EL PASO, Texas (Border Report) – Migrants from Latin America are still setting off for the U.S. borders albeit nowhere close to the numbers seen prior to 2025.
Those who make the journey are met with violence and exploitation in countries they cross on their way north. Those who made it to Mexico are stranded due to U.S. deterrence tactics including the closing of asylum avenues, according to a new report by Doctors Without Borders.
“Violence along the route between the Darien Gap and Mexico has been very high and has not stopped. It remains one of the longest and most dangerous migration routes on Earth,” the organization said in its Aug. 12 report.
Doctors Without Borders teams encountered 3,000 victims of sexual violence and interviewed 17,000 migrants in need of mental health consultation due to robbery, extortion, kidnapping, torture, forced labor and exploitation between January 2024 and May 2025.
“We continue to provide care for a significant number of patients stranded in southern Mexico and Mexico City, in particular. We have increased psychological care following a surge in cases of anxiety, depression and feelings of hopelessness triggered by abrupt migration policy changes” by the Trump administration last January, the organization reported.
Doctors Without Borders says the new migration policies are having a devastating human impact and calls on the U.S. and other governments to reverse course on deterrence and militarization.
The organization estimates possibly hundreds of thousands of migrants who no longer have asylum avenues in the United States are dispersed and sometimes hide due to fear and stigma amid rhetoric that labels them as criminals.
“It wasn’t just the closure of avenues to request asylum but also the surveillance by U.S. immigration, the designation of military zones, the showcases of weapons of war – helicopters, drones, armored vehicles,” according to Daniel Bruce, a Doctors Without Borders staff member in Juarez, Mexico. “We see it constantly and it sends a clear message to people: The border is closed.”
The U.S. government has allegedly “externalized” its restrictive immigration policy by funding other countries’ migration control strategies. In Mexico, for instance, migrants sent to the southern border city of Villahermosa “basically are given paperwork and told to leave the country in 10 days,” the report states. In addition, Mexican immigration agents allegedly are raiding hotels, hostels, private homes and parks looking for migrants.
In Guatemala, police are allegedly carrying out checks at known migrant transit points and public places and routing them to back to the Honduran border.
Their situation is being made worse by a global reduction of humanitarian aid stemming from the defunding of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) that used to go to health care, mental health care and the distribution of food and hygiene kits, per the report.
Reverse migration also has become a reality. The International Organization for Migration estimated an average of 1,000 to 4,600 monthly arrivals in Honduras of migrants on the march southward. Panamanian authorities documented the arrival of 11,000 returnees between January and June 2025, per the report.
Most of those marching south through Panama are Venezuelans, some not trying to return to their country but headed to Colombia by sea in vessels sometimes involved in shipwrecks, Doctors Without Borders reported.
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