Yet these challenges don’t deter everyone. Each year, tens of thousands of migrants en route to the U.S. attempt to cross the Darien Gap. Estimates on the number of annual transit migrants in Panama range from 20,000 (consistent with public Panamanian apprehension figures) to 34,000 (based on Colombian apprehension figures). These figures are small compared to Venezuelan refugee outflows across South America—where an estimated 3.4 million Venezuelans have fled their country since 2014. But unlike other mass migrations in Latin America, the majority of migrants currently moving through Panama originate in countries outside the Western Hemisphere, such as Eritrea, Nepal, Bangladesh, India, Pakistan and Cameroon. These extracontinental migrants are attempting to arrive in the U.S. for a variety of reasons similar to Latin American migrants, including to reunify with family, to seek asylum or to search for economic opportunities.
Both regional immigration policies and geographic constraints contribute to this particular migration flow. First, extracontinental migrants often enter the Americas through Brazil or Ecuador, which have laxer visa laws. This migrant population then continues north, typically with an intended destination of the U.S. or Canada. Second, the crossing point between Colombia and Panama is almost impossible, meaning that only migrants without other migration options attempt the journey. The extracontinental population—together with migrants from Cuba and Haiti—tend to be the migrants with such limited options to enter the U.S., again given the United States’s strict visa regulations.
Extracontinental migrants represent only a small portion of the individuals arriving to the U.S. In fiscal 2018, only 3.2 percent of migrants apprehended along the U.S.-Mexico southern border originated from the African and Asian continents, barely denting overall U.S. apprehension figures. However, that figure is up from only 2 percent in fiscal 2017 as this population continues to increase every year. The United States’s real interest in this population lies in the security and political challenges posed by extracontinental migrants’ countries of origin. In fact, since at least 2011 the Department of Homeland Security has used a different lexicon for this population, opting instead to use the term “special interest alien” when referring to migrants originating in countries that “promote, produce, or protect terrorist organizations or their members.” Despite these heightened concerns, however, there is no evidence that extracontinental migrants pose any greater threat to U.S. national security.
So while the remote jungle of the Darien Gap may feel far away from the migration debates in Washington, Panama’s border patrol efforts are actually closely linked to U.S. policies. For years, the U.S. has supported Panama’s border enforcement efforts, often as an extension of the United States’s own security and border priorities.
In 2008, Panama announced a modification to its border and jungle security entities to address the irregular flows of people and goods. The government effectively combined several law enforcement agencies into one security entity—known commonly as SENAFRONT, or the Servicio Nacional de Fronteras—that would patrol Panama’s land borders and seas, interdict drugs and weapons trafficking, and counter guerilla violence overflows from Colombia. Increasingly, SENAFRONT’s mandate also includes apprehending and detaining migrants. Since the agency’s restructuring, officers have been posted in almost every community throughout the Darien, often being helicoptered in to their posts or enduring up to 13-hour canoe rides through the jungle’s river system.
U.S. law enforcement and military forces offer training to SENAFRONT officers, including international courses—often held in the United States—but also “marksmanship, basic patrolling, land navigation, communication, medical skills, and engineer tasks” to be conducted in Panama. The United States also increasingly provides funding and equipment. In fiscal 2016, the United States provided Panamanian security forces—including SENAFRONT—with more than US$8 million in funds, an almost 800 percent increase from fiscal 2014 as the countries’ migration and security cooperation increased. These funds went toward radios, boats for maritime patrol, night-vision goggles and dive gear. Most were allocated to security forces operating in the Darien Gap.
In exchange, Panama apprehends migrants and exchanges information on the transit migration population through the United States’s biometric registration system, known as BITMAP. According to the United States’s 2018 Biometric Identification Transnational Migration Alert Program Authorization Act, the BITMAP system was “established to equip international partner-country law enforcement officers to collect and share biometric and biographic data on special interest individuals and to identify potential threat actors transiting through participating countries.” Panama is one of these participating countries—and by July 2017, Panama had already entered more than 20,000 registries into this system.
Overall, Panamanian officials apprehend the vast majority of extracontinental migrants while they travel through the Darien, given the jungle’s natural bottleneck effect. This means that Panamanian border security officials will run every apprehended migrant’s biographic information through international databases weeks, or even months, before migrants complete their transit to the U.S. southern border. They then share that information with U.S. law enforcement authorities. Such moves represent an almost invisible form of border security outsourcing, targeted primarily at the extracontinental migrant population.
A Case Study in the Outsourcing of U.S. Border Control
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Originally Posted by GuanoLoco
