The border policies of President Donald Trump have been incredibly successful in halting the flow of illegals crossing into the United States from the south.
Such a conclusion is not surprising if it came from a conservative oriented media source. However, since that was the conclusion of a writer for the Trump hating The Atlantic magazine, it makes one scratch his head in amazement that the periodical someone let this article by Justin Gest get published on Saturday, "Migrants Are Heading South." The subtitle of the article is also highly adulatory of Trump's border policies, "For years, millions of people traveled through Central America north to the United States. Now that flow is changing direction."
The big question now is which Atlantic editor is going to get into big trouble for allowing Gest's article into print with such words not only of praise for Trump's border policies but also criticism of the utter failure of Joe Biden on the same issue.
...For the first time in recent history, the people passing through Central America are mostly moving south. The new migration flow seems to have been triggered by the Trump administration’s crackdown on both legal and illegal crossings at the southern U.S. border. And it is already disorienting the region.
In recent years, millions of migrants from Latin America, the Caribbean, Asia, and Africa have carved a path from South America through the treacherous Darién jungle and into Panama en route north to the United States. But that massive flow is now dwindling.
Costa Rica is representative of the trend. For decades, hundreds and sometimes thousands of migrants crossed the country by bus every day, traveling the roughly 300 miles from Paso Canoas in the south to Los Chiles in the north; according to the UN-affiliated International Organization for Migration, from 2021 to 2024 more than 1.2 million people entered the country heading north from Panama.
But after peaking in August 2023 at about 84,500, the number of people migrating north through Costa Rica began to decline—dipping to 14,400 in November 2024, then 1,600 in January 2025, the month Donald Trump was inaugurated; it was 1,600 again in February, then zero as of mid-March. Meanwhile, during a six-week period in February and March, IOM estimates that some 1,200 people moved south into Costa Rica.
And yet more praise from Gest highlighting the dramatic change in direction of the migrant flow through Central America due to Trump's border policies:
In my conversations with more than two dozen migrants in Costa Rica last month, all but one was either halting their northbound journey or returning after a period in Mexico, where they had resided while awaiting asylum interviews with U.S. officials that never took place.
Aid workers I spoke with said that bus companies had recently begun organizing additional routes from Los Chiles to interior cities farther south, such as Quesada and the capital, San José, to account for the new migration flows. At the bus terminals in Los Chiles and Las Tablillas, I observed coyotes, the exploitative human traffickers who once facilitated migrants’ movement northward, offering to guide migrants back down the route if they chose to turn around.
The migrants I spoke with were broadly aware of the Trump administration’s hostility toward immigrants, including its highly publicized deportations. Most had reversed their course simply because they didn’t think they could get into the United States. Asylum claims began to fall during the Biden administration, after it imposed restrictions.
But the Trump administration effectively ended consideration of asylum claims at the southern border when, hours after Trump’s inauguration, the White House shut down an app that the Biden administration had set up so migrants could schedule screening appointments. Migrants I interviewed said that they had waited up to nine months for their appointments and decided to turn back when those appointments were canceled. Although some migrants continue to cross the border illegally, they often have to pay smuggling sums that most of them can’t afford; El País recently reported fees between $6,000 and $10,000 per person in Tijuana.
If anybody wants to know just how successful Trump's border policies have been, just point them to this Atlantic magazine article.
