Finalist: Julie Turkewitz and Federico Rios of The New York Times

By Julie Turkewitz

Photographs by Federico Rios

Every step through the jungle, there is money to be made.

The boat ride to reach the rainforest: $40. A guide on the treacherous route once you start walking: $170. A porter to carry your backpack over the muddy mountains: $100. A plate of chicken and rice after arduous climbing: $10. Special, all-inclusive packages to make the perilous slog faster and more bearable, with tents, boots and other necessities: $500, or more.

Hundreds of thousands of migrants are now pouring through a sliver of jungle known as the Darién Gap, the only land route to the United States from South America, in a record tide that the Biden administration and the Colombian government have vowed to stop.

But the windfall here at the edge of the continent is simply too big to pass up, and the entrepreneurs behind the migrant gold rush are not underground smugglers hiding from the authorities.

They are politicians, prominent businessmen and elected leaders, now sending thousands of migrants toward the United States in plain sight each day — and charging millions of dollars a month for the privilege.

“We have organized everything: the boatmen, the guides, the bag carriers,” said Darwin García, an elected community board member and former town councilman in Acandí, a Colombian municipality at the entrance to the jungle.

The crush of migrants willing to risk everything to make it to the United States is “the best thing that could have happened” to a poor town like his, he said.

Now, Mr. García’s younger brother, Luis Fernando Martínez, the head of a local tourism association, is a leading candidate for mayor of Acandí — defending the migration business as the only profitable industry in a place that “didn’t have a defined economy before.”

The Darién Gap has quickly morphed into one the Western Hemisphere’s most pressing political and humanitarian crises. A trickle only a few years ago has become a flood: More than 360,000 people have already crossed the jungle in 2023, according to the Panamanian government, surpassing last year’s almost unthinkable record of nearly 250,000.

In response, the United States, Colombia and Panama signed an agreement in April to “end the illicit movement of people” through the Darién Gap, a practice that “leads to death and exploitation of vulnerable people for significant profit.”

Today, that profit is greater than ever, with local leaders collecting tens of millions of dollars this year alone from migrants in an enormous people-moving operation — one that international experts say is more sophisticated than anything they have seen.

“This is a beautiful economy,” said Fredy Marín, a former town councilman in the neighboring municipality of Necoclí who manages a boat company that ferries migrants on their way to the United States. He says he transports thousands of people a month, charging them $40 a head.

Mr. Marín is now running for mayor of Necoclí, vowing to preserve the thriving migration industry.

“What was first a problem,” he said of the many migrants who began showing up in the last few years, “has become an opportunity.”

American diplomats have visited the towns next to the Darién Gap in recent months, strolling dusty streets and shaking hands with Mr. Marín, Mr. García and others running the migration business. White House officials say they believe that the Colombian government is following through on its commitment to crack down on illicit migration.

But on the ground, the opposite is happening. The New York Times has spent months here in the Darién Gap and surrounding towns, and the national government has, at best, a marginal presence.

When the national authorities can be seen at all, they are often waving migrants through, or in the case of the national police, fist-bumping the men selling expensive travel packages through the jungle.

The top police official in the region, Col. William Zubieta, said it wasn’t his job to halt the flow. Instead, he argued, the nation’s migration authorities should be exerting control.

“Unfortunately, they do not have it,” he said.

Colombia’s president, Gustavo Petro, acknowledged in an interview that the national government had little control over the region, but added that it was not his goal to stop migration through the Darién anyway — despite the agreement his government signed with the United States.

After all, he argued, the roots of this migration were “the product of poorly taken measures against Latin American peoples,” particularly by the United States, pointing to Washington’s sanctions against Venezuela.

He said he had no intention of sending “horses and whips” to the border to solve a problem that wasn’t of his country’s making.

In the absence of the Colombian government, local leaders have decided to handle migration themselves.

Today, the business is run by elected community board members like Mr. García, through a registered nonprofit started by the board’s president and his family. It’s called the New Light Darién Foundation, and it manages the entire route from Acandí to the border with Panama — setting prices for the journey, collecting fees and running sprawling campsites in the middle of the jungle.

The foundation has hired more than 2,000 local guides and backpack carriers, organized in teams with numbered T-shirts of varying colors — lime green, butter yellow, sky blue — like members of an amateur soccer league.

Migrants pay for tiers of what the foundation calls “services,” including the basic $170 guide and security package to the border. Then a migration “adviser” wraps two bracelets around their wrists as proof of payment.

“Like a ticket to Disney,” said Renny Montilla, 25, a construction worker from Venezuela.

Mr. García says that the foundation’s work is legal, in part because it guides people to an international border, but not over one.

Some officials have questioned whether the foundation is running a smuggling operation under the guise of a nonprofit. A human rights officer responsible for monitoring the Necoclí government blamed the crisis on the negligence of national leaders, and noted that officials weren’t motivated to stop it because they were making money from it.

Even Mr. García’s brother, the mayoral candidate, said he wished the national government would clarify the legal “thin line” that local residents working in the migration industry were walking.

“Five hundred thousand people are going to pass through” our town, Mr. Martínez said. “What do we do?”

Hanging over the entire business is a large and powerful drug-trafficking group called the Gaitanist Self-Defense Forces, sometimes known as the Gulf Clan. Its control over this part of northern Colombia is so complete that the country’s ombudsman’s office calls the group the region’s “hegemonic” armed actor.

In a recent report, the ombudsman accused the group of exercising what it called “criminal governance” over the region, meaning that whatever happens here must have the group’s blessing.

Mr. García, the community board member, acknowledged that the armed group “provides security” in the region, but insisted that the foundation was completely separate.

“I am not part of the Gulf Clan,” he said.

In a statement, the armed group contended that it “in no way” profits from “the business that traffics in migrants’ dreams.”

Mr. Petro, the Colombian president, dismissed that notion, saying the Gulf Clan was earning $30 million a year from the migration business.

At the edge of the forest, the transactions are plain to see.

Before they enter the jungle, migrants have to pay the group a separate tax of about $80 a person for permission to cross the Darién, according to multiple people who collect the fee in Necoclí.

Once migrants have paid, they even get a receipt, the tax collectors say: a tiny sticker, often an American flag, on their passports.

Taming a Jungle

Thick, hot and prone to intense rain, sliced by raging rivers and steep mountains, the Darién jungle acted as a vast natural barrier between North and South America for generations, thwarting the flow of people north.

Guerrillas and other armed groups have long used the dense forest for cover and drug smuggling, sometimes attacking those who dared to pass. The terrain and threat of violence once kept all but the most desperate away.

But a stew of crises and politics — like the turmoil in Venezuela, Haiti and now Ecuador, the economic devastation of the pandemic, and visa regulations that prevent many migrants from simply flying to Mexico or other countries — has brought a huge rise in the number of people trekking from South America to the United States in the last few years.

Now, the New Light Darién Foundation is helping to turn that natural barrier into something much more passable, with restaurants, camps, porters and guides.

This new economy, run in large part by elected leaders, has acted as an accelerant, emboldening more people to take — and pay for — the journey than ever.

In August alone, almost 82,000 people made the trek through the Darién, according to Panamanian officials, by far the largest single-month total on record.

So many people are coming through the jungle that Panama and Costa Rica say they cannot handle the surge. Panama’s top migration official, Samira Gozaine, has even threatened to close its border with Colombia.

And the political tumult stacks up all the way to the United States. After dipping briefly this year, migrant apprehensions at the American border have risen again, with a record number of families crossing.

