14,000 US-bound migrants have returned south since Trump border changes, UN says

Friday's report, published with support of the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, said that northward migration had dropped 97% this year.

Migrants traveling south interviewed in Costa Rica, Panama and Colombia by those countries' ombudsmen offices were almost all Venezuelans (97%) and about half of them said they planned to return to Venezuela, according to the report. Nearly all said they were returning because they could no longer legally reach the U.S.

Since 2017, around 8 million people have fled the crisis in Venezuela. For years, those migrants flocked to other South American nations, including Colombia, Peru, Ecuador, Chile and more.

That changed in 2021, when hundreds of thousands of people set out for the U.S., braving the Darien Gap along the way.

A U.S. government smartphone app became the main way for asylum-seekers to enter the U.S. under the Biden administration. Then thousands of migrants became stranded in Mexico when Trump ended the use of the app on his first day in office.

Now, those migrants who were still trying to reach the U.S. when Trump entered and changed border policies have reversed course, traveling back to South America. Around a quarter of those interviewed planned to go to neighboring Colombia, previously the epicenter of the mass migration from Venezuela. Others said they didn’t know where they were going.

Colombia and other South American nations spent years pleading for aid from the international community to cope with the brunt of Venezuela's migratory crisis, before many of those same migrants began moving toward the United States. Today, Venezuela's political and economic turmoil rages on.

Migrants, most of whom trekked days across the Darien Gap on their way north, are even more vulnerable as they make their way back. They have fewer funds to finance their journey and few prospects for work when they get back. Migrants are dropped into regions with a heavy presence of criminal groups that increasingly prey upon them, the report said.

“Most of these people are already victims of human rights abuses," Scott Campbell, a U.N. human rights representative in Colombia, said in a statement. “We urge authorities to aid people in this reverse migration to prevent them from being exploited or falling into trafficking networks run by illegal armed groups.”

The shift marks a radical reversal in one of the biggest mass migrations in the world.

Migrants bus south through Mexico and other Central American nations until they arrive in the center of Panama. From there, migrants pay between $260 and $280 to ride on precarious boats packed with people back to Colombia.

They take two different routes. Most island hop north of Panama through the Caribbean Sea, landing in the small town of Necocli, Colombia, where many started their journeys through the Darien.

Others travel south by sea along a jungled swath of Panama and Colombia through the Pacific Ocean, where they are dropped off in remote towns or the Colombian city of Buenaventura. Colombia’s Ombudsman’s Office estimates around 450 people have taken the perilous route, and the U.N. documented migrants getting scammed and stranded, facing boat accidents and arriving beaten down and vulnerable from their journey.

The region is one of the most violent in Colombia, and lack of state presence is filled by warring armed groups.