illegal immigration
Panama’s Incoming President Wants To Shut Down His Country’s Most Treacherous Route For Migrants — But Will It Work?
From the Daily Caller News Foundation
Panama’s new president-elect is pledging to close a key corridor used by hundreds of thousands of migrants en route to the U.S., but experts and Panamanians aren’t so sure it can be done.
President-elect Jose Raul Mulino handily won the Panamanian presidential election earlier in May, riding a wave of voter discontent over the country’s slow economic growth and an endorsement from a popular former president. The 64-year-old lawyer also campaigned on a pledge to end the illegal immigration that runs through the tiny Central American nation’s Darien gap — but some question the feasibility of that pledge, given the vastness of the jungle, the cartels that populate it and the sheer amount of migrants flowing through it.
“While President Mulino’s promise to close the Darien Gap to migrants appears to be made in good faith, it’s unclear how he could ever actually deliver,” Matt O’Brien, director of investigations for the Immigration Reform Law Institute, said to the Daily Caller News Foundation. “The region consists of thousands of square miles of jungle that are virtually impossible to police.”
“And the gap itself is already home to massive migrant assistance operations that are funded by politically-potent, anti-borders groups from all over the world,” O’Brien added. “None of these organizations are likely to close up shop and go home without a fight.”
The number of illegal immigrants crossing the Darien Gap is incredibly massive — and rising. More than half a million migrants passed through the region in 2023, double the nearly 250,000 that had crossed the year before, according to the Council of Foreign Relations.
“The border of the United States, instead of being in Texas, moved to Panama,” Mulino said on the campaign trail. “We’re going to close the Darien and we’re going to repatriate all these people,” referring to a vast jungle region across Panama and Colombia known as the Darien Gap.
The pledge has received notable coverage from American media, and the Secretary of State’s office made mention of anticipated cooperation on the issue shortly after Mulino’s election victory.
The Darien Gap, however, is roughly 40 miles wide and 100 miles long, with a combination of rainforests and mountains and virtually no government presence, according to the Guardian. Hiking through the region can take days.
The area is also under the de facto authority of drug-trafficking organizations such as the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and the Gulf Clan paramilitary group, according to the Council on Foreign Relations. The groups are known to extort and sexually assault travelers who pass through the region.
The idea of closing off the Darien has long been regarded as too much of a burden to accomplish, given these factors.
“Panama closed their border,” Wisconsin GOP Rep. Tom Tiffany said in 2021 after a trip to the Darien Gap. “But they, in effect, can’t because of the incredible crush of migrants that are coming from all over the world.”
More recently, Juan Pappier, the Americas deputy director at Human Rights Watch, framed Mulino’s promise to close the Darien Gap as “virtually impossible.”
The majority of migrants crossing the Darien Gap are Venezuelan nationals, but people from Ecuador, Haiti and other African and Asian countries also utilize these routes to make it to the U.S. border.
Panamanians have made notice of the enormous flow of migrants crossing their country on a daily basis.
“It’s impossible to not run into a foreigner who is begging for money or puts their child in front of you to beg for money, or sell you chewing gum or candy,” Allan Baitel, a born-and-raised Panamanian citizen, told the DCNF. “We have a lot of individuals who are present on the streets at all times, 24 hours a day with signs asking for help.”
Baitel noted that the government is “doing its best” to mitigate disruptions to daily Panamanian life by getting the migrants off the street and moving them to the border of Costa Rica. While he acknowledged the difficulty in closing up the Darien Gap, he expressed optimism over Mulino’s background.
“It’s going to be very hard to close the gap, very difficult,” he said, noting that Colombia was unlikely to help in the effort. Colombia’s leftist president, Gustavo Petro, has long been hesitant to adopt measures to physically bar migrants from entering the jungle, claiming that a more humanitarian approach should be taken.
“Let me tell you that Mulino’s background is in security,” Baitel said. “He has preparation in having to deal with a lot of these issues, so he may have something up his sleeve.”
Currently, the Panamanian government’s policy has been to immediately bus incoming migrants to the Costa Rican border, allowing them to carry on in their U.S.-bound journey. In a recent radio interview, the incoming president said most would-be migrants would simply not even try to cross Panama once he begins deporting them.
“Because when we start to deport people here in an immediate deportation plan the interest for sneaking through Panama will decrease,” Mulino said in the radio interview. “I assure you they are going to say that going through Panama is not attractive because they are deporting you.”
