illegal immigration
Potential game changer: Will Panama’s new President really ‘close’ the Darien Gap?

From the American Mind: A publication of the Claremont Institute
By Todd Bensman
Panama Pinch Point: Closing the Darien Gap would be a big step toward stopping the flow of migrants north.
Panama’s new president, Jose Raul Mulino, recently began his five-year term with a keynote promise that may help decide the upcoming U.S. presidential election.
Mulino has vowed to “close” the infamous “Darien Gap” immigrant passageway over the border from Colombia to Panama, the jungled 70-mile bottleneck of wilderness foot trails through which nearly 1.5 million immigrants from 150 nations have passed to the besieged U.S. Southwest Border.
“The border of the United States, instead of being in Texas, moved to Panama,” said Mulino, who served as security minister under former president Ricardo Martinelli. “We’re going to repatriate all those people.”
Elsewhere since, Mulino doubled down on his promise to “end the odyssey of the Darien.”
“Those from here,” he said in a May 9 speech, referring to his country. “And those who would like to come know that whoever arrives here will return to their country of origin. Our Darien is not a transit route. No sir. That is our border.”
That warning shot alone, by a sitting executive of Panama, has reverberated throughout the Western Hemisphere but has drawn little public analysis. For starters, the vow signaled a sharply lower trajectory to the historic U.S. mass migration border crisis, which I predicted in December 2020 would emanate from the Gap and did so in numbers that rocketed skyward after Biden’s 2021 inauguration.
Whereas fewer than 20,000 each year went through the Darien for decades, Biden’s border policies, featuring high-percentage acceptance of illegal entries and quick releases into the American interior, beckoned more than 130,000 immigrants from a great diversity of nations to cross the gap that first year of 2021. The number shot to 250,000 by the end of 2022, then 520,000 during 2023 and is on pace to a projected 800,000 before 2024 is out.

Inadvertently or not, Mulino’s closure of the Darien Gap more than three years into this torrent can only help President Joe Biden’s reelection prospects, a border crisis that polls regularly show tops the most important problem list for the U.S. presidential election.
The big question that begs analysis is whether President Mulino can or will follow through on the aspiration and relieve Panama as perhaps the world’s most trammeled immigration transit nation, ease the crushing fiscal burdens pushing destination U.S. cities toward bankruptcy, and save Biden from voter punishment for it all in November.
The short answer is that Mulino seems determined to give this a real yeoman’s effort. For instance, he has already begun groundwork, like appointing as Security Minister Frank Abrego, founder of Panama’s Border Police (SENAFRONT) who is known as a close-the-gap hawk with deep experience battling Colombian rebels in Darien and who is already preparing trail “checkpoints.” His main given mission, according to local media accounts is to close the gap.
But any early optimism by Biden’s campaign managers or long-suffering American cities must be tempered by the fact that powerful forces are arrayed to prevent Mulino’s success. Those would include liberal progressive open borders elements in Biden’s government who want mass migration; United Nations and non-governmental migrant advocacy agencies set up in Panama’s “City of Knowledge” that also want the unprecedented revenue that has bloated them; and a Colombian government that would be stuck with backlogged immigrant populations.
The prognosis for Mulino’s success, in my opinion and of others familiar with Panamanian immigration politics, is not good despite his best intentions.
Minding the Gap
What Mulino has proposed is a dramatic 180-degree policy swivel for the isthmian nation that portends a seismic earthquake to be felt around the world. Knowing how human traffic funnels into this narrow, blockade-able channel is essential to understanding what he has in mind and what would happen afterward.
To reach the gap, immigrants in South America move toward Caribbean beach towns like Necocli and Turbo in the far northwestern corner of Colombia, on the east side of the Gulf of Uraba.
With Colombia’s full acquiescence along that shoreline, the immigrants pile into passenger ferries and other boats that cross them west across the gulf and land them on beaches closer to Panama, whence trailheads start inland. From these trailheads, migrants typically have to cross some 60 or more roadless miles of wilderness mountains and rivers to reach the Panamanian border, which once took up to a week or longer. More recently, a shorter river route was opened.
Once on the Panama side, prevailing policy had immigrants and SENAFRONT border police looking to unite with one another for one of the most unusual policies in the world: a government human smuggling policy called “controlled flow.”