The Colombians transporting migrants through the jungle say they are providing a humanitarian service. The migrants will try to get to the United States regardless, they say, driven by violence, poverty and political upheaval at home.

So, by professionalizing the migration business, Colombian leaders say they can prevent their impoverished towns from being overwhelmed by hundreds of thousands of needy people, help the migrants traverse the treacherous jungle more safely — and feed their own economies in the process.

Migrant deaths in the Colombian portion of the Darién now appear to be relatively low, aid workers say, because even the Gaitanist armed group, or Gulf Clan, has realized that the Darién’s notoriety is bad for business. Local officials say the group has set a policy to keep customers coming: Anyone who robs, rapes or kills a migrant will face punishment, possibly even death.

But the Daríen is still perilous, with diseases like malaria and dengue stalking migrants in “a grotesque test of survival,” said Carlos Franco-Paredes, a doctor studying the journey.

Beyond that, the foundation’s guides take migrants only part of the way, leaving them at the border with Panama, often with no food or money left — and days of hiking to go in a part of the jungle that is even more dangerous than what they already endured. The United Nations counted more than 140 migrants deaths in the Panama portion of the Darién last year alone, nearly triple the year before. At least 10 percent of them were children.

Mr. Petro, Colombia’s first leftist president, came to office last year promising to help long forgotten parts of the country — like the communities now in charge of the jungle crossings.

In the interview, Mr. Petro said he had never heard of the New Light Darién Foundation. But just like the people running the migration business, he presented his hands-off approach to migration as a humanitarian one.

The answer to this crisis, he said, was not to go “chasing migrants” at the border or to force them into “concentration camps” that blocked them from trying to reach the United States.

“I would say yes, I’ll help, but not like you think,” Mr. Petro said of the agreement with the Biden administration, which was big on ambition but thin on details. He said any solution to the issue had to focus on “solving migrants’ social problems, which do not come from Colombia.”

He expects half a million people to cross the Darién this year, he said, and then a million next year.

On the other side of the Darién Gap, Panamanian officials are fuming, accusing “countries to the south” of shirking “their due responsibility” to stem the tide of people heading north.

“There is nothing humanitarian about this,” Ms. Gozaine, the Panamanian migration official, said at a recent news conference. “The children who die in the jungle, the women who are raped, the men who are raped, the people who are killed.”

Crisis, Then Bonanza

The boats leave each day from the eastern edge of Necoclí, the docks filled with people from around the world — not only from the Western Hemisphere, but from as far as India, China and Afghanistan.

“Travel safe!” Mr. Marín’s employees boom from a microphone. “Travel happy!”

At his office, where a service award from the national police hangs on the wall, Mr. Marín said that he was proud to be a part of the industry that had become the region’s most important employer.

Just outside, a new construction project soars, soon to be a gas station that will fuel his boats more quickly than ever.

Remote, tropical and bordering the Caribbean Sea, the Colombian towns on the migrant path to the jungle are beautiful but poor. More than half of their residents live below the poverty line. Many are victims of the country’s decades-long war, forced to live among criminal groups for generations. Fishing, tourism and wildcat gold mining have long been among the main sources of income.

But in 2021, the towns started changing, quickly. Thousands of Haitians began showing up, fleeing the tumult that only worsened after the assassination of their president.

Suddenly, the region’s already precarious sewage, water and electricity systems were overwhelmed. The beaches filled with migrant tents, pushing out an already struggling tourism industry.

The way local leaders tell it, pleas for help from the national government fell on deaf ears.

Mr. Marín, then a city councilman, was one of the first to do something big, turning crisis into opportunity by taking command of the boat company, Katamaranes S.A.S., with the goal of shuttling migrants to the Darién on their way to the United States.

Since then, Necoclí, once a sleepy beach town offering two-for-one cocktails, nature hikes and sea excursions for tourists, has been transformed.

At almost any hour, day or night, private buses wheeze into town, carrying migrants who have learned about the Darién route on Facebook, WhatsApp and TikTok, the de facto advertising services for the journey.

The streets of Necoclí are now filled with people speaking Mandarin, Persian and Nepali. Locals with wooden carts make a living selling flimsy tents, snake repellent and toddler-size rubber boots. Aid workers in canvas vests patrol the streets, offering a bit of help — water jugs, diapers, sunscreen.

A laminated instruction booklet tied to the register at a grocery store provides tips for crossing the jungle. A map marks in red the common locations of “violent assaults and rapes.”

New hostels are everywhere. In a region so poor that horse carts still plod the streets, expensive motorcycles roar through town and $100,000 SUVs roll alongside the sea.

The poorest migrants arrive by foot, camping on the beach. Most come from Venezuela, which has been in the grips of an economic and humanitarian crisis for nearly a decade, with few signs that the country’s authoritarian leader, Nicolás Maduro, will give up power any time soon.

Many of the Venezuelan migrants congregate outside a thatch-roof soup kitchen opened just a few months ago by an aid group. Here, children waiting for meals of beans and arepas bear the telltale signs of malnutrition: skinny limbs, hair turned rust yellow.

Francis Sifontes, 32, stood in the breakfast line. In Venezuela, she had made so little working for the government’s signature food-distribution program that her husband had been forced to beg in the street.

Destitute, the family moved to Colombia, where they cut sugar cane, grueling work that paid $5 a day.

Ms. Sifontes had arrived in Necoclí three weeks before, with her husband, stepson and four young children. To earn money for the rest of the journey, they had found work in the region’s new micro-economy, buying small goods in bulk from local merchants — plastic trash bags, cheap lighters — and selling them to other migrants for a profit of 20 or 30 cents a piece.

At night they slept in a single tent in the shadow of Mr. Marín’s office.

But they were hopeful, Ms. Sifontes said, because they had recently struck a deal with Mr. Marín. If they cleaned the beach by his business, for an unspecified amount of time, she said, Mr. Marín had promised to give them three boat tickets to the Darién.

Darién Gap Inc.

Once across the choppy Gulf of Urabá, the passengers on Mr. Marín’s boats arrive in the town of Acandí, at the mouth of the jungle. For decades, some residents here have led migrants into the jungle for a fee, arguing that people would die without help.

But with the arrival of the Haitians in 2021, and then an even bigger wave of Venezuelans in 2022, local leaders began to organize, bringing the migration business under the New Light Darién Foundation.

On a recent afternoon, Alexandra Vilcacundo, 44, traveling with 30 others fleeing the rising violence in Ecuador, stepped onto the wooden dock in Acandí. Ms. Vilcacundo, a seamstress, looked terrified, having left three children behind. “We know that we are risking our lives,” she said of the journey ahead.

On the bus to Necoclí, she said they had been stopped five times by Colombian police officers who threatened to arrest them unless they paid bribes. (A dozen others said they had also been extorted by the police.)

Once loaded into motorized rickshaws, Ms. Vilcacundo and the other migrants were ferried through Acandí on dirt roads still flooded from the previous night’s rain. They passed cow pastures and a corn field, before finally passing through a gate into a compound Mr. García called “the shelter.”

There were no police, migration authorities or international groups present. To the contrary, an insignia — “AGC,” the Spanish initials of the Gaitanist Self-Defense Forces, or Gulf Clan — had been painted on a wall on the way to the shelter, a reminder of who ultimately called the shots.

Roughly a thousand migrants had gathered inside the compound. Local men in skinny jeans, polo shirts and sunglasses roved the sun-beaten expanse, introducing themselves as the foundation’s “advisers,” in charge of collecting fees and describing the route from here.

For those who didn’t have the money on hand, there was a Western Union agent inside the compound, charging 15 percent per transfer. (The company said it had agents in Acandí, but that anyone operating inside a migrant camp was doing so in an unauthorized way).