For many Panamanian citizens, the crisis hasn’t made much of a personal impact on them since the vast majority of the migrants are quickly moving on and out of the country.
“We don’t see that many, no one wants to stay here. They want to get to the shining city on the hill,” said Surse Pierpoint, a third-generation Panamanian who spoke to the DCNF.
Pierpoint said that the topic of immigration doesn’t even crack the “top five” issues that matter to him at the moment. Like many other voters, Pierpoint cited the tough economic times the country has faced and he liked Mulino’s agenda for the private sector.
Panama, once the top performing economy in Latin America, has struggled with credit downgrades, slow economic growth, less foreign direct investment and the closing of a major copper mine. The president-elect campaigned on a pledge to bring life back into the private sector with a pro-market agenda.
As for closing the Darien Gap, Pierpoint has doubts: “I don’t know how he can do that frankly,” he said. “It sounds good, but I don’t see how it’s feasible in the short term.”
While so much attention has been focused on Mulino’s ability to close the migration routes himself, policy experts in Washington, D.C,. and locals in Panama alike also pointed the finger back at the Biden administration. The crisis taking place in this Latin American isthmus, they say, begins and ends at the White House.
“Panama president-elect Jose Mulino’s pledge to close the Darien Gap route that migrants are traversing on their way to the U.S. southern border demonstrates the far-reaching negative consequences of Pres. Biden’s immigration policies,” Eric Ruark, director of research at NumbersUSA, said to the DCNF. “This is a humanitarian crisis entirely of President’ Biden’s making, and Panama is just one of the countries dealing with the fallout.”
“All of this has to do with the United States,” Baitel added. “It will not cease until there’s a very drastic change in the United States.”
From The Center for Immigration Studies
By Todd Bensman
AUSTIN, Texas — During the violent social justice upheavals of 2019-2020, Democratic primary candidate for President Sen. Kamala Harris told America exactly where she stood on illegal border immigration, no matter how she might spin it now that she is the Democratic Party’s presumptive nominee for president.
American voters should not forget the politically extreme positions she staked just a few years ago, as thousands of “Occupy ICE” hooligans were disrupting detention and deportation operations. “Abolish ICE” was the street chant as arson fires burned major cities and an AR-15-armed Antifa terrorist named Willem van Spronsen died in a fiery July 2019 attack on a Washington State ICE detention facility.
What American voters should remember about this period, now that they regard the border crisis as a top 2024 campaign issue, is that Harris went all-in with the most extreme agenda on border security in American history and has neither said nor acted once in any way contrary to those early positions, other than to tone down rhetoric while serving as vice president.
Taking Up the Extremist Cudgel
Just one week after ICE agents killed van Spronsen and found his manifesto demanding an end to corporate profiteering from private detention centers and their human suffering, Sen. Harris all but rewarded the attack with a tweet that mainstreamed the terrorist demand:
During a June 2019 televised primary debate, she reiterated that “I will get rid of the private detention centers.”
Harris was always at the forefront of Democratic primary contenders adopting the extreme immigration policy demands of a violent progressive movement high on the smoke of anti-police BLM arson, antifa attacks on Trump supporters, and Occupy ICE campfires. Indeed, Harris began messaging as her own the most fringe ideas about immigration and the border ever heard on the main American public square.
Abolish ICE. End all deportation and detention. Extend U.S. asylum access to all comers so they can stay and disappear. Grant citizenship to millions of illegal immigrants. Free healthcare to all. Stop the wall.
The van Spronsens of a border security abolitionist movement burgeoning among progressives at the time were pushing an extreme agenda driven by an ideology unchained from the Democratic Party basement to dismantle immigration enforcement as cruel and inhumane, a violation of human rights like Jim Crow laws and slavery.
They demanded the dismantling of ICE “concentration camps” full of detained latter-day Jews who this time were illegal-immigrant brown people, an end to deportation “death flights” home, the dismantling of ICE’s Nazi jack-booted brown shirts, abolition of laws deterring illegal immigration, and a southern border opened wide to anyone in the world who might feel like crossing it as an inalienable civil right.
Yes on “Abolish ICE” — and Immigration Law Enforcement with It
Harris went full throttle with the narrative that ICE agents she may one day lead were indeed the racist thugs everyone was saying they were.
“Certain communities saw ICE as comparable to the Ku Klux Klan for administering its power in a way that is causing fear and intimidation, particularly among immigrants and specifically among immigrants coming from Mexico and Central America,” Harris accused during a Senate confirmation hearing of Trump’s nominee to lead ICE, Ronald Vitiello.
