Two small scars on either side of his left thigh remind Mario Torres of the worst day he has had during the two-plus years he has spent on the road crisscrossing Latin America searching for a stable life.

Torres fled Venezuela in 2018, when he was just 18 years old. After a stint in Colombia and Peru, he lived in Chile for four years. When cost-of-living increases started to make life less tenable, he decided to leave in September 2024 and head towards the United States. Torres rode buses, boats and trains, and also walked, crossing nine countries – a journey that took months.

He traversed the Darién Gap – the lawless and dangerous stretch of jungle connecting Colombia and Panama. In Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Honduras and Guatemala, his money ran low and travelling wore him down. But none of the difficulties he encountered matched the day in Mexico he got those scars.

“I was walking with a group of migrants on the road towards Coatzacoalcos [a Mexican port city in the state of Veracruz], when three men with guns came out of nowhere,” Torres recalled. “It was getting dark and these men didn’t just want to rob us, they wanted to kidnap us.”

Torres started running. After a short sprint he felt the sting of a bullet pierce the flesh of his leg.

“After they shot me, I ran for 100 more metres until I reached a gas station. There were several police and military officers there, but they’re all the same,” he said, hinting at how criminal groups have corrupted security forces in the country. “They didn’t [go after the men]. They just called an ambulance and took me to the hospital.”

Torres eventually made it to the northern Mexican city of Monterrey in January 2025, but by then it was already too late.

When Donald Trump returned to office on 20 January last year, he began rolling out a draconian migration policy that has effectively ended access to asylum at the US-Mexico border and shaken up migration dynamics throughout Latin America.

One of the first moves the Trump administration made was to shut down a pathway to seek asylum in the US for people in Mexico using a cellphone application called CBP One. In a matter of minutes, about 300,000 people in the app’s pipeline, including Torres, found themselves stranded.

With no way forward, many began retracing their steps toward South America. For several months, the so-called reverse flow garnered a smattering of media coverage, but it soon faded from focus.

International attention has been consumed by Trump’s controversial domestic political agenda and, recently, his foreign interventions and wars. Deep cuts to humanitarian funding – led by the slashing of the US foreign aid budget – have also left the UN agencies and NGOs that would usually monitor such things strapped for cash and capacity.

The New Humanitarian has spent much of the past 15 months reporting throughout Latin America, trying to piece together an answer to one pressing question: what happened to the 300,000 people who saw their dreams of a better life suddenly rebuffed when Trump returned to office?

The picture that emerged is of a situation very much still in flux: some people have returned home, others have run out of resources and have ending up stranded in various countries, while many are still searching for a place where they can find stability.

Torres’s story – and his sense of despondent confusion – could be expressed similarly by countless other asylum seekers. More than a year later, he is living and working informally in Panama City, still trying to figure out his next move. “It’s hard to know what to do,” he said. “There have been so many changes.”

The growing information gap

There is little data available about the reverse movement of people from Mexico. The UN’s refugee agency, the UNHCR, told the New Humanitarian it had not been monitoring what happened to people who were in the CBP One pipeline, and it had “no knowledge” of the Mexican government monitoring the situation either.

Aid groups and NGOs say shrinking resources have made keeping tabs on shifting trends particularly difficult. “There are growing gaps in what we know about returnees, their next steps and the situation of stranded populations in Central America, among other migration dynamics,” said Simon Tomasi, regional manager for Latin America and the Caribbean at the Mixed Migration Centre (MMC).

The MMC did manage to interview about 1,500 people moving south in Mexico, Costa Rica and Colombia between March and December last year. According to the unpublished findings shared with the New Humanitarian, the overwhelming majority were from Venezuela (85%), and 54% said they were returning somewhere other than their home country. For those, the main destinations were Colombia (49%), Peru (21%), Ecuador (11%) and Chile (8%).

According to official data from the Colombian authorities, the reverse movement appears to have peaked between March and August of last year. It has slowed since then but still continues. In addition to Venezuelans, the Colombian data also shows that Ecuadorians, Haitians, Iranians and citizens of numerous African and Asian countries also headed to South America from Mexico.

The accounts of aid workers and the directors of migrant shelters whom the New Humanitarian spoke to in Tapachula, a city in southern Mexico that many people passed through on their way back south, backed up the picture painted by the data from the MMC and the Colombian authorities.

“[For] the first half of the year, [people] were going back to their countries, mostly from Venezuela or Central America,” said José Espinoza, a doctor working with Médecins Sans Frontières in Tapachula. “The people from Cuba, they won’t go back. From Haiti, they won’t go back, or people from Africa, they’re stuck here.”

