo Chiquito, I was sitting around with a few Venezuelan kids, probably four to eight years old,

ripping pages out of my write in the rain notebook to make paper airplanes before I interviewed their parents. I asked them about the jungle. They said it was scary and they had nightmares now. I often find kids in these places get scared of the dark and I used to bring these crappy little electric lights for them, but they're bulky and they're not very good. Recently, I've been carrying little packets of fishing glow sticks instead. They cost about 10 bucks for maybe 100 of the little green lights. So I pulled out my glow sticks, cut my hands and snapped one.

The children were amazed at the little glowing rod. So I gave them the rest of the packet and told them they could keep them for any time they were scared of the dark. Nearly a month later, I sometimes get a message on my phone with a photo of a little tiny glow stick and a note of thanks. One thing that Father Elias said that really impacted me is that when he meets migrants, he asks what he sees of God in them. And his work for them is where he finds what there is of God in himself.

I think I've struggled so much with this series in part because I have seen so much of the best of other people, and indeed the best of myself in such hard places. I always struggle a little to readjust after trips like this, but this one's been particularly hard. In the jungle, I saw people helping, and in a sense, we were all in it together. When it rained, we all got wet, and when it got hot, we all huddled together in the shade. We shared bottles of water, we sat at the same tables and ate together.

I can't really begin to experience a full Daradiane experience because I've been lucky enough never to have anything that bad to run away from. But I have experienced incredible solidarity and kindness of the people who went through it. I've also experienced the incredible indifference of people at home, and indeed of the states and governments of the world. The Colombian friends at Beton Las Blancas and Bajo Chiquito, who were handcuffed and deported and ripped from their families, have already invited me to come and stay in their homes in Colombia.

But if their families make it here, they won't encounter that kind of hospitality. Just last week, I helped to translate for a Venezuelan family living on the street in San Diego. Some of my friends do sponsor migrants, and that's something anyone can do. If you're able to, it's an incredible thing you can do to change someone's life, and I can't encourage you enough to do so. I really do see the best of myself, of my friends, and of humanity in our work to help migrants. I would say that on Reflectio, and I wasn't really an anarchist until 2018, when I watched the states of the world abandon thousands of migrants in Tijuana

and climbed a fence with my friends to take care of them, and specifically to distribute three huge backpacks full of waffles another friend had sent from his waffle factory. I'd stopped believing in the benevolence of the state a long time before, but it wasn't really until then that I really understood the power of people organizing horizontally to provide each other with dignity. Ever since then, I've drawn a lot of hope for humanity in the same places I despair for people. Maybe that's why I keep going back. Since then, at the border, I've seen people die. I've held crying babies and crying parents.

I've also shared meals with people from around the world, made friends for life, and learned Kurdish disco songs about killing people. I've danced around campfires with people I couldn't have imagined meeting when I first made my own journey here. Last Christmas, when I'd normally be at the bar with my friends, I sat on a rock in the desert, eating a cold vegan MRE with an Ecuadorian family and some of my friends. In all the Christmases I can remember, I never felt so much like I was in the right place, doing the right thing, with the right people.

Well, I've seen a lot of terrible things at the border in the jungle, and I'll never forget those. More importantly, I've seen that together we can do incredible things, and we can make the state irrelevant, especially in the places it's chosen to be absent. I don't think we should make demands of the state anymore. It's simply not in its nature to care. But I do think we should make demands of ourselves. I don't believe in God, and I've written a whole dissertation about people who burn churches. But I think I see something that's just as special to me in the experience of mutual aid.

And in a way, it fulfills not only people's material needs, but also our human desire for dignity and mutual respect. When I drop water at the border or carry someone's bags in the jungle, I see myself in them. And I hope they see themselves a little bit in me. But right now, our asylum system is so broken that very few people even make it far enough to drink the water I leave at the border. And despite the border featuring heavily in this year's election, there seems to be no national concern about the way our tax dollars brutalize people across the continent. So I want to end by asking you what you could do.

It might be coming down here to drop water. It might be sending some money to one of the links I'll include in the description. It might be offering to translate for asylum seekers. It might just be talking to people and helping to change the narrative. You can vote or not next week. But there isn't a box you can take that will change the things I saw in the jungle. Trump wants to deport millions more people. Harris wants to pass a bill that will kill more people. You can't pass your commitments off to someone whose box you take every four years. You have to take them on for yourself.

The way we change things is in the way we do things every day, every week, not once every four years. I want to end with Noemi's mum and her message to the American people. I also want to ask if anyone knows how to get cheap tickets to Disneyland, because I've just looked that up and I cannot stress enough how unable I am to afford it. Please excuse us, because we know that we are knocking on that door. There are a lot of us, but...

We are desperate because complaining about the president we have is not helping us. No, he's doing almost nothing. So our children have no future and our country won't support us. It's not easy to leave our parents, our friends, our relatives, our grandparents. And we do not know if we will ever return or if we will ever see them again. It is not easy. But we also think about a future for our children. And I do not know what has happened, but...

We feel like living in a dictatorship. We are living something very unpleasant and we do not get any help. But those who help us, we want to say thank you. They opened that door for us. They have opened many doors for many Venezuelans and well, we hope in faith that they will open them for us. I want to take this opportunity to thank a few people who made this possible.

Firstly, Dalia Nela Bruse, my fixer. She was incredible. Secondly, I want to thank iHeart for paying for this. Like I said, it's been nearly a decade that I've been asking to do this story and I'm just really happy that they trusted me to do it.

Thirdly, I want to thank everyone who trusted me with their stories, everybody who stayed in touch as they've come north. I want to thank Border Kindness and Borderlands Relief Collective who have both welcomed me on their drops. And it's not always easy to be a router journalist. It's not easy to let someone record everything you're doing out there. And there are inherent risks to that. And I really appreciate them trusting me. I want to thank Dutch Wear Hammocks who rush shipped me a hammock when my old one tore right before I left. And I think...

Most of all, I want to thank all of you for listening, taking the time and all the listeners who have reached out to say they're listening to the series. People have reached out to ask how they can help. I would love to organize a way to help the people I've spoken to. I spoke to someone just this morning who's still stuck in Tapachula because she was robbed.

and her and her daughter are 500 bucks short for the bus to ride north to Tijuana. I don't have the capacity to organize that right now, but if someone else does, they should reach out to me because I would really like to help these people who have become my friends and who I care about and who are right now stuck in a very dangerous place.

because someone in Washington, D.C. has made a choice to treat them with cruelty and not kindness. So if that's you, if you're the person who could administer that, please let me know. Thanks, and I hope you enjoyed the series.

Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe. It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

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