Panamanian government officials have reported that approximately 4,000 migrants, most of whom came from Haiti, have passed through Panama on the Colombian border and are en route to the United States.
The migrants traveled through “treacherous” jungles to migration reception stations in Darien and Chiriqui, an anonymous source from Panama’s security ministry told Reuters.
While the officials say the migrants are mostly Haitian, some people from Cuba and other places are also part of the group, Reuters said.
Reuters also reported that about 16,000 people are in Necocli, a town in northern Colombia, where they await a boat ride to the Darien Gap. There, smugglers will reportedly take them through “one of the most dangerous and impassable regions of Latin America.”
Last month, Colombia and Panama decided to allow 500 migrants a day to pass through their borders, far fewer than the nearly 1,500 arrivals seen daily, Reuters reported.
Over 80,000 migrants traveled through Panama this year, Panama’s President Laurentino Cortizo said to the United Nations General Assembly on Thursday. In January, the country was receiving about 800 people per day, and as of August, that figure was up to 30,000, per Reuters.
As of Friday, a makeshift camp of Haitian migrants in Del Rio, Texas, that had drawn national attention was cleared completely after it was home to about 15,000 people earlier this month. Most of those people remain in the U.S. while others were either deported or went to Mexico, Reuters said.
Over the weekend, Haitian Prime Minister Ariel Henry said that such migration was bound to continue amid global inequality.
“Migration will continue as long as the planet has both wealthy areas, whilst most of the world’s population lives in poverty, even extreme poverty, without any prospects of a better life,” he said on Saturday in a video to the U.N. General Assembly