The End of Title 42 is Going to Mean Chaos for Latin America

Joshua Collins
5 min readMay 9, 2023

Biden’s new migration policy brings military action in the Darien Gap, confusion in Colombia, bottlenecks in Central America, and a lot more deportations to Mexico

Humanitarian workers give warm drinks to migrants on the Colombian-Ecuadorian border (Photo: Joshua Collins)

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Bogotá, Colombia — Title 42, the Trump-era migration policy enacted during the COVID epidemic that resulted in more than 2 million expulsions, will finally be allowed to expire by the Center For Disease Control (CDC) on May 11. Despite promising to end the program on the campaign trail, U.S. President Joe Biden greatly expanded the program instead.

Ahead of an expected surge in migrants, Washington has enacted several policies across the region, and well beyond U.S borders, as a “prevention through deterrence strategy”. What that means for Colombia and its infamous Darien Gap, the dense jungle corridor on the Panamanian-Colombian border which acts as the principal gateway for migration into Central America and beyond isn’t clear, but militarization of the Darien Gap is a distinct possibility.

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Joshua Collins

A reporter on immigration and world affairs, based in Cucuta, Colombia. Bylines at Al Jazeera, Caracas Chronicles, New Humanitarian and more