Todd Bensman, senior national security fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies, said there is no evidence that the “superhighway” immigration route via the Darien Gap has been closed despite an agreement between the U.S. and new Panamanian President Jose Raul Mulino.
The Darien Gap between Colombia and Panama, which is the only land path connecting Central America and South America, is used by illegal immigrants from South America and other parts of the world as a passageway to get to North America.
While the typical number of illegal immigrants that cross the Darien Gap to get to the U.S.-Mexico border per year is less than 10,000, hundreds of thousands have used the passageway under the Biden-Harris administration.
On July 1, the U.S. and Panama signed a Memorandum of Understanding designed to jointly reduce the number of migrants using the Darien Gap as a passageway to North America.
The U.S. agreed to fund repatriation flights to send migrants back to their countries of origin as part of the agreement with Panama.
However, Bensman, who has traveled twice to the Darien Gap to document the migration crisis, said he found “no evidence” that the agreement between the U.S. and Panama has taken effect.
“Probably the main reason that they were unable to really get this thing done is that they really relied on U.S. financial support and maybe even material support for large scale repatriation flights, frequent enough repatriation flights to create a deterrence on the ground there in Darien. That has not come through,” Bensman explained on Monday’s edition of The Michael Patrick Leahy Show.
“The Americans appear to be welching on that deal, so you’ve got the president of Panama now holding press conferences, complaining about, ‘Where’s the money? We’ve signed an agreement, the Americans signed an agreement to help with air repatriation and they really haven’t come through’,” Bensman added.
Bensman said he believes the Biden-Harris administration may be stalling on its agreement to slow migration via the Darien Gap due to the excessive funding that went into developing the area into a “safe, orderly, and humane” route for migrants.
“Two and a half years ago, the Biden-Harris administration began a program of creating a superhighway through there to make it faster for more people…They called it safe, orderly, and humane migration through the Darien. That was the whole thing. They brought the UN in, the NGOs, they flooded the zone with all kinds of U.S. taxpayer cash for that, no problem for that. I never thought that the Biden Harris administration would want to undo all of that. They have so much investment with an opposite policy to let as many people in as they can get through there and now all of a sudden, here’s a government in the area that’s ready to shut it down,” Bensman explained.
Looking ahead, Bensman said he was not optimistic of the route being closed under the rest of the Biden-Harris administration or a possible Harris administration.
“I saw no change at all. Nothing different from how it was before. Maybe I should be a little bit more optimistic that we’re still early and things might change and whatever, but…I don’t think that anything’s going to happen unless Donald Trump gets into office. I think that a Harris administration would just continue like this and that the Biden administration will not do anything different at all until he’s gone,” Bensman said.
Watch the full interview:
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Kaitlin Housler is a reporter at The Tennessee Star and The Star News Network. Follow Kaitlin on X / Twitter.
