Miranda Villasmil led her daughter and son past hundreds of huddled migrants, many still muddy and swollen from their journey here to Costa Rica from South America. The family of three carried with them only two grocery bags containing belongings from their past lives in Venezuela.
When they reached the line of shuttle buses that would take them to the Nicaraguan border, Ms. Villasmil was so overwhelmed with relief that she texted her relatives back home who were thinking of fleeing. The Costa Rican government, she wrote to them, was willing to provide “safe passage.”
“Let’s move on,” Ms. Villasmil told her family in Venezuela.
Ms. Villasmil is one of thousands of migrants taking advantage of new bus programs adopted by Costa Rica and other Central American countries trying to cope with a historic wave of migration crossing their borders.
According to Panamanian officials, more than 400,000 people have entered Costa Rica from Panama this year, doubling the number of crossings compared to last year and prompting a massive tent encampment along Costa Rica’s borders, complaints from business owners and a increase in abusive smuggling operations. .
In October, Costa Rica’s government declared a national state of emergency and worked out a plan with Panama to transport migrants from the southern to the northern border. Costa Rican officials say the bus program has removed the encampment, as well as relieved pressure on border communities and provided people with a safer alternative to paying human traffickers.
Similar bus programs have also emerged in parts of Honduras and Mexico.
But the strategy has raised alarm in the United States, which has called on its Latin American allies to dissuade people from making the dangerous journey north by encouraging them to apply for refugee status closer to their home countries.
Instead, the shuttles appear to form a fast lane to race north.
“The United States wants to contain people,” said Dr. Marta Blanco, executive director of the Cadena Foundation, a nonprofit humanitarian organization currently assisting migrants at a bus terminal in Paso Canoas, Costa Rica, near at the border. “This is to keep sending people, just to keep the flow going.”
Biden administration officials, who were not authorized to speak publicly, say they have expressed their concerns behind closed doors to the governments of both Costa Rica and Panama, publicly praising both countries for working together on other security and safety agreements. ‘immigration. Biden even hosted President Rodrigo Chaves of Costa Rica at the White House in August before sending $12 million to the country to strengthen its immigration policies.
But U.S. officials have also argued that the bus routes only incentivize more migrants to flee their homes and make the dangerous journey to the U.S. border. Their Central American colleagues argue that migrants are already ready to travel to the United States and that the bus system is making the journey less dangerous.
“This migratory flow cannot be stopped, it cannot be prohibited, but it can be administered,” said Jose Pablo Vindas, coordinator of the Costa Rican immigration police, in an interview from the migrant bus terminal, which had once been a pencil factory.
Every day around 30 buses enter and leave the facility, each carrying 55 migrants. The numbers may increase; More than 14,000 people were bused from Panama to Costa Rica’s northern border in one week, according to Costa Rican officials.
“It’s not a question of enabling, motivating or discouraging this journey,” Vindas said. “It’s about ensuring safe conditions for the people who do this, because otherwise they would be exposed to trafficking or dangerous conditions.”
But some families said they encountered precisely these conditions in the bus terminal.
The bus program is not free and adds one more cost to the many that migrants face on their expensive journey north.
It can also be dangerous. Earlier this year, at least 39 people were killed when a bus carrying migrants through Panama fell off a cliff. Last month, 18 migrants died in a bus crash in Mexico and a crash in Honduras left four dead and a dozen injured.
In Panama, each person must pay $60 to be transported by bus to the main terminal in Costa Rica. They will then have to pay another $30 to board a shuttle that will take them to the border with Nicaragua. Fares are collected by bus companies, authorized by governments.
On a recent October day inside the terminal, dozens of frantic families lined up outside a money transfer office to receive funds from a relative for a bus ticket.
Travelers can only leave the facility on a bus, Vindas said. They can’t just walk out of the facility.
Bunk beds and military cots for about 380 people were set up in a nearby building, but they had been full for days. Mr. Vindas said the facility normally housed more than 1,000 people and recently housed up to 1,800, with hundreds sleeping on the floor.
Jose Diaz and his family had been traveling for 20 days when they arrived at the bus terminal. They were relieved to board one of the shuttles provided by the Panamanian government that would transport them north.
But he soon discovered he needed more bus tickets – and had spent his last $120 in Panama, just to get here.
The Diaz family had two options, a terminal employee said: A relative could wire them money, or they could wait in the dark underpass of the bus terminal, along with dozens of other families, and sleep on the concrete with little light. With the terminal full of people, Mr. Diaz prepared his daughters to make their way under the building.
“We feel like prisoners – prisoners, prisoners, prisoners – because we can’t get out,” he said. “They think you have a lot of money. Rather, they come to secure their future.”
Below, in the darkness, families huddled on sheets on the concrete floor or leaned against loose plastic barricades. There was a frame for a bunk bed but no mattress. Babies in diapers ran around the stunned adults. Parents were desperately trying to find staff to help their sick children.
Some migrants said they were not provided with regular meals and that when they asked for water they were told to drink rainwater dripping from the floor above. Many said the only way to get enough money was to leave the facility and work, which authorities had banned.
In an interview, Marta Vindas, immigration director for Costa Rica, rejected comparisons between the bus terminal and a detention facility, pointing out that migrants had access to bathrooms, meals and numerous humanitarian organizations on site.
“This is a transit area; that is why they are there, so that they can flow to the other border,” Ms. Vindas said.
Other Central American countries have also adopted busing practices. Honduran migration and transportation officials have created direct bus routes to Guatemala as a safe alternative for migrants. In Mexico, transit programs are more sporadic. The government has set up centers in Oaxaca where buses ferry migrants north to relieve pressure on the country’s southern border, but it has also flown migrants south, away from the U.S. border.
In the United States, Texas and Florida have committed migrants to New York, Chicago, Philadelphia and several other cities to facilitate the concentration of people arriving in border cities. But Republicans have also used the practice to punish blue states.
Before Costa Rica’s bus program, migrants crossed the country’s southern border without major problems, before temporarily settling in a tent city on a fairgrounds in the town of Paso Canoas while seeking short-term work.
“At least this bus system moves the problem elsewhere instead of keeping it here,” said Rubén Acón, president of Canatur, Costa Rica’s national chamber of tourism. He said the country is facing “the same situation” as New York City , where Mayor Eric Adams said his resources were stretched thin by the wave of migrants arriving in the city.
From the street outside the bus terminal, Kimberly Salas, 43, of Venezuela, and her son, Pedro Zerpa, wondered whether they should go inside. While traveling from Panama they had heard about the new bus program that could speed up their journey north. But as they pondered, they saw a person at the window of the building motioning for them to stay away.
“Okay,” Mr. Zerpa said. “We can walk.”
The next day they were spotted walking in the scorching sun along a highway heading north into the United States.
Emiliano Rodríguez Mega contributed a report from Mexico City, e Joan Suazo from Tegucigalpa, Honduras.