Then-Sen. Harris responded on MSNBC in 2019 to a question about abolishing ICE that the United States should “probably think about starting from scratch” on enforcing immigration laws, while a spokesperson for Harris said the senator was weighing “a complete overhaul of the agency, mission, culture, operations”.
None of this could be said to be opportunistic at the time, either. In 2015, while serving as California’s Attorney General, Harris told the CBS affiliate in Los Angeles that “An undocumented immigrant is not a criminal. I know what a criminal looks like who’s committing a crime. An undocumented immigrant is not a criminal.”
In fact, illegally crossing the southern border is a federal misdemeanor punishable by up to six months in prison for a first offense and a felony on subsequent violations.
She was one of the candidates who raised a hand at another debate when asked if she supported decriminalizing illegal crossings and when asked if she would give free healthcare to illegal immigrants.
In a 2019 interview with National Public Radio, candidate Harris expressed a willingness as president to declare all illegal border-crossers refugees based on unconfirmable claims of political violence, even if that meant ignoring the law, despite well-known reporting that many let in on such claims disappear into the nation’s illegal immigrant population:
I disagree with any policy that would turn America’s back on people who are fleeing harm. I frankly believe that it is contrary to everything that we have symbolically and actually said we stand for. And so, I would not enforce a law that would reject people and turn them away without giving them a fair and due process to determine if we should give them asylum and refuge. (Emphasis added.)
Harris’ presidential campaign website took a page from Antifa and Black Lives Matter ideology handbooks about dismantling detention and deportation infrastructure, declaring her belief that “[W]e must fundamentally overhaul our immigration enforcement policies and practices — they are cruel and out of control.” She promised to “increase oversight” of agencies like the U.S. Border Patrol were she to be elected.
Expect claims from Harris supporters that, well, this was a primary campaign intended to appeal to the party base and she didn’t really mean any of it.
That’s not believable if Wall Street Journal reporting this week is accurate. People who have worked with Harris over the years told the Journal she only takes up a policy idea after “detailed deliberations … and has been reluctant to always endorse immediate, sweeping policy changes” before achieving full understanding.
“She really wants to understand what the data and evidence is to support a potential course of action,” Jill Habig, who worked for Harris in different roles over the years, is quoted saying. “She really wants to understand not just the idea in theory, but how it’s actually going to work in practice.”
Toning Down in High Office in Favor of Denialism and Gaslighting
Harris went on the down-low about her policy views after becoming vice president, but repeatedly denied a mass migration crisis was underway at the southern border, refusing to visit there, and, when she finally did under pressure, staying indoors in controlled environments with the television cameras.
When Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis sent some illegal immigrants to Martha’s Vineyard to make a political point in September 2022, Harris was quoted insisting the administration’s policies had “closed” the border when, in fact, hundreds of thousands had just crossed.
Local TV quoted one of the Martha’s Vineyard immigrants refuting the vice president’s absurd claim. “It’s open, not closed. The border is open,” the gentleman responded in English when asked about Harris’ claim that it was closed. “Everybody believes the border is open. It’s open because … we entered! We come in. Free. No problem.”
As vice president, Harris has regularly blamed “root causes” and “climate change” for the vast influx that began right after she and Biden took office and implemented an extreme vision straight from the burning streets of blue cities. Immigration was all so very “complex”, Harris explained during a state visit to Central America to get the strategy up and running.
During an April 2021 roundtable discussion Harris said:
We are looking at extensive storm damage because of extreme climate. We’re looking at drought in an area in a region where agriculture is one of the most traditionally important bases for their economy. We’re looking at what’s happening in terms of food scarcity as a result of that and in fact, incredible food insecurity, which we used to call hunger, food insecurity.
Whatever the Democratic Party nominee might float about her plans for border security over the next four months, Americans concerned about what she and Biden have done at the border should know that, in her case, past definitely is prologue.
From ToddBensman.com
By Todd Bensman
Time for border enforcement hawks to disengage with this intellectually fraudulent sham debate and find this new approach
Advocates of a borderless United States – those who will do or say anything to unleash and maintain a torrent of unimpeded illegal mass border migration – demand that Americans deny an especially resonate outcome: illegal border crossers who murder, kill with drunk driving, rape, rob and beat their hosts.
