Exhausted after traveling through several countries, excluded from any legal protection and desperate to escape their confinement, hundreds of migrants have been detained in Lajas Blancas and San Vicente, two communities in Darién, the province that marks where Panama disappears into the impenetrable jungle that forms its border with Colombia. Until the new U.S. president took office last January, both places had been overflowing with people crossing the jungle, heading north. Now, they are full of women, children and others who have been deported or are simply terrified by Donald Trump’s anti-immigrant crusade.
“I crossed this same jungle five months ago and nearly lost my daughter in the river twice,” says Yojana. The 32-year-old Venezuelan left her country with husband José Luis, their 10-year-old daughter and six-year-old son in September 2024. They made their way to Mexico, where they were kidnapped and released after paying $400. They eventually made it to a Mexican town on the U.S. border, waiting for their appointment to apply for asylum. When Trump won the election and their options for entering the country legally evaporated, they retraced their steps. “We were making a huge effort to leave and look at us now — back in the same jungle, with no way out,” Yohana laments at the entrance to the Lajas Blancas detention center.
The town once operated as a checkpoint for people arriving from Colombia without proper documentation. Officials used to detain migrants in this spot, many unable to leave unless they took a bus to the Costa Rican border or to San Vicente, another town in the Darién province. Now, Lajas Blancas receives those who don’t want to return to their homes in the south: 2,925 people in the last four months, 75% of which arrived in February, according to official statistics. They are adding up to a phenomenon known as “reversed flow.” In San Vicente, home to the province’s second migrant shelter, the government has detained 103 of the 299 people who were deported by Trump to Panama, most of whom are from Asian countries.
The official name for these camps is Migrant Reception Station, but in reality, they are enclosures of dust, sweat, and filth — places from which no one can leave and where entry is restricted without a permit. Migrants describe Lajas Blancas as a prison.
“We are prisoners here, because they don’t let us leave and they won’t tell us when will be able to leave,” says José Luis, Yojana’s 37-year-old husband. “There are people who leave, who escape, and they catch them and bring them back here,” adds Bryan, a 19-year-old Colombian who has been on the road for a year.
The migrants who have been locked up in Lajas Blancas have survived the hell of the Darién Gap, the Mexican cartels and, in Bryan’s case, Texas immigration detention centers. Some prefer not to talk about the months-long journeys they’ve made along routes plagued by criminals and state surveillance, but they will talk about what they experienced in this camp. They speak of injured and sick children. They show videos of pregnant women sleeping on a ground of hot rock. They say they receive three meals a day, but at 5 p.m., the water is cut off and mosquitos emerge whose bites can cause one to bleed to death.
The Panamanian government says that it provides these detainees with food and a safe place to stay and guarantees the presence of United Nations agencies like the International Organization for Migration and UNICEF. The view from the entry seems to match up with the migrants’ descriptions: makeshift shacks without flooring or beds, with cardboard or rubber mats to sleep on. Until February 25, 500 people were staying here, the majority of them Venezuelans and a few Colombians, all of them anxious to leave.
“They took us from a shelter there [Costa Rica] saying that they were going to bring us to an airport, but they didn’t take us to an airport. They brought us back to the jungle,” says César, a 53-year-old Venezuelan who has been at Lajas Blancas for two weeks. “They don’t want us here, but they won’t let us go.”
Panama, deportee hub
With his back against the wall due to Trump’s pressure regarding the Canal, Panamanian President José Raúl Mulino proposed turning Panama into a hub for deportees and migrants. Since he had previously severed diplomatic ties with Venezuela, the idea was that those who arrived from that country would be flown to Cúcata, a Colombian border town. But Colombian President Gustavo Petro rejected the notion, blocking flights, according to a source from the Colombian embassy in Panama who asked to remain anonymous. And so, the exit routes for migrants are few and risky: via the Caribbean Sea or the Darién Gap. Panamanian authorities have tried to solve the problem by sending them by water, a strategy that has ended in tragedy.
