Panama will start charging hefty fines to people crossing through the Darién Gap. CBS "60 Minutes" looked at "mass deportation" plans.

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Developments

Panama’s president issued a decree establishing fines of $300 to as much as $5,000 for people who enter the country irregularly through the border with Colombia: the Darién Gap jungle route that nearly 800,000 migrants have traversed since 2023. The fine may be adjusted according to migrants’ state of “vulnerability.” Those who do not pay may be prohibited from moving on to Costa Rica and subject to deportation.

EFE reported that “as of October 13, 274,444 irregular travelers have arrived in Panama through the jungle.” That means 11,148 people migrated through the Darién during those 13 days, or 858 per day. That is a very slight increase over the 837 per day reported in September.

The human rights ombudsmen’s offices of Colombia and Panama signed a “letter of binational understanding” pledging increased cooperation on humanitarian and human rights monitoring in the Darién Gap region, where large but untold numbers of migrants perish or are assaulted, robbed, and raped by criminal groups.

A Border Patrol vehicle pursuit southeast of San Diego ended with a crash, killing two citizens of Mexico aboard, on October 22.

The population of Venezuelan migrants in Mexico City—many awaiting CBP One appointments at the U.S.-Mexico border—may have increased 13-fold from 2021 to 2023, judging from a municipal welfare agency’s count of the number of people served, Milenio reported. Many are in the central district of Cuauhtémoc, finding work paying about $60-120 per week.

In Mexico’s border state of Chihuahua, the state government’s security department established a police task force to track the activities of Tren de Aragua, the Venezuelan organized crime group. At the federal level, the Secretary of Security and Citizen Protection, Omar García Harfuch, said on October 25 that while security forces have arrested some Tren de Aragua members, “we do not have this group registered as the main generator of violence.”

Leonard Darnell George, a CBP officer found guilty of taking bribes to allow drugs to cross the border through California ports of entry, was sentenced to 23 years in prison. “Prosecutors allege George was so entrenched with the drug traffickers that one trafficking associate took a selfie photograph of himself wearing George’s CBP uniform jacket,” reported San Diego’s NBC affiliate.

Analyses and Feature Stories

CBS News’s 60 Minutes program aired a segment about Republican candidate Donald Trump’s’ plan to carry out a mass deportation campaign if elected. Tom Homan, who was the acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) during Trump’s presidency, said that separating migrant families “needs to be considered, absolutely.”

CBS looked at the last time the U.S. government carried out mass sweeps to deport people–during the Eisenhower administration, an example that Trump cites often–and found that “this short-term show-of-force did not stop the problem.”

The Associated Press reported that some children separated from their parents by the Trump administration are telling their painful stories in social media videos and pro-Kamala Harris campaign events. ACLU attorney Lee Gelernt recalled that as many as 1,000 families remain separated over six years later.

At the New York Review of Books, John Washington profiled a woman who fled Guatemala but is stranded in the border city of Nogales, Mexico, after being refused an opportunity to seek asylum in the United States due to Biden administration restrictions. She and her son have been kidnapped twice by criminal groups in Mexico.

At Foreign Affairs, veteran journalist Julia Preston found that, despite the Democratic candidate’s rightward turn on border security and immigration policy, Kamala Harris and the much harder-line Donald Trump offer policy choices that differ in “stark and consequential” ways.

Eurasia Review spoke to Yale University sociologist Ángel Escamilla García, whose interviews with unaccompanied Central American minor children migrating through Mexico showed a significant level of knowledge of U.S. immigration law. A 17-year-old girl from Honduras said she decided not to reveal being raped during the journey “after learning that rape and other physical violence migrants suffer en route to the United States is irrelevant to their asylum applications.”

On the Right