In their arguments for unmitigated releases into the country of illegal border-crossing strangers, libertarian and progressive liberal pro-illegal immigration, anti-border enforcement activists always point to “studies” that compare illegal alien criminality to U.S. citizen criminality and then conclude that Americans commit as much or more than the illegal immigrants.
Media writers and pundits on the open-borders side parrot the “studies” to deflect detention and deportation proposals that would reduce illegal alien crime on grounds that the main danger to address are U.S. citizen criminals and, while you’re at that, let the border flows continue unimpeded since that population is less worrisome.
“No, Illegal Migrants Aren’t Fueling a Crime Wave,” reads the June 26 headline of a Bloomberg column by Justin Fox in a typical argument against illegal immigration enforcement.
“Migrant Crime Wave Not Supported by Data, Despite High-Profile Cases,” the headline of a February 15 New York Times report states in another one undermining recent demands for border enforcement.
“Ironically, studies indicate that immigrants commit less crime than U.S.-born individuals, and advocates have been pushing for less detention for years,” wrote Michael Lukens, Executive Director at the Capital Area Immigrants’ Rights Coalition, in a February 20 letter to the editor in The Washington Post. “Instead of alarmist tactics, ICE [U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement] should be looking at the devastating impacts of detention and releasing immigrants because it is the right thing to do.”
As complicit in this redirection are Republican border hawks and many on the right who abhor unimpeded illegal border immigration because they frequently engage the citizens-versus-illegal-aliens comparison, ever trying to challenge, counter, and undermine the crime comparison studies.
But what opponents of unmitigated mass migration must finally be made to realize, especially now that illegal alien crime is figuring largely for the November 5 presidential election, is that the door their adversaries opened for them leads up a fake stairwell.
The citizen-illegal alien comparison is invalid at the jump and, because it is once again often cited, a different approach is necessary.
An invalid apples-to-rocks comparison
The notion that policy thinkers and media pundits must compare the measured crime rates of citizens and illegal aliens – it’s unclear who initially devised it – has no foundation in academic science because the two compared groups are not similar enough.
Here is why: Illegal immigrants – and not ever American citizens and legal residents – are uniquely subject to an elaborate, expansive, and lawful government deportation and detention apparatus that Congress built to block and remove them from the country, in some part, so that they are not present to commit crimes. The same apparatus, of course, cannot touch American citizens who will commit crimes.
To restate the seemingly obvious, illegal aliens blocked at the border or who are quickly removed from the country cannot inflict any harm on American inhabitants because they are not present. That means every single crime committed by an illegally present immigrant should never have happened, was avoidable, preventable, and unnecessary whereas the Department of Homeland Security detention and removal machine cannot prevent a single American citizen crime. The United States, unfortunately, has no such choice but to contend with its criminal citizens before, during and after every crime they commit.
What this means is that all crimes committed by illegal aliens amount to a 100-percent net-gain burden on American society and its criminal justice system that was always largely preventable and unnecessary.
These differences between the two groups amount to an insurmountable Grand Canyon for purposes of comparison, apples-to-rocks, thus invalid for any academic study at the jump.
The libertarian and progressive liberals who created and purveyed the citizen-versus-illegal immigrant crime rate comparison debate should be called out for their campaign of misdirection or, if you will “gas-lighting.”
The misdirection campaign has always neutralized deserved political backlash against the highly resonate problem of 100 percent unnecessary extra crime that illegal aliens commit in the United States and stunted political momentum for policy remedies that would reduce both. By design, the mass illegal immigration and its associated 100 percent extra crime victimization continue while those who either favor or disfavor illegal immigration fruitlessly wage battles over a totally invalid proposition.
A different approach is long overdue.
The comparison stands discredited anyway but…
Border enforcement hawks have done much to discredit the studies that conclude American citizens commit more crime than illegal aliens. For instance, the Center for Immigration Studies has found that the activist-academics who favor unimpeded illegal immigration have misused data to undercount criminal alien crime. (See Misuse of Texas Data Understates Illegal Immigrant Crime and Continued Misuse of Texas Crime Data)
But as this 2024 presidential campaign period shows, efforts to engage the comparison debate have done little to suppress its continued impact of nullifying momentum for policy change. Mass media outlets still default to the original ruse at a time when a new approach to this discussion is most needed at this key time in the American political cycle, presenting an opportunity for the polity to rise up on good information and demand a halt to the mass border incursions that fuel 100-percent unnecessary net increases illegal alien crime.