Mr. García of the community board showed off public works nearby, built by the board with funds from the migration business, he said: a foot bridge by the dock, a school in one of the area’s poorest neighborhoods, meters of paved road, a drainage system so the town would not flood.

He said the town had spent decades trying to become a tourist destination. But for now, without decent schools, a hospital or even a road connecting it to the rest of the country, all it had was migration.

“What we have done” with migration is more than tourism brought “in 50 years,” Mr. García said.

Sutures and Ice Cream

Few places embody the transformation of the Darién route like the first camp in the jungle.

Two years ago, the route from the shelter in Acandí to this camp, Las Tecas, was a crude dirt path. Today, it is a road navigable by truck. The camp itself was once a muddy expanse. Today it is a village, with a welcome pavilion, security checkpoint, 38 shops and restaurants, Wi-Fi and even a billiard hall.

Here, the New Light Darién Foundation has organized the vast teams of guides and backpack carriers in their numbered and color-coded T-shirts. A few have dressed up their uniforms further, adding words like “respect” and “friendship” to their sleeves.

The foundation coordinates their schedules to spread around the work — guides get to make one trek every 15 days — and pays them $125 per trek. Porters are contracted individually by migrants who want help carrying their luggage or children, somewhere between $60 and $120 per load. Any employees who abandon or rob their charges are fired, said Mr. García.

“If I had not found this job, I have no idea how I would have sustained my family,” said Aureliana Domicó, 32, a single mother who works as a backpack carrier, carting up to 70 pounds to the Panama border several times a week. Months ago, a heavy rain wiped out her plantain crop, leaving her four children with nothing to eat. Now, she makes as much as $800 a month.

Elmer Arias, 29, a guide, had struggled to find work after losing an arm. He had punched a window in anger, and because there is no hospital in Acandí, it took him days to get care, eventually leading to an amputation. The migrants were not that different from him, he explained — reaching for better lives, “just like us.”

At the Las Tecas welcome pavilion that evening, guides wanded the migrants with metal detectors, a new protocol.

“Razors?” one guide asked, confiscating anything sharp. “Knives? Machetes?”

The next morning, more than 2,000 migrants assembled in the heart of the camp. There were children in Barbie T-shirts, two anxious moms with toddlers on leashes, a man with a baby on his back and a doll tucked into his waistband, a woman with an American flag backpack.

Samuel, 13, wore a purple Lakers shirt. His mother, an elder care aide, had left Venezuela years before, moving from city to city in Colombia and Peru, trying to find decent work. She had spent the last of her savings on their tickets to the jungle.

To their right, the sun rose over the forest. To their left, guides and backpack carriers waited. The crowd buzzed with excitement.

Soon, a man from the foundation, Iván Díaz, climbed a hill above the camp, beginning the morning’s orientation. This was not a race, he instructed on a megaphone. This was about surviving to make it to the United States.

Don’t sleep by the rivers, he said; they often rise with the rain. Eat food with salt to prevent dehydration. Take breaks. Children should stay with their parents. Pregnant women should stick with the guides. Anyone caught with drugs would get sent back to Necoclí.

A bullhorn roared. “Applause!” Mr. Díaz shouted. The crowd cheered.

“Duro, duro, duro,” he yelled — hard, hard, hard — “for Maduro, Maduro, Maduro!” he added, a sarcastic nod to the Venezuelan president.

The group laughed and booed.

“With God’s blessing it will all go well,” Mr. Díaz continued. “I know that in three weeks you will be sending me Western Union transfers from New York.”

It was roughly a day and a half hike to the border with Panama, and along the way, the foundation had positioned small camps where migrants could buy water and food.

Prices rose as people climbed. A Gatorade cost $2.50 at the start, and $5 at the end. Ice cream sellers hiked with the crowd, coolers on their backs. At the bend of a river, the crowds were met by a man holding a platter of homemade empanadas for sale.

The migrants moved slowly, crisscrossing a river, climbing hills knotted by roots. With so many people, the traffic jam at times slowed to gridlock.

By midmorning, Natasha, 5, from Ecuador, slipped from the shoulders of a man who had been carrying her. Natasha came crashing down, slicing a spot above her eye on a rock.

She wailed in pain as blood gushed from her face. Her mother began to panic.

But up ahead, there was a nurse. In recent months, the New Light Darién Foundation has hired several nurses and a doctor to care for the migrants. In the absence of any other institutional presence, they had become a lifeline.

On the porch of a hut, the nurse, José Luis Fernández, cleaned the wound, injected an anesthetic and sutured the cut. “If it had hit a little higher,” he said of the blow, “we could have been talking about a dead person.”

Mr. Fernández used to work for a public hospital in nearby Turbo, he said, but left “for salary reasons.”

The foundation pays him much more.

Most of the group slept that night in a crowded, muddy expanse known to the guides as the Fourth Camp, where a generator buzzed and several restaurants offered fried fish or chicken for $10 a plate, a small fortune for most of the migrants.

Many families, having spent all their money to get this far, ate nothing, wondering what they would do for the rest of the trek. At dusk, the camp smelled of human feces and gasoline. The mood began to shift.

In his tent, José García, 32, explained that he had already crossed the Darién last year, but had decided to turn around after it seemed the Biden administration would not let Venezuelans into the United States.

Now, he was trying again, this time with his wife, Dayarid Pernia, 24, and their two children, ages 1 and 3. But by this point, they were penniless.

He rued the prices charged by the foundation to get this far.

“If this were humanitarian,” Mr. García said of the route, his voice settling somewhere between a laugh and a cry, “they would lend a hand to those who have nothing.”

The Handoff

For thousands of migrants, the normalization of this route has set up a cruel paradox.

On the Colombian side of the Darién, where the government is almost absent and the Gaitanist Self-Defense Forces, or Gulf Clan, dominate, crime in the jungle is lower, at least according to aid groups and researchers interviewing migrants at the end of the route.

That perception of safety is sending more and more people into the forest, believing that they will make it out alive.

But at the border with Panama, the foundation’s guides leave them — crossing could lead to arrest — and the power of the armed group recedes. Then, on the Panamanian side, small criminal bands rove the forest, using rape as a tool to extract money and punish those who cannot pay.

The regional head of one aid group said that women and children are often the victims, with men forced to watch. Children as young as 6 have been shot and killed in this section of the jungle in the past year.

And anyone without money — including those who spent it paying guides in Colombia — is particularly vulnerable.

On their last morning in Colombia, the group of more than 2,000 migrants rose before dawn. Inside one of the restaurants, a few raised their hands in a pre-trek prayer.

“Thank you, Lord,” said Nestor Fernández, 33, a Venezuelan who had been working construction in Chile. “Just as we submit to you, may everything that tries to rise against us submit — every robbery, every theft, every kidnapping, every killing.”

In the darkness, the parade of people began their march to the border. Children held jugs of sugar water, which might be their only sustenance for days. A pregnant woman was helped out of the camp by two others, one on each side.

It took roughly two hours to climb two hills known as the Twins, and then they reached a muddy clearing with a hand-painted sign marking the border.

In the clearing, migrants still lucky enough to have money paid their porters. And then a man — one of the guides had introduced him as the “head of security,” without elaboration — stepped forward to offer final instructions.

Move slowly, stick together and follow a route marked by blue and green pieces of plastic, he told the group. It would take three more days to reach the end of the jungle, he explained, where the United Nations and the government of Panama offered support.