The New Humanitarian spoke to numerous people who saw their opportunity to seek protection in the US evaporate when the Trump administration shuttered the CBP One process. Many, like Torres, were still in limbo.

Eduin, a 27-year-old Venezuelan who asked to be identified by only his first name, is one of them. He has been stranded since last August in Panama City with his wife and two children. The couple sells chocolates and cookies at traffic lights to earn money. Between December and the end of March, they managed to save $572 – nearly half of what they say they need to pay smugglers as the fare to reach Colombia.

From there, they plan on making their way to the Colombia-Venezuela border, and eventually all the way to Caracas, their country’s capital. In the meantime, life is difficult. “We live day by day,” Eduin said. “We pay $15 daily for a hotel, and every ticket costs $350 for the adults and a little less for the children.”

“We have to go out every day to sell. Every day it’s the same. It’s very hard,” he added.

Searching for stability

The Trump administration’s attack on Venezuela and abduction of the country’s president, Nicolás Maduro, at the beginning of January have added a new layer to the anxiety and uncertainty of many.

Torres does not want to stay in Panama and said he hopes the situation will soon “settle down”. But he and many other Venezuelans in Panama are waiting to see if the Venezuelan economy starts to recover before going back. Others have entirely lost faith that the situation will improve and have given up on the idea of return. “They want a stable country where they can make money, like Chile, Uruguay and Panama,” Torres said. “Those who are here are not leaving.”

A regional crackdown on migrants is also being felt in Panama, where conditions are exceedingly difficult. Torres is undocumented and works as a waiter. He does not earn a salary, and his only take-home pay comes from tips customers give him. It’s barely enough to survive off. Between the money he regularly sends back to his mother and what he has to pay to rent a room and live, he isn’t able to save enough for a passport or for the eventual ticket he would need to return to Venezuela.

Daysi, 26, another Venezuelan migrant stranded in Panama City, is in a similar predicament. After trekking across Latin America to reach Mexico, she and her family spent eight months waiting for a CBP One appointment – long enough for her children to enrol in a school. They remained in Mexico for several months after Trump returned to office, but last June decided to start the journey back towards Venezuela – although not to stay.

The New Humanitarian was in touch with Daysi periodically after the family arrived in Panama City. She said they often had to sleep in the streets while travelling, and that having enough food to eat remained a daily challenge. “Sometimes we have to buy something and stretch it among us. That’s what affects us the most,” she said in November.

The family received no humanitarian assistance while they were travelling, and by late December Daysi was selling cookies at a set of traffic lights in Panama City to earn money. She made up to $150 per week, but it was not enough to continue their journey. The family planned to go back to Venezuela temporarily to get passports so they could leave again for Peru.

The last time the New Humanitarian was able to reach Daysi was in late January. The US attack on Venezuela had thrown their plans into disarray once again. “We are stuck here and we don’t know what to do, whether to go back to Venezuela or not,” she said. “The situation is difficult everywhere.”

Shifting routes

One of the challenges when it comes to tracing what has happened to people undertaking reverse journeys has been keeping track of the various routes that have sprung up – especially with the diminished capacity of UN agencies and NGOs.

More than 800,000 people crossed the Darién Gap heading north towards the US in 2023 and 2024. The journey was gruelling and dangerous. People who made it to the other side told stories of robberies, rapes and people falling to their deaths. Some drowned while crossing rivers, others were left behind after growing too tired to carry on. People were attacked by animals or bitten by venomous snakes, and others were killed by assailants.

After surviving the Darién once, many of those returning from Mexico wanted to avoid crossing it again on their way back to South America. Instead, they opted to take sea routes, but those also proved treacherous.

One route was on Panama’s Caribbean coast, where people headed to small towns with few resources to board boats to Colombia. At least three people died in shipwrecks, underscoring the danger involved in the passage. Some people were also abandoned on cays or islets when the smugglers running the boats became afraid of being caught by authorities.

A second route on the Pacific coast from Panama to Colombia went through remote territory where armed groups had a presence. But around September last year, this route appears to have shut down almost as quickly as it emerged. Locals say migrants who took it warned those still travelling or stranded farther north of its dangers, advising them to choose other options. Aid groups, however, fear that an unknown number of people who took the route have simply disappeared.

The movement of people along the Caribbean route has continued, but numbers have dropped, falling from 2,914 people in March 2025 to 816 last February, with a slight uptick to 1,041 in March, according to Colombia’s data.

Aid workers the New Humanitarian spoke to said they expect movement to pick back up again because plenty of people are still stranded in various locations along the route from Mexico to South America.