Even though they have done a laudable job at discrediting the original studies, border enforcement advocates should disengage from further such distracting attempts and call out the comparison studies as the mendacious intellectual sham they are, on grounds that the two groups are too different to be compared. They must parry every citation of the studies and re-direct to the correct policy discussion, which is the extent to which current American leadership uses existing border enforcement law to block, detain, and deport. They must argue that all illegal alien crime is a 100 percent net addition to America’s crime problem, no matter what the rates per alien are, and that American citizen crime rates are irrelevant to the discussion of a solution to that.
They must only ever argue that blocking, detaining and deporting illegal aliens are the main levers that enable or prevent illegal alien crime in the United States. Most Americans will instinctively understand that this objective truth is on their side.
No one on either side of this policy issue should ever again engage in this immoral sham, but border enforcement hawks should parry and thrust elsewhere.
Graves that need never have been dug
Having said all of this, the comparison “studies” ruse was useful in one important regard; it surfaced rare data that establishes a rare and important measure of this preventable illegal immigrant crime. The data used in them comes from the only U.S. state that has tracked its unnecessary, all-net-gain illegal immigrant crime for years: Texas.
Border enforcement advocates should use this rare data set, not to compare the incomparable but, rather, to emphasize that it was entirely a net total – preventable – addition to overall U.S. crime. The Texas data should be used to emphasize a need for the United States to protect its citizens by exercising existing deportation and detention requirements embodied in the Immigration and Naturalization Act.
America may never know the extent to which alien crime that will result from the three-plus years of the Biden border crisis, which has ushered into the country at least seven million strangers as of this writing. Most local, state and federal agencies will not log immigration status of criminals.
But the Texas Department of Public Safety tracks the immigration status of suspects who are booked into local jails through a program that submits fingerprints to the FBI for criminal history and warrant checks, and to DHS. The agencies return immigration status information on those whose fingerprints were already on file (which is not all of them).
From the resulting Texas statistics, we catch a sound partial glimpse at the vaster sea of nationwide blood and carnage that was up to 100 percent preventable and unnecessary, of murder, rape, child abuse, burglary, felony theft, drug trafficking, alien smuggling and drunken driving manslaughter.
Between June 1, 2011 and June 30, 2024, these 437,000 criminal aliens (308,000 classified as illegal) were charged with more than 533,000 unnecessary extra criminal offenses that should never have happened.
Those included 997 homicide charges (resulting in 498 convictions as of June 2024), 1,245 kidnapping charges (resulting in 354 convictions), 6,744 sexual assault charges (resulting in 3,537 convictions), 7,763 sexual offense charges (resulting in 3,537 sexual offense convictions), and 6,560 weapons charges (resulting in 2,138 weapons convictions). Texas includes another category called “All Other Offenses,” which tallies 298,912 (and 103,265 convictions).
The Texas data reveals hundreds of dead people who should be alive, thousands of sexual assault and sexual offense victims who should never have suffered the trauma, and tens of thousands of assault charges involving victims who would not have been hurt.
The Texas data shows that criminal aliens took up police time and clogged up the American justice system that could have been more dedicated to American criminals. Thousands of drugs, burglary, robbery and weapons charges need not have jammed the Texas criminal justice systems at taxpayer cost.
In all, more than 32,000 people identified by DHS as living in the country illegally were imprisoned in Texas.
But the number of criminal illegal aliens appears to be a highly undercounted one even when a state like Texas is working hard at the tally. We know this because the Texas program found that another 10,748 illegal aliens since 2011, whose immigration status hadn’t been federally determined at the time of their arrests, were only later determined to be illegally present when they were sent to Texas state prisons. There must be far more.
Among them were prisoners serving time for 134 more unnecessary, preventable homicides.
The graves of all their dozens of dead victims are real even as nary any of them have drawn national media attention like a mere few have lately.
The bamboozlers bear responsibility for tragedies that deportation would have prevented. Far too often, the preventable violence is exceptionally brutal, scenes from the most extreme horror movies in volumes far too numerous to catalogue here.
The huge scale of seven or ten million foreign national strangers allowed to enter the United States in three years means the size of the criminal class among them must be historically large as well. All their crime will be 100 percent extra on top of U.S. citizen crime and potentially reducible by up to 100 percent in with the exercise of lawful detention and deportation.
Far fewer bad things will happen if Americans finally slam closed the wrong door with its fake stairwell.
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