“From the municipality of Acandí,” he said before the migrants pushed on, “we would like to wish you a happy trip.”

Reporting was contributed by Federico Rios in the Darién Gap and Simón Posada in Bogotá.

For thousands of Afghans, the American withdrawal from Kabul was just the beginning of a long, dangerous search for safety.

By Julie Turkewitz

Photographs and Video by Federico Rios

Taiba was being hunted by the men she had put behind bars.

The death threats came as the Americans withdrew from Afghanistan and the Taliban marched across her country, she said. In the chaos, cell doors were flung open, freeing the rapists and abusers she had helped send to prison.

“We will find you,” the callers growled. “We will kill you.”

Taiba’s entire life had been shaped by the American vision of a democratic Afghanistan: She had studied law, worked with the Americans to fight violence against women and ultimately became a top government official for women’s rights, gathering testimony that put abusers away.

But after saving so many women’s lives, she was suddenly trying to save her own.

She and her husband, Ali, pleaded for help from a half-dozen nations — many of which they’d worked with — and found an American refugee program they might be eligible for. Taiba said she sent off her information, but never heard back.

“They left us behind,” she said of the Americans. “Sometimes I think maybe God left all Afghans behind.”

For months, Taiba kept trying to make it to America any way she could — even by foot. She and her husband fled with their 2-year-old son, first to Pakistan, then to South America, joining the vast human tide of desperation pressing north toward the United States.

Like thousands of Afghans who have taken this same, unfathomable route to escape the Taliban and their country’s economic collapse in the last 17 months, they trudged through the jungle, slept on the forest floor amid fire ants and snakes, hid their money in their food to fool thieves and crossed the sliver of land connecting North and South America — the treacherous Darién Gap.

Now, after more than 16,000 miles, Taiba and her family had finally reached it: the American border.

In the darkness, Taiba crawled into a drainage tunnel under a highway. When she emerged, she saw two enormous steel fences, the last barriers between her old life and what she hoped would be a new one. A smuggler flung a ladder over the first wall.

Taiba gripped the rungs and began to climb into the country that had helped define her. She knew the Americans were turning away asylum seekers. A single thought consumed her.

Once she got in, would they let her stay?

‘The failure is happening right now.’

Frantic parents breached airport gates with suitcases and children in hand. Panicked crowds climbed jet wings and clung to the sides of departing American planes. A few tried to hang on, lost their grip and fell from the skies.

It was August 2021, and the Taliban had swept into Kabul just as American troops pulled out, ending a 20-year occupation that left Afghanistan in the hands of the very militants Washington had ousted.

The images seemed a tragic coda to America’s longest war. But for countless Afghans, the frenetic days of the U.S. withdrawal were only the beginning of a long, harrowing search for safety.

The new Taliban administration turned back decades of civil liberties, particularly for women. Afghans who had supported the West were terrified of being persecuted, and a careening economy pushed millions near starvation. Many Afghans fled to Pakistan, Iran and Turkey, often finding only short-term visas or worse — beatings, detention and deportation.

Thousands tried for Europe, climbing into cargo trucks or taking flimsy boats across the Mediterranean Sea. At least 1,250 Afghan migrants have died trying to find refuge since the American withdrawal, the United Nations says.

Many others set their sights even farther: the United States.

More than 3,600 Afghans have traveled the same agonizing route as Taiba since the beginning of 2022, according to tallies in Panama, one of the most perilous sections of the journey. Many of them had partnered with the West for years — lawyers, human rights advocates, members of the Afghan government or security forces. They packed up their children, parents or entire families, sold their apartments and borrowed enormous sums to pay for the passage, convinced there was nothing left for them back home.

Their journeys represent the collision of two of President Biden’s biggest policy crises: the hasty American withdrawal from Afghanistan and the record number of migrants crossing the U.S. border.

Now, the fallout from a faraway war that many Americans thought was over is landing at the president’s doorstep: Afghan men, women and children climbing over border walls under the cover of night, desperate to join a nation that, they feel, left them behind.

The withdrawal from Afghanistan is not just a failure “in the rearview mirror,” said Francis Hoang, a former U.S. Army captain who runs an organization to help Afghans immigrate, called Allied Airlift 21.

“The failure is happening right now,” he said.

The Afghans wend through about a dozen countries, for months or longer. Nearly all are robbed or extorted; some are kidnapped or jailed. Others are fought over by rival smugglers or sent back to countries they already passed through. Parents and children are torn apart by the authorities. Babies have been born along the way.

The Times traveled with a group of 54 Afghans through one of the hardest parts of the journey, the notorious Darién Gap, and interviewed nearly 100 people making the trek. Many spoke English, had entwined their lives with the Western mission in Afghanistan and hoped that, as American allies, they would be received with open arms.

Most set out for the U.S. border after flying to Brazil, which offers humanitarian visas for Afghans. From there, the smuggler fees mounted quickly, often costing $10,000 a person or more, sealing in the Afghans a conviction that they had to reach the United States, where they could earn enough money to dig out from debt and help their relatives back home.

Niazi, 41, traveled with his wife and three sons, all wearing New York baseball caps. He described working in the Afghan president’s protective service, and showed off pictures of himself guarding Laura Bush, the American first lady, and President Barack Obama.

He then played a surveillance video of people he identified as members of the Taliban, beating his brothers as they searched for him. He had applied for a special U.S. visa, he said, but because he had worked for the Afghan government, not directly for the Americans, he wasn’t eligible.

Ali and Nazanin, a pair of doctors in their 20s who had recently married, were risking the journey, too. Like Taiba and her family, they are Hazara, an ethnic minority massacred by the Taliban during their first regime in the 1990s, and believed they could never be safe under the new government.

“I am thinking about my future child,” said Ali.

Two grandfathers, one who said he had worked for the toppled Afghan government, traveled with their families, 17 people in all. Mohammad Sharif, who said he was a former Afghan police officer, and his wife, Rahima, came too, carrying their infant son, born two months before in Brazil.

Nearly all of them asked to be identified only by their first names, to protect relatives back in Afghanistan.

Mozhgan, 20, was the most talkative. She had been in the 11th grade when the Taliban entered Kabul and she could no longer go to school.

The American presence had opened the world for her. She spoke multiple languages, including English, Hindi and bits of Chinese. She watched Marvel movies and listened to BTS, the Korean pop group whose music had turned her from what she called a “shy, sad, corner girl” into a confident, inquisitive woman.

She dreamed of being a fashion designer or a reporter, like the women in American movies. Her sister, Samira, 16, thought about being an astronaut. Under the Taliban, which have barred women from most public spaces, those lives were now impossible.

“Like being on a road with no destination,” Mozhgan called it.

Their family, also Hazara, considered legal paths to the United States, Mozhgan said, but determined they would “take years.”

Then a bomb went off at their brother’s school in Kabul, most likely an attack by Islamic State militants challenging the Taliban, and her father decided to flee.

“You don’t know if you will survive,” she said, “so we have to take action now.”

Thousands of despairing migrants have made the daunting jungle crossing from South America to the United States for years.

But before the Americans left Afghanistan and the Taliban took over, Afghans were hardly ever among them. Officials in Panama say that only about 100 Afghans in total crossed the jungle from 2010 to 2019.

Now, hundreds of Afghans are risking it every month, officials say, part of a historic crush of people pouring through the Darién, the only way from South America to the United States by land.

The Darién is a roadless, mountainous tangle, considered a last resort for decades, with notorious hardships: rivers that sweep away bodies, hills that cause heart attacks, mud that nearly swallows children, bandits who rob, kidnap, assault and kill.