As I first reported in late 2018 from Darien Province, the outrageous controlled flow policy, presumably about to be cancelled, aimed to make sure migrants did not have a chance to linger in Panama. Once SENAFRONT has custody of the gap-exiting immigrants, the agency transports or directs them to various expanding hospitality camps near a main highway where they are fed, sheltered, treated if sick, and given access to money-wiring services and communications.
Then, SENAFRONT organizes commercial bus caravans to drive them all on to Costa Rica, whose own government checks them in and transports them north for delivery to criminal smuggling groups in towns along Nicaragua’s border for the leg to Honduras, as I reported in a three-part 2022 series from that region.
While Panama and Costa Rica may have to shoulder increasing costs of running camps and buses, at least they weren’t the ones getting stuck with the hot potato of needy immigrant populations. They move that hot potato from Colombia to the United States, which never objected to these government passing it on, not even Republican Donald Trump.
But while the Trump administration seemed ignorant of controlled flow, the Biden administration’s liberal progressive wing, its titular head being DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, strongly embraced it and went to great lengths to expand it. This policy was instituted by the hard left wing of the Biden administration and the non-governmental migrant advocacy organizations that engineered the mass migration logistics, as I document in my book Overrun.
In 2022, the Biden government got Panama to vastly expand the capacity and speed of the controlled flow on the grounds that this would save the lives of immigrants who’d answered Biden’s opened borders invitation. The Biden administration’s progressives, for instance, convinced Panama to open Caribbean Sea access to a navigable Panamanian river that dramatically shortened the difficult foot journeys. The years 2022 and 2023 and 2024 were historic as more than a million foreign nationals came to traverse the shorter, faster, safer route that Biden’s progressives engineered.
At administration urging and with U.S. taxpayer money, the two countries built new hospitality camps and expanded existing ones, improved trail conditions, mounted bridge projects over dangerous rivers, and brought in dozens of UN and non-governmental organizations to manage migration aid and support from Panama’s so-called “City of Knowledge.”
The U.S. State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) began showering many hundreds of millions of dollars in U.S. taxpayer funds on advocacy groups that set up shop in Panama and exerted political influence in a country known for its susceptibility to government corruption, a place the the CIA’s World Factbook calls a historic money-laundering and illegal drug trafficking hub.
It was against all this momentum that Panama’s new president suddenly announced he was going to shut the whole thing down.
Disruption of an Established Order
In my 2021 book America’s Covert Border War, I discussed the Darien Gap as a U.S. national security threat because it has enabled terrorist travel to the American border. I proposed a set of policies that would be bought and paid for by a mythological U.S. administration that really would one day want – or need – to seal the Gap after, say, a terror attack. An American administration could impose robust ICE Air deportation flight operations on the supposedly allied nations of Colombia, Panama, Costa Rica, and Mexico. U.S. taxpayers would foot the bill because those countries should not be asked to pick up the tab for U.S. national security.
The Biden administration cannot be counted on to go that far for reasons that will be explained shortly. But I and other experts who have witnessed the flow in these countries believe the volume of migrants can still be reduced.
“Physically, he can shut the border. He can do it if he’s got the guts. He can do it tomorrow,” says independent blogger and war correspondent Michael Yon in reference to Mulino. Yom, who has spent the past two years living and reporting on all sides of the Darien Gap, knows its surrounding geography or politics better than almost anyone. He says Mulino can shut down most human traffic through the gap and deter any further movement using the very same measures Panama used when Covid hit and it closed its borders to Colombia.
At any given time, about 5,000 are moving through the gap. Let them pass through as the last ones under the “controlled flow” regime, Yon suggests.
Then, Mulino can start the program by having SENAFRONT intercept Colombia boat traffic moving almost all the immigrants across the Gulf of Uraba.
“Seize any boats and people will get the hint really quick,” Yon said. “Once people start losing those expensive boats, that’ll do it. They’ll be on the phone reporting back, ‘Hey I’ve been arrested in Panama, and they took my boat.’ That’ll do it right there. Right away.”
Those who get through and onto the trails will need to find a similarly rude awakening in SENAFRONT officers not interested in rescue so much as detention and expulsion, in Yon’s expert view. They’ll all go into hospitality camps converted into real detention camps, only to be kicked back as soon as practicable to Colombia.
“Make it all Colombia’s problem, and you’ll see Colombia stop them,” Yon said, referring again to the dynamics seen during Covid. “If it worked for Covid, and we know that they did it then, it’ll work now too.”
