Governments Conspire with Cartels in “Controlled Flow”

We first mentioned “controlled flow” in July of this year. That’s the now longstanding policy of Panama and other Central and South American governments to cooperate with migrant-smuggling cartels to usher illegal migrants up from the south toward their ultimate destination, the United States.

Todd Bensman of the Center for Immigration Studies has investigated and written about this practice for years. Currently, he has a piece on The Federalist website entitled “How To Stop The Entire World From Marching Across The U.S. Border.” In it, he warns that “a human migration tsunami of historic proportions—anywhere from 70,000 to 85,000 strong—is on its way from throughout the globe to the U.S. southern border.” This estimate has been confirmed by the Associated Press, Axios, and finally by the Sunday edition of The New York Times.

What those outlets do not reveal, however, is that the government of Panama, assisted by those of Colombia and Costa Rica, is the primary smuggler in their part of the world. Although the U.S. government, including the Trump administration, has long known of these countries’ involvement in the smuggling pipeline, it has never applied diplomatic pressure to halt or interfere with it.

Bensman first began to investigate controlled flow during a trip to Panama and Costa Rica in December, 2018, and wrote of it in a CIS.org piece entitled “Panama and Costa Rica Doing Smugglers’ Work with ‘Controlled Flow’ Policy.” Dubbing the policy “catch, rest, and release,” he said then that “the governments of Panama and Costa Rica grease the skids to get [migrants] smoothly and safely to Nicaragua, Honduras, and Mexico, where organized smugglers can take over again.”

Controlled flow is still underway, as strong as ever. He describes it this way:

Colombia allows thousands of migrants from all over the world to pool up, just as they are now, on edge of the Darien wilderness route to Panama, then tolerates a significant smuggling industry that guides these migrants by foot out through the gap into Panama.

On the gap’s other side, militarized Panamanian police collect the migrants from the trail and bring them to a series of open-door detention camps, which the migrants freely enter and leave. After visiting two, I would call these more like hospitality camps. In these, Panama provides for all the migrants’ basic needs for the next trip: medical treatment, showers, access to communications, money wires, food, and legal permission slips to be in Panama for up to a month.

But everyone knows they won’t need a month. The government coordinates and organizes commercial buses to drive the migrants to the Costa Rica border and drop them at the town of Paso Canoas.

Due to pandemic measures, Bensman says the government of Costa Rica has now ceased to cooperate officially in controlled flow, though cartels there are generally permitted to operate openly without interference. North of Costa Rica, Nicaraguan soldiers accept bribes to facilitate the migrants’ way forward.

Bensman urges the U.S. government to force an end to controlled flow diplomatically and to provide instead “a scheme to fund passenger flight repatriations” from Colombia, Panama, and Costa Rica. He says the Del Rio outcome demonstrated how such a policy could work. The decision by the administration to order the deportation of Haitians to Haiti last month resulted in thousands fleeing the Del Rio camp and others turning around on their way north.

To make his recommendations work, however, “the United States would need to fund detention facilities, legal processing infrastructure, and especially air transport to origin countries.” Therein lies a problem. “It seems doubtful that the Biden administration would have the interest or diplomatic moxie to pull off such a strategy.”

Doubtful indeed.

For more, see The Federalist website.

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