But with the economic and political havoc of recent years, including the pandemic and the war in Ukraine, interest in the Darién has exploded — along with relentless advertising on TikTok, Facebook and WhatsApp by smugglers and migrants alike, sometimes presenting the route like a family outing that almost anyone can manage.

“Safe. 100 percent trustworthy. Special packages with transport, lodging and food,” reads one Facebook post showing people holding hands as they stroll toward a fluttering American flag. “Guaranteed.”

Fewer than 11,000 people crossed the jungle each year, on average, from 2010 to 2020. But this year, officials say, as many as 400,000 are expected to make the journey, nearly all of them headed to the United States.

And while most are from Venezuela, Haiti and Ecuador, the route has increasingly become a United Nations of migration, with a growing number from China, India, Nigeria, Somalia and elsewhere.

Mr. Biden is trying hard to shut it down. In April, he and his allies in the region announced a 60-day campaign intended to end the illicit movement of people through the Darién. His administration has also imposed new rules that are expected to make it harder for all asylum seekers, including Afghans, to enter the United States.

Many of the Afghans on the journey knew Mr. Biden was clamping down on immigration, but said they were coming anyway — no matter the hardship.

“If 10 times I am sent back,” said Ali, the doctor, “10 times I will return.”

‘Are we going to survive?’

A village formed in Terminal B of São Paulo-Guarulhos airport: Afghans sleeping under wool blankets strung like tents across luggage carts.

It was December 2022, and most of them had arrived in Brazil days before, even weeks, carrying the last of their belongings and only a vague idea of what to do next.

They could stay in Brazil, even work. But few spoke Portuguese, and the nation’s minimum wage was only about $250 a month. Most had large families — five, 10 or 20 people — to support back home. Many had borrowed their relatives’ last savings to make it this far, and if they didn’t pay it back, their families would go hungry.

“The only hope in the family is me,” said Haroon, 27, an engineer who had recently arrived in Brazil.

So, many of the Afghans soon took off, their minds fixed on the United States.

They crossed Peru, Ecuador and Colombia, passed liked batons from smuggler to smuggler.

On a starless night in March, Taiba and her husband, Ali, waded toward a boat in Colombia with 50 other Afghans, headed for the Darién Gap. A haze blurred a full moon.

Their road map was nothing more than a terse, three-page PDF circulating around the world, sometimes on WhatsApp chains. Written in Persian, it offered advice on getting from Brazil all the way through Mexico, listing a few smuggler contacts and pithy travel tips.

In Colombia, “always remember to keep 10 dollars in your passport,” to pay off police officers who threaten arrest. In the jungle, “the first day is stressful.” In Mexico, “make sure to hide all your documents and money.”

Taiba and Ali’s son, a round-cheeked toddler who had just turned 3, was getting heavy, so they often strapped him to the back of a cousin, Jalil, 24, a kickboxing coach and an ideal bodyguard for the journey ahead.

Most of the Afghans had heard about the dangers of the Darién, and their smuggler offered them the so-called V.I.P. route — $420 a person, versus the more common $300 — that cut the trip to about four days, from as many as eight or nine.

As Taiba climbed into the boat, packing in with dozens of others like cargo, she tried to make sense of how much her life had changed in the last two years.

She and Ali had met as university students. He later worked as a translator for Spanish troops, he said, before taking a job with a United Nations contractor. Until the Taliban took over, they were happy — and in love with the Afghanistan they were helping to build. Then, as fighters swept into Kabul, Taiba raced to her office to burn documents, hoping to protect herself and other women, she said, before fleeing to another city.

For months, they pleaded with governments for help, until Uruguay agreed to take them in. But in Montevideo, the capital, they quickly decided that they couldn’t earn enough to support their families back home. Taiba argued for heading north.

Now, she was having regrets.

A boat captain barked at them to turn off their phones, so they could travel undetected by the police. The motor roared, and the 54 Afghans sped up the coast, crying, vomiting and praying. Many had never seen an ocean or sea.

“Are we going to drown?” Mozhgan wondered out loud. “Or are we going to survive?”

The next day, they entered the forest and trudged up three mountains, the last of which is known locally as La Llorona, the crying woman. They fell often, lanced their hands on spiked trees, dragged boots filled with mud and at times collapsed from exhaustion. The former policeman’s son cried constantly.

Mohammad Rahim, 60, one of the two grandfathers in the family of 17, fared the worst, stopping many times each hour to lay in the dirt. His children knelt beside him, massaging his body back to life. Murmuring prayers, the other Afghans wondered if he would make it.

Near the top of La Llorona, Ahmad, 24, an engineer, began to break down.

“I am crazy to come here!” he yelled, banging his machete into the tree roots knotting the ground.

He had tried to enter the United States legally, applying for a humanitarian parole program in 2021, he said, but never heard back.

“No one cares about us!” he yelled. “We have important people left in Afghanistan and no one cares!”

In the final days of the American occupation in 2021, the Biden administration airlifted roughly 88,500 Afghans out of the country, an effort the American president called “extraordinary.”

“Only the United States had the capacity and the will and the ability to do it,” Mr. Biden told the American public afterward.

But many tens of thousands of other Afghans worked with the U.S. government or American organizations during the war, and could be at risk of retaliation, according to #AfghanEvac, a group of organizations helping Afghans seeking resettlement.

Fewer than 25,000 Afghans have received special visas or refugee status in the United States since the airlifts in 2021, government data shows. And the options are scarcer for people who didn’t work with the United States but might still be in danger.

Roughly 52,000 Afghans have applied for a program called humanitarian parole. As of mid-April, just 760 people had been approved.

By comparison, more than 300,000 Ukrainians arrived in the United States under various programs in just over a year.

“I don’t understand why the world has had their arms so open to Ukrainians and so closed to Afghans,” said Shawn VanDiver, the U.S. Navy veteran who started #AfghanEvac.

A spokeswoman for the U.S. National Security Council, Adrienne Watson, said the administration was working to enhance an already robust resettlement program for Afghans. She called it “part of our long-term commitment to our Afghan allies.”

Many of the Afghans in the jungle said they didn’t feel that commitment.

“We did a lot of things for the American people,” said Niazi, the father who showed pictures of himself as a guard with President Obama. “But the American people just left us.”

A steep dirt hill signaled the Afghans’ last push through the wilderness. Finally, they had reached a camp constructed by an Indigenous group, the Emberá. Taiba stared slack-jawed at the generators, wooden platforms and women selling fried chicken and Coca-Cola.

In the morning, the Emberá led them to canoes and, for $25 a person, ferried them to a checkpoint in Panama, where officials counted them, took down their nationalities and sent them on their way north.

Mohammad Azim, 70, the other grandfather, rushed to the river to wash himself. Then, beneath a fence topped by barbed wire, he knelt to pray — thankful that he made it, apprehensive about the thousands of miles to go.

‘Everything is dark.’

The group of 54 splintered soon after.

Taiba and her family took a bus through Costa Rica, walked for hours until they found a car through Nicaragua, and were forced to pay bribes to the police in Honduras. In Guatemala, they hiked through more forest, then paid another smuggler to get them from a bus to a boat, across a river and into a truck, all the way to southern Mexico.

Back in Uruguay, Taiba had shed her head scarf to blend in and cut her hair when it began to fall out. By now, she had lost 20 pounds and watched her child lose 15 percent of his body weight.

If the Americans didn’t take her, she thought, maybe she would just keep going — to Canada, where, she imagined, the government might be more welcoming.