Yon’s point is supported by data. A 2020 United Nations report credited a Panamanian coronavirus quarantine with significantly deterring migration by containing those SENAFRONT caught in camps indefinitely. Numbers of border crossers dropped from 24,000 in 2019 when controlled flow was in use, to only 4,000 in 2020 when Panama opened detention camps.
Migrants stopped trying the Gap in large numbers when word of indefinite Panamanian detention got back to Colombia, which then had to close its own borders lest it too get stuck with huge numbers of immigrants, the hot potato.
Next up, according to Yon: revoke all visas and immediately expel every United Nations agency and all the non-governmental organizations whose work and aid incentivize the traffic. These agencies, fat with U.S. tax money, will try to use political influence in the Panamanian congress or in Mulino’s own administration to undermine the new policies.
“Put police on their doors, and tell them it’s time to pack up and leave right now,” Yon said.
But while Panama’s narrow geography would allow a determined president to almost certainly replicate Covid-era border closure and detention with expulsion policies, Yon said he’ll need “guts” to stay the course when political pushback immediately begins that Mulino might not be able to withstand.
He’ll get it from the government of Colombia. From the United Nations and NGOs profiting by the flow. From elements of U.S. government that believe in open borders.
The key weapon they will deploy is a global disinformation media campaign that will paint Panama’s president as inhumane to marshal global sanctions and other economic repercussions.
“They’ll hit him hardcore in the press. They’ll show kids dying in the jungle,” Yon said. “It takes damn the torpedoes, and then just see what their best looks like, and if you don’t make it, you don’t make it. But I think he can do it.”
Joseph M. Humire, executive director of the Center for a Secure Free Society and Latin America expert, also believes Mulino is serious about trying to close the gap. His predictions about the pushback mirror Yon’s, especially from the NGO industry which has used its largess to build lobbying influence both in Panama and the United States, and which has a financial interest in keeping the migrants flowing.
“If he actually tries to do things to close the border, I see a disinformation campaign against him that will charge him with violating human rights,” Humire said. “The amount of money that industry has established is pretty big. We’ll see how much they put their money where their mouth is to keep the Darien Gap open.”
In turn, media disinformation campaigns that will tar Mulino as evil should enable open-border progressives inside the Biden administration to argue against U.S. support for a gap closure, even though such a closure would aid the American president’s incumbency at least until November.
“The Biden administration will want to work with him, at least on paper,” Humire said. “But at the same time, I feel like the pressure mechanisms of these NGOs with the disinformation campaign will scare away the Biden administration.”
In short, Mulino will walk his own trail very much alone.
illegal immigration
ICE raids California pot farm, uncovers illegal aliens and child labor

Quick Hit:
ICE raided a California cannabis farm Thursday suspected of employing illegal immigrants, uncovering 10 underage workers — including 8 unaccompanied minors. The operation sparked protests, but federal officials defended the action as a necessary crackdown on illegal labor and child exploitation.
Key Details:
- ICE agents executed a lawful raid at Glass House Farms in Camarillo, targeting illegal immigrant laborers employed at the state-licensed cannabis operation.
- Ten underage illegal immigrants were found working at the site — eight of them unaccompanied minors — prompting a federal investigation into potential child labor violations.
- Protesters attempted to interfere with the operation and were dispersed by federal agents using crowd control measures; multiple arrests and injuries were reported.
🚨BREAKING: ICE just swarmed Ventura County fields, hauling away the very farm workers who keep America’s produce aisles stocked.
We’re arresting assets; treating the backbone of our food chain like a threat. That’s not “border security.” That’s self-sabotage in uniform. pic.twitter.com/GgZvnXbVsd
— Brian Allen (@allenanalysis) July 10, 2025
Diving Deeper:
Federal immigration agents executed a large-scale raid Thursday at a cannabis farm in Camarillo, California, targeting illegal immigrant laborers and uncovering possible child labor violations. The operation, led by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), took place at Glass House Farms, a state-licensed marijuana facility that remains illegal under federal law.
Dozens of agents stormed the property with a federal warrant, encountering resistance from left-wing protesters who attempted to disrupt the operation. Agents responded with tear gas and smoke devices, and helicopters were deployed to ensure no suspects could flee or hide in nearby fields. Authorities later confirmed that 10 minors were working at the facility—eight of whom were unaccompanied illegal aliens.
