Some migrants told me that another factor, one that predates Trump’s second term, is driving southbound migration too: the grave danger to would-be asylum seekers idling in Mexico. In January 2024, the Mexican government began helping U.S. officials move migrants and asylum seekers away from the U.S. border. In southern Mexico, where corrupt public officials often overlook cartel violence, criminals have extorted and kidnapped people, sometimes targeting those likely to have U.S.-based relatives willing to pay their ransoms. Several migrants told me that they wanted to escape conditions in Mexico that were worse than those that inspired them to leave their home countries in the first place.

Sooo you’re admitting they weren’t actually asylum seekers?

Costa Rica is quickly becoming overwhelmed. When I met with him last month, Omer Badilla Toledo, a vice minister who oversees migration policy for Costa Rica’s government, told me that the country of about 5.1 million people was currently processing more than 200,000 asylum applications. According to IOM officials I spoke with, the country’s asylum system had a nine-month backlog. None of the seven shelters I visited had any vacancies.

Over 10% of the US population is either here illegally or the child of someone here illegally, spare me your “overwhelmed” bullshit.

Costa Rican officials acknowledge that they are not fully prepared. “We expect a wave—a gigantic wave,” Badilla told me during an interview in his San José office. “We think they”—migrants—“are staggered between Mexico and Nicaragua, and at some point they are going to explode into Costa Rica.” With sober certainty, he told me that the country would have to declare a state of emergency to authorize the release of state resources to build temporary shelters and provide food, medical assistance, clothing, and toiletries for migrants. “We do not have the capability,” he said.

Then the migrants will move on and be parasitic elsewhere, you believe they will suck blood from a carcass? There’s a reason they aren’t staying in Mexico.

Badilla—an appointee of President Chaves, whose centrist Social Democratic Progress Party won the country’s 2022 election with an anti-corruption campaign—says that xenophobia is already on the rise in Costa Rica. He believes that his party, which faces an election in 2026, only stands to lose from a nativist political backlash like those that have displaced moderate governments in Europe and the United States in recent years.

“Centrist social democrats” 😂😂😂😂😂😂

The Trump administration might welcome the news that migrants are turning back, but a more unstable Central and South America could hurt U.S. interests. Should Costa Rica’s Washington-friendly government fall, a weaker state or a more Beijing-oriented alternative could be elected in its place. Meanwhile, the shutdown of the U.S. asylum system will pressure more migrants to turn to smugglers to cross the border, and leave migrants vulnerable to exploitation by the Mexican cartels that Trump promised to attack in his campaign. Trump’s policies are tarnishing America’s legacy as a refuge for persecuted people searching for freedom and human rights, and could embolden other nations to adopt similar tactics in violation of international law.

The blatant gaslighting here is insane, we have zero obligation to be the world’s “refugee” center, especially when they are 100% all economic migrants. The left love Mexico except when it becomes time to put migrants there and it suddenly transforms into a cartel run shithole.