Ali, the doctor who vowed to keep trying to make it to the United States even if he was “sent back” 10 times, proved prescient. Near the American border, he and his wife were stopped by the Mexican police, robbed and put on a bus across Mexico, back to the border with Guatemala.

They set out again from there, only to be apprehended for a second time and jailed for about a week.

News about other Afghans who tried to cross into the United States trickled in.

Milad, 29, a lawyer, climbed over the wall with his wife and children, ages 2 and 4. They were held in U.S. detention in Calexico, Calif., he said, and told they would be taken to a hotel. Instead, U.S. border officials put them in a white van with blacked out windows that dropped them on the street in Mexicali, Mexico, he said. His cousin Tamim, 27, a journalist, said he had a similar experience.

Ahmad Faheem Majeed, 28, a former Afghan Air Force intelligence officer who crossed into Texas in September 2022, was detained and charged with failing to enter at a designated checkpoint, a misdemeanor. He pleaded guilty and was held in U.S. custody for eight months, court records show.

“I helped these Americans,” he said from Eden Detention Center in Texas, sometimes near tears. “I am not understanding why they are not helping me.”

U.S. homeland security officials declined to discuss their cases.

Mozhgan’s family made it to Mexico City, but was scared to continue without immigration paperwork issued by the Mexican government, which they thought would shield them from arrest. They waited in line for days before heading north.

Taiba and her family boarded a bus from Mexico City to the U.S. border.

“The pleasure of travel,” the motto on the bus said. It had been a year since they left Afghanistan.

A weariness set in, her hope nearly buried by exhaustion. Criminals and the police stopped the bus repeatedly to extort money. On the third night, they reached Tijuana, border lights twinkling in the distance. It was early April.

The next evening, a smuggler brought them to the drainage tunnel in the middle of the city. As they climbed the first border fence, they could see wildflowers and a highway on the other side.

Taiba lowered herself to the ground with anticipation, her feet landing on dirt.

They had made it — or so they thought.

They spent a cold night in an immigration netherworld, of sorts, trapped between two border fences. In the morning, U.S. Border Patrol officers swept them up. After so many thousands of miles, they said, their welcome was a detention center.

They had hoped to claim asylum then and there. Instead, U.S. officials handed them documents clarifying that each was an “alien present in the United States,” subject to deportation.

They could fight removal at a court hearing, set for June 30, 2025, on the other side of the country, in Boston.

To apply for asylum, they would have to navigate the process on their own, or find a lawyer. Until then, they couldn’t work.

A charity briefly put them in a hotel room, but the questions began to gnaw: How would they eat? Where could they live? Was this the American dream?

“Everything is dark,” said Taiba’s husband, Ali.

The others faced similar challenges.

Milad, the lawyer, tried the crossing again and made it, landing a kitchen job under the table. Ali and Nazanin, the doctors, finally got to the border and across it, then made their way to her brother’s home in Georgia. Niazi, the presidential guard, wound up in a shelter in San Diego, wondering how to get his three boys into classes — they had lost two years of schooling.

None of the families had a lawyer or a clear idea of how to survive, much less feed their families back home in Afghanistan. Most began writing desperate messages to migrant aid organizations, but the groups were overwhelmed, and the Afghans rarely heard back.

Mozhgan’s family faced a different terror: She had gone missing.

She had scaled the first border fence, then spent three nights between the walls. Finally, immigration officials carted her family to detention — but she and an older brother, both over 18, were treated as single adults and kept in custody, while the rest of the family was released in California.

They had fled Afghanistan together and spent months trekking through unforgiving terrain, evading bandits and dodging corrupt police officers — only to be separated, without any contact, in the country where they hoped to find refuge.

Her mother, Anisa, was frantic, said Mozhgan’s father, Abdul. “We might not be able to see them again,” he recalled her saying.

Their children were released about a week later and reunited with the family.

Taiba kept moving. In early May, an aid group in New York offered a spot in a shelter and the family headed east, bound for more uncertainty. Without asylum, they faced a life in the shadows, like millions of other undocumented immigrants in the United States.

Her husband had always assumed the Darién would be the hardest part of the journey.

“But when I emerged from the jungle, we have seen, ‘No,’” he said. “The difficulties are forever.”

Federico Rios contributed reporting from Brazil, Mexico and the Darién Gap, and Ruhullah Khapalwak from Vancouver.

After surviving a perilous jungle, a mother and daughter obeyed the president’s plea to enter the United States legally. 341 days later, they’re still waiting.

By Julie Turkewitz

Photographs by Federico Rios

They live in a rusty shack with no running water, hiding from the violence just outside their door, haunted by a question that won’t go away: Should they have listened to President Biden?

A year ago, Dayry Alexandra Cuauro and her 6-year-old daughter, Sarah, fled a crumbling Venezuela, setting off for the United States, carrying almost nothing. But they quickly lost each other, separated in a treacherous jungle known as the Darién Gap.

For three terrifying days, Ms. Cuauro heaved herself over muddy hills and plowed through rivers that rose to her chest, panicked that her child had drowned, been kidnapped or fallen to her death.

After they finally found each other, reunited in a squall of kisses and tears, Ms. Cuauro took the Biden administration’s message to heart: The journey north is incredibly dangerous. Don’t risk it. Stop, and apply to come to the United States the legal way.

Many of the migrants traveling alongside the Cuauros — like hundreds of thousands of others — simply ignored the president’s warning, dismissing it as a ploy to keep them at bay. They kept marching, crossed the border and quickly started building new lives in the United States, with jobs that pay in dollars and children in American schools.

Ms. Cuauro listened and dropped off the migrant trail. But nearly a year later, all she has gotten is an auto-reply: Her applications to enter the United States legally have been submitted. She refreshes the website constantly, obsessively, and every day it says the same thing: “Case received.” Only the numbers shift: 57 days. 197 days. 341 days.

Online, she is bombarded by jubilant posts from Venezuelans who have made it to the United States — pictures of them in Times Square, wearing new clothes, eating big meals, going to school. Even the friend who guided her daughter safely through the jungle kept going and made it to Pennsylvania, where he now makes $140 a day as a mechanic.

Ms. Cuauro’s own life is mostly confined to the two rooms of her shack. Crime and violence are such constants that she rarely ventures out. Some days, there is no food in the house, and even when there is, her anxious daughter Sarah, now 7, often refuses to eat.

“I have cried, I have become desperate,” said Ms. Cuauro, 37, asking that her current location not be published for fear of being attacked. “We have followed the order to stay and wait.”

Ms. Cuauro and more than a million people are caught in a central contradiction of Mr. Biden’s response to the record number of migrants crossing the southern border during his presidency.

Eager to thwart a political crisis, the Biden administration is both urging and threatening people not to make the trek, pleading with Venezuelans like Ms. Cuauro to stay where they are and apply for a legal path to the United States announced last year.

The government has invited people from three other troubled nations in the region — Haiti, Cuba and Nicaragua — to apply as well, giving them a chance to seek refuge in the country for up to two years in “a safe and lawful way.”

But only a fraction of the applicants have been accepted, while countless others — as many as 1.5 million or more, by several estimates — are waiting for an answer outside the United States in a kind of migration purgatory, trying to weather the upheaval, violence and hardship that makes them so anxious to flee.

Then, last month, Mr. Biden ripped up his own script, abruptly telling hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans who had ignored his pleas and come to the United States anyway that they could remain in the country for at least 18 months, and even get a job.

Mr. Biden did so after Democratic leaders warned that big cities like New York would sink under the weight of tens of thousands of migrants who could not work and support themselves.

But for the legions of people who had followed the president’s instructions to stay away and take the legal route instead, like Ms. Cuauro, it was a slap in the face.