Despite clear evidence of immigration and labor violations, California Democrats rushed to attack the enforcement action. Governor Gavin Newsom lashed out on social media, posting video of people running from the scene. Rep. Salud Carbajal called the raid “deplorable,” complaining about the use of tactical gear.
Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Rodney Scott pushed back, calling out Newsom directly. “Here’s some breaking news: 10 juveniles were found at this marijuana facility – all illegal aliens, 8 of them unaccompanied,” he posted on X. “It’s now under investigation for child labor violations.”
While California officials cried foul, ICE defended the operation as necessary and lawful. The raid is part of a broader push under President Trump to enforce federal immigration laws and shut down operations that exploit illegal labor to undercut American workers.
The clash in Camarillo follows similar enforcement actions earlier this week in Los Angeles, where ICE also faced hostility from local officials. Nonetheless, the Trump administration appears undeterred, making clear that sanctuary policies will not shield illegal activity from federal scrutiny.
Crime
Sweeping Boston Indictment Points to Vast Chinese Narco-Smuggling and Illegal Alien Labor Plot via Mexican Border

Sam Cooper
Case details a pipeline from China through Mexico, trapping trafficked illegal migrants as indentured workers in a sweeping drug network.
In a sweeping indictment that tears into an underworld of Chinese narco infiltration of North American cities — including the smuggling of impoverished Chinese nationals across the Mexican border to work as drug debt slaves in illegal drug houses — seven Chinese nationals living in Massachusetts stand accused of running a sprawling, multimillion-dollar marijuana trafficking and money laundering network across New England.
The backdrop of the human smuggling allegations stretches back to 2020, as an unprecedented wave of illegal Chinese migrants surged across the U.S. border with Mexico — a surge that peaked in 2024 under the Biden administration before the White House reversed course. This explosive migration trend became a flashpoint in heated U.S. election debates, fueling concerns over border security and transnational organized crime.
Six of the accused, including alleged ringleader Jianxiong Chen of Braintree, were arrested this week in coordinated FBI raids across Massachusetts. The border exploitation schemes match exactly with decades-long human smuggling and Chinese Triad criminal pipelines into America reported by The Bureau last summer, based on leaked intelligence documents filed by a Canadian immigration official in 1993. A seventh suspect in the new U.S. indictment, Yanrong Zhu, remains a fugitive and is believed to be moving between Greenfield, Massachusetts, and Brooklyn, New York.
The case paints a striking portrait of China-based criminal organizations operating behind the quiet facades of upscale American suburban properties. Prosecutors allege the defendants owned or partnered with a network of sophisticated indoor grow houses hidden inside single-family residences in Massachusetts, Maine, and beyond, producing kilogram-scale shipments of marijuana. According to court documents, the marijuana was sold in bulk to distributors across the Northeast, and the profits — amounting to millions — were funneled into luxury real estate, cars, jewelry, and further expansion of their illicit operations.
“During a search of [ringleader Chen’s] home in October 2024, over $270,000 in cash was allegedly recovered from the house and from a Porsche in the driveway,” the indictment alleges, “as well as several Chinese passports and other identification documents inside a safe.”
According to the indictment, Chen’s cell phone data confirmed his personal role in orchestrating smuggling logistics and controlling workers. Additional searches of homes where co-defendants lived yielded over 109 kilograms of marijuana, nearly $200,000 in cash, and luxury items including a $65,000 gold Rolex with the price tag still attached.
A photo from the indictment, humorously but damningly, shows alleged ring member Hongbin Wu, 35, wearing a green “money laundering” T-shirt printed with an image of a hot iron pressing U.S. dollar bills on an ironing board — a snapshot that encapsulates the brazenness of the alleged scheme.
Key to FBI allegations of stunning sophistication tying together Chinese narcos along the U.S. East Coast with bases in mainland China is a document allegedly shared among the conspirators.
“The grow house operators maintained contact with each other through a list of marijuana cultivators and distributors from or with ties to China in the region called the ‘East Coast Contact List,’” the indictment alleges.
Investigators say the conspiracy reveals a human smuggling component directly tied to China’s underground migration and debt bondage networks, mirroring exactly the historic intelligence from Canadian and U.S. Homeland Security documents reported by The Bureau last summer.