One of the main reasons for the recent drop is because ticket prices charged by smugglers have increased from about $100 to about $300, according to Elías Cornejo, who runs Fe y Alegría, an NGO that works with migrants in Panama. “It has become a business,” Cornejo said.

“There are a lot of people being held up in Guatemala, Costa Rica, the Costa Rican-Panamanian border, and within Panama that have to wait to have enough money to pay their way,” he added.

Another humanitarian worker, who asked not to be identified, said the numbers may also have declined because Panamanian migration authorities are now stopping people in a town called Nuevo Tonosí, north of Miramar – the gateway to the Caribbean route – and only allowing through those who have enough money to pay the inflated ticket price.

“It’s not that we won’t see migrants coming any more,” said Leonarda de Gracia, project manager for RET International, an aid group in Panama with a presence in Miramar. “What [migrants we talk to] say is that many are still in Central America, mostly in Mexico and Guatemala, working informally to make the money needed to cross to Colombia by boat.”

Colliding regional dynamics

The reverse flow is also just one aspect of a regional migration picture that has been chaotically disrupted by Trump’s policies.

In addition to those heading south, people in Latin America and beyond are still being pushed from their homes by gang and cartel violence, dire economic conditions, political repression and natural disasters. This is especially the case in Haiti, Cuba and Venezuela – all countries in the midst of crises in which the US is playing a role.

Many are still making their way to Mexico, either to bide their time before trying to reach the US or because they see the country as offering a better chance at stability than others in the region. Once there, tens of thousands have found themselves stuck in difficult conditions in Tapachula.

A second route, circumventing the bottleneck in Tapachula, also exists, according to activists who monitor movement at the country’s southern border.

“This route is the new one for human trafficking and drug trafficking,” said Luis García Villagrán, a migrant rights activist in Mexico and founder of a civil society organisation called the Centre for Human Dignity.

In northern Guatemala, smugglers who control movement through the country divide people into two categories: those with less money are sent to Tapachula, while those who can afford a more “premium” service are taken across the border farther east into the Mexican state of Tabasco near a town called El Ceibo, according to Villagrán.

From there, many people – especially Cubans and Venezuelans – head to cities on the Yucatán peninsula, such as Cancún, to join established communities. Others continue north along routes controlled by organised crime to cities such as Monterrey or Guadalajara.

People from Cuba, where a US blockade imposed since January has tipped a long-running economic crisis towards humanitarian collapse, are also increasingly choosing to stay in other parts of Latin America, such as Brazil, Uruguay and Costa Rica.

Adding to the chaotic mix, the US is also deporting hundreds of thousands of people to countries throughout Latin America – including thousands to countries other than their own.

These are just some of the shifting dynamics aid workers and migration experts told the New Humanitarian they were aware of and struggling to monitor.

“There is a multiplicity of dynamics coexisting at the regional level, and new ones are appearing, but since US funding cuts we have less data and less capacity to collect and analyse data to understand what is happening on the ground,” said the MMC’s Tomasi.

Between two dead ends

The surge in anti-migration policies adopted by the growing number of rightwing leaders in Latin America is making the situation even more unpredictable.

In Chile, the recently elected president, José Antonio Kast, is promising a Trump-esque immigration crackdown. Already, Kast has announced plans to deploy the military, use drones for surveillance and build barriers at the country’s northern border to keep out migrants. He is also in talks with Peru and Ecuador about plans to push Venezuelans out of all three countries back to Venezuela.

In addition to Kast’s crackdown in Chile, El Salvador, Panama, Ecuador, Honduras, Guatemala and Costa Rica have all agreed to receive third-country nationals whom the Trump administration is trying to deport.

Meanwhile, in Argentina – once a haven for migrants and asylum seekers – the far-right president, Javier Milei, has started a crackdown, with raids resembling those carried out by ICE in the US. A dozen regional countries have also joined Trump’s “Shield of the Americas” initiative, committing to work with him on border control.

“Migration is not seen as a humanitarian issue any more,” said Cornejo, summing up the shift that has taken place in recent years. “It is seen as a national security issue – a US national security issue.”

Tomasi warned that deterrence policies across the region were trapping many migrants between two dead ends: mounting barriers to regularisation and integration in host countries, and the absence of conditions that would allow them to safely return and reintegrate into their home countries.

“What will happen with the hundreds of thousands of people who will have to return?” Tomasi asked. “The region risks producing even greater precarity, immobility and forced re-migration.”

• This article is a co-publication with the New Humanitarian. Additional reporting by Daniel Allott in Panama City and Joshua Collins in Buenaventura, Colombia. Reporting for this article was supported by the Fund for Investigative Journalism.