Had she disregarded him, kept plodding north and made it across the American border, she may well have been one of the nearly 500,000 Venezuelans granted special protection by the president.

Now, her chances of getting to the United States may disappear entirely.

A judge in Texas is expected to rule on the legal pathway she applied for, and many of its defenders are bracing for it to be shut down. Sneaking across the border is not an option, either, because Mr. Biden’s reprieve does not apply to newcomers. To the contrary, they can now be deported back to Venezuela.

The mixed messages show the obvious strains of Mr. Biden’s efforts to appease his own party members without fueling Republican claims that he is throwing open the doors of the nation to migrants and rewarding border crossers for breaking the law.

Stuck in the middle are people like the Cuauros.

In their shack, Sarah often asks when they are leaving for the United States.

“Let’s go, Mommy!” she says.

“My God,” Ms. Cuauro says to herself, wondering how to explain why they may never be able to. “What did I do wrong?”

Lost in the Jungle

I met Sarah on a steep, mud-slick mountain known as the Hill of Death.

She didn’t know yet that she was lost.

It was early October of last year, her fifth day in the Darién Gap. She and her mother had just spent the night under a cluster of tarps deep in the jungle.

Hundreds of people, exhausted and dirty, some gaunt from a lack of food, had slept with them in a muddy expanse by the Caribbean Sea. It looked like they were fleeing a war.

Most were Venezuelan, escaping nearly a decade of economic crisis presided over by an authoritarian leader, but made worse by American sanctions. Others, reflecting a growing global desperation, came from Haiti, Ecuador, China or Afghanistan.

The Darién Gap, a forested land bridge connecting Colombia and Panama, was the only way for them to get from South to North America on foot. Once barely penetrable, it has quickly become one of the planet’s busiest migrant thoroughfares, a roadless route of last resort for hundreds of thousands of people like Ms. Cuauro and her daughter.

Sarah, Ms. Cuauro’s only child, had never known a prosperous Venezuela, when oil wealth, not scarcity and hunger, defined the nation. She was born in 2016, in the throes of the country’s crisis. Food and diapers often disappeared from shelves. Lines for gasoline lasted days. The public health and education systems were falling apart. All around her, people were dying of curable problems.

Ms. Cuauro, a lawyer, had worked in the maritime industry. But as gasoline dwindled, so did her income. Friends were making it to the United States through the Darién jungle. The choice seemed clear — she and Sarah needed to go, too.

“No risk,” Ms. Cuauro had told herself, “no reward.”

But by the time I met Sarah, Ms. Cuauro was nowhere to be found.

The little girl was slowly trudging up the Hill of Death, caked in mud, gripping the hand of Ángel García. He was not her father, he explained, but a friend of Sarah’s mother, who had asked him to help the girl across the rugged terrain. He lifted her gingerly over logs, steered her past crevices and gave her pep talks to keep her spirits high.

“We’re almost there,” he told her near the top of the hill.

All the while, they assumed Sarah’s mother was not far behind.

Ms. Cuauro had been lucky enough to buy boots for the journey — tall, made of rubber, with thick, grippy soles. But blisters tore her feet anyway, and she had made the rookie mistake of cutting the skin off the wounds, exposing raw flesh.

By that October morning, every step had become excruciating, prompting her to ask Mr. García, a fellow Venezuelan she had met on the journey, to help with Sarah. As he took the little girl’s hand, Mr. García, 42, thought of his own 6-year-old, a bespectacled boy named Andrés, whom he had left behind.

What happened next changed their lives.

Ms. Cuauro moved slowly, unbalanced, her blistered feet slipping on a rocky river bed. Sarah, with Mr. García’s steady hand, traveled swiftly, often disappearing from view.

By late afternoon, when I came across Sarah near the top of the hill, Ms. Cuauro was still at the very bottom, surrounded by the slowest climbers, including people with injuries like hers, or worse.

She had expected Mr. García to wait with Sarah at the foot of the hill. But when she got there, “it was as if my soul had left my body,” she said.

Sarah was gone.

The Lure of Success Stories

American officials privately acknowledge that their core message to migrants — “Don’t risk the journey north. Take the legal path instead” — is not getting through to the extent they need it to.

A big reason, they say, is the onslaught of viral images showcasing the fruits of the jungle pass.

An entire subsection of the web is now dedicated to the Darién trek, which has achieved a kind of celebrity status on TikTok and Facebook. Some of the messages come from smugglers advertising their services, often wildly exaggerating the route’s ease. Many other images are posted by migrants themselves. And while some show the horrors of the forest, including dead bodies, the warnings are no match for the success stories.

One diptych posted on Facebook in March shows a muddy man in the jungle, bowing to kiss the stomach of a muddy-but-smiling pregnant woman. Then, in the second picture, he is in Times Square with the same woman, kissing a newborn she holds to her belly.

“If you have a dream,” the caption says, “go for it.”

Of course, many migrants suffer terribly on the journey north and, even if they make it to the United States, may find that their anguish is far from over, leaving them to beg or sell candy on the street to survive.

But the boosterish “before” and “after” memes often drown this out. Some posts show a family in the jungle, followed by a child’s cap-and-gown graduation in the United States. Others feature migrants with new cars and clothes. “My first day of work in the USA” is another common theme, typically accompanied by a picture of a fan of cash.

Alejandro Mayorkas, the homeland security secretary, says it’s hard to get migrants to take the risks seriously enough because “the victims” of the journey “don’t communicate” as profusely on social media. After all, he says, some of them “didn’t survive the journey through the Darién” and are never heard from again.

The legal path that Ms. Cuauro applied for, called humanitarian parole, allows people from Venezuela and the three other nations with sponsors in the United States to leapfrog the dangers of the trek by flying to America. The government says that about 250,000 people have entered this way in the last year alone.

Mr. Mayorkas says it’s part of a broader push by the Biden administration to expand legal ways of entering the country, calling it “the best model” for managing the nation’s “broken immigration system.”

But this legal route has a cap — 30,000 people a month — and while supporters call it the most ambitious effort to open the gates in years, it does not come close to meeting the demand.

The tide of Venezuelans at the southern American border keeps rising, hitting a new high in September. The once impenetrable Darién Gap now has thousands of people slogging through it at any given time. By year’s end, half a million people are expected to make the trek through the jungle, double last year’s almost unfathomable record.

For the frantic millions trying to leave their homes, the legal door is simply not wide enough.

“The wait is worth it,” Mr. Mayorkas says to migrants. “The wait is safer than the smuggler.”

He says the administration’s policies are consistent and coherent. But the long odds make it hard to convince people that the legal route will actually work for them, said David Bier, an immigration expert at the Cato Institute.

As for the migrants who trek to the border instead of waiting, he said, “I think it’s totally rational what they’re doing.”

A Glimmer of Hope

“Sarah! Sarah!” Ms. Cuauro yelled, searching for her daughter in the dark.

By the time Ms. Cuauro had reached the top of the Hill of Death, it was pitch black, the stars obscured by the rain.

Sarah was hours ahead of her, having already made her way down the other side of the mountain with Mr. García, who rushed to find her a place to sleep. That night, Sarah trembled in the rain as he and two friends pitched a tent. She slept sandwiched between them.

In the morning, the friends doted on her, asking other migrants if they had seen her mother. People passed word up and down the chain of marchers, referring to her with a nickname: the lost girl.

Mr. García decided that the sooner he got Sarah out of the jungle, the safer she would be. They lumbered forward with a long trail of migrants in a delirious shuffle, barely eating or sleeping. By then, the guides people had paid to lead them through the forest had disappeared. No one knew how many more days of hiking remained, what the end of the route looked like, or what to do once they found it.