The alleged leader, 39-year-old Jianxiong Chen, is charged with paying to smuggle Chinese nationals across the Mexican border, then forcing them to work in grow houses while withholding their passports until they repaid enormous smuggling debts.
“Data extracted from Chen’s cell phone allegedly revealed that he helped smuggle Chinese nationals into the United States — putting the aliens to work at one of the grow houses he controlled,” U.S. filings say.
“This case pulls back the curtain on a sprawling criminal enterprise that exploited our immigration system and our communities for personal gain,” said U.S. Attorney Leah Foley. “These defendants allegedly turned quiet homes across the Northeast into hubs for a criminal enterprise — building a multi-million-dollar black-market operation off the backs of an illegal workforce and using our neighborhoods as cover.”
The arrests come amid a surge of Chinese migrants entering the U.S. through Mexico, part of a pattern previously exposed in Canadian diplomatic and intelligence reporting. In 1993, a confidential Canadian government study, “Passports of Convenience,” warned that Chinese government officials, in collusion with Triads and corrupt Latin American partners, were driving a multi-billion-dollar human smuggling business. That report predicted that tens of thousands of migrants from coastal Fujian province would flood North America, empowered by Beijing’s tacit support and organized crime’s global reach.
It also warned that mass migration from China in the 1990s came during a time of political upheaval, a trend that has apparently re-emerged while President Xi Jinping’s economic and political guidance has been increasingly questioned among mainland citizens, particularly since the Covid-19 pandemic crisis and lockdowns inside China.
The 1993 report, obtained and analyzed exclusively by The Bureau, described how the Triads — particularly those connected with Chinese Communist networks in Fujian — would leverage human smuggling to extend their influence into American cities. The migrants, often saddled with debts of $50,000 or more, became trapped in forced labor, prostitution, or drug networks, coerced to repay their passage fees.
“Alien smuggling is closely linked to narcotics smuggling; many of the persons smuggled in have to resort to prostitution or drug dealing to pay the smugglers,” the 1993 Canadian immigration report says.

Citing legal filings in one U.S. Homeland Security case, it says a Triad member who reportedly smuggled 150 Fujianese migrants into New York stated that if fees aren’t paid “the victims are often tortured until the money is paid.”
Supporting these early warnings, a 1995 U.S. Department of Justice report echoed the Canadian findings, stating that “up to 100,000 Chinese aliens are smuggled into the United States each year,” with 85 percent originating from Fujian. The DOJ report also cited allegations of “negotiations between the Sun Yee On Triad and the Mainland Chinese Government,” suggesting that smuggling and criminal infiltration were tolerated — if not orchestrated — to extend China’s economic and political influence abroad.
That report added American investigators and immigration officials concluded it was nearly impossible to counter waves of illegal immigration from China with deportation orders, and the government should focus on “the larger menace working its way into U.S. cities: Chinese transnational criminal organizations.”
“To combat the growing threat of Asian organized crime in the West,” it says, “law enforcement officials must tackle this new global problem through an understanding of the Triad system and the nature of its threat to Western countries.”
In New England, the Braintree indictment shows how those old predictions have not only materialized but scaled up.
These networks operate by embedding Chinese nationals into illicit industries in North America, from black-market cannabis cultivation to high-end money laundering. Once inside, they channel profits back through complex underground banking channels that tie the North American drug economy to China’s export-driven cash flows and, ultimately, to powerful actors in Beijing.
In recent years, Maine has emerged as a strategic hotspot for illicit Chinese-controlled marijuana operations. As The Bureau has reported, the state’s vast rural areas, lax local oversight, and proximity to East Coast urban markets have made it a favored location for covert grow houses.
-
Business18 hours ago
Most Canadians say retaliatory tariffs on American goods contribute to raising the price of essential goods at home
-
National1 day ago
Women and girls beauty pageant urges dismissal of transgender human rights complaint
-
Alberta19 hours ago
Cross-Canada NGL corridor will stretch from B.C. to Ontario
-
International2 days ago
Support for the Ukraine war continues because no one elected is actually in charge.
-
Business2 days ago
Trump slaps Brazil with tariffs over social media censorship
-
Business2 days ago
CBC six-figure salaries soar
-
Business20 hours ago
B.C. premier wants a private pipeline—here’s how you make that happen
-
Addictions2 days ago
Can addiction be predicted—and prevented?