On the eighth day in the jungle, Sarah and her companions arrived bleary-eyed at an Indigenous community near the end of the forest, where the Panamanian authorities had set up a checkpoint.

Hearing of the lost girl, officials took Sarah to a back room in an improvised office. She sat in white plastic chair, mostly silent.

Hours later, her mother came limping in, crying, kissing and hugging her child.

“Forgive me,” Ms. Cuauro cried. “I didn’t abandon you,” she insisted. “I came to find you.”

Sarah stared ahead blankly, her emotions left on the mountain.

A few days later, another shock: The whole reason Ms. Cuauro had put herself and her daughter through such an ordeal evaporated in an instant.

For months, the Biden administration had been allowing thousands of Venezuelans who showed up at the southern border to cross into the United States. It was more default than hardened policy. The United States had few relations with Venezuela’s autocratic government, making it harder to send people back there.

The opening had inspired Ms. Cuauro and countless others to risk the journey. But right after she and Sarah emerged from the jungle, the Biden administration announced a switch. Venezuelans at the American border could now be turned around and sent to Mexico.

Crushed and overcome by guilt after what her daughter had endured, Ms. Cuauro considered returning to Venezuela. But how? Back through the jungle that had nearly torn them apart? She thought of scrounging money for a plane ticket home. And then, what? A life of perpetual deprivation?

First, she needed a safe place to regroup. The two took a bus to Costa Rica, then another to Nicaragua, then trekked through another forest, then took a boat, then more forest, then rode a motorbike. At one point, in a rainstorm near the border with Honduras, Ms. Cuauro stumbled forward blindly and thought for a terrifying moment that she had lost Sarah again.

Her heart pounded, as if she was suddenly back in the Darién.

“I’m lost, I’m lost!” Ms. Cuauro screamed after briefly losing contact with the group.

One of the other migrants responded, “Girl! Don’t yell! Be quiet.” Ms. Cuauro followed the voice back to the group, rattled but relieved.

Within days, Ms. Cuauro’s sister, who had made it to the United States a few months earlier, raised a new hope: the Biden administration’s legal pathway for Venezuelans.

Getting in would not be easy. The rules required a sponsor willing to take financial responsibility for Ms. Cuauro and her daughter for two years. So, her sister paid $1,000 to a person who claimed to be a lawyer and promised to help. The family waited. The person vanished.

When The New York Times published a front-page story about the Cuauros’ harrowing trek through the jungle, readers took matters into their own hands. The chief executive of an insurance claim management company in Georgia and an account manager at a wine company in New York quickly submitted applications to sponsor Ms. Cuauro. A Microsoft executive in Colorado and a lawyer in Minnesota exchanged late night texts to help out as well.

“I’m a mom of three kids,” the lawyer said of Ms. Cuauro’s decision to make the trip. “I would make the exact same choice.”

The Microsoft executive decided to open her home to the Cuauros once they arrived, and the women went about lining up work, school enrollment and trauma counseling.

A room in the executive’s Colorado home was prepared for them, nearly every inch of it covered in donated clothes, shoes, boots, jackets, school supplies, books in English and Spanish — an outpouring of support from families the women had contacted. A former executive in North Carolina reached out, and together these five strangers formed an unofficial Cuauro committee.

Ms. Cuauro was barely able to comprehend the response. She waited in Tegucigalpa, the Honduran capital, living in a single room with a bed, television and fan. Gang violence had prompted the Honduran president to issue a state of emergency, and mother and daughter rarely went out.

As the months dragged on, the Cuauro committee began to contact immigrant aid groups and congressmen, seeking information about the status of the Cuauros’ applications. Was there something wrong with the paperwork? Did they need to provide more information? No one could get an answer.

In July, the office of U.S. Representative Lou Correa, Democrat of California, printed out a giant photograph of Sarah covered in mud in the jungle, and he held it up during a hearing to show the sacrifices migrants were making to build new lives.

Sarah had become a literal poster child for the Darién. She and her mother had done what Mr. Biden had asked of them. They had a first-class support team of eager American sponsors. Yet no one could figure out how to get their cases through the U.S. immigration system.

‘I’m Unstoppable’

Inside the shack, Sarah sleeps with an international collection of stuffed animals, plush toys she’s been given in the many countries she’s trekked through in her short life.

Over the last year, Sarah has grown taller, but is as skinny as ever. In the afternoons, the two venture outside so that Sarah can go to school. She is still in first grade, not third, like she should be, having lost so much of her education already.

In the evenings, mother and daughter practice English on Duolingo — Sarah has learned numbers, colors and days of the week — or talk about the United States. Sarah has heard that she will be able to pick strawberries there, though she wants to study math and join a chess club. Her latest obsession is learning the lyrics to the pop song “Unstoppable.”

“I put my armor on, show you how strong I am,” Sarah sings. “I’m unstoppable!”

Ms. Cuauro agrees with Mr. Biden that the trek north is far more dangerous than anyone should have to risk. In the days after their Darién ordeal, she bolted awake at night, having dreamed of falling off a steep muddy hill.

That doesn’t happen any more. But anxiety about the present and future is so persistent that she has begun losing her hair. She tries to hide it from Sarah, she said, “because I don’t want her to feel that she is a burden to me.”

Still, “she’s very smart and she understands many things.”

Recently, a member of the Cuauro committee, the woman in North Carolina, reached out with an urgent request. A Venezuelan man who had contacted her asking for help was about to take the Darién route. The woman asked Ms. Cuauro to talk to him — to try to convince him to apply for the legal route instead.

“I did it,” Ms. Cuauro said, “but he didn’t want to listen, and he left.”

The man got to the American border and, within days, crossed into the United States.

Federico Rios, Isayen Herrera, Zolan Kanno-Youngs and Eileen Sullivan contributed reporting.

Audio produced by Parin Behrooz.

TikTok, Facebook and YouTube are transforming global migration, becoming tools of migrants and smugglers alike.

By Julie Turkewitz

Manuel Monterrosa set out for the United States last year with his cellphone and a plan: He’d record his journey through the dangerous jungle known as the Darién Gap and post it on YouTube, warning other migrants of the perils they’d face.

In his six-part series, edited entirely on his phone along the way, he heads north with a backpack, leading viewers on a video-selfie play-by-play of his passage across rivers, muddy forests and a mountain known as the Hill of Death.

He eventually made it to the United States. But to his surprise, his videos began attracting so many views and earning enough money from YouTube that he decided he no longer needed to live in America at all.

So, Mr. Monterrosa, a 35-year-old from Venezuela, returned to South America and now has a new plan altogether: trekking the Darién route again, this time in search of content and clicks, having learned how to make a living as a perpetual migrant.

“Migration sells,” Mr. Monterrosa said. “My public is a public that wants a dream.”

For more than a decade, cellphones have been indispensable tools for people fleeing their homelands, helping them research routes, find friends and loved ones, connect with smugglers and evade the authorities.

Now, cellphones and social media platforms like Facebook, YouTube and TikTok are drastically changing the equation once again, fueling the next evolution of global movement.

Today, migrants are the producers of an enormous digital almanac of the trek to the United States, documenting the route and its pitfalls in such detail that, in a few stretches, people can find their way on their own, without smugglers.

And as migrants stream their struggles and successes to millions back home, some are becoming small-time celebrities and influencers in their own right, inspiring others to make the trek as well.

Their posts, pictures, videos and memes are not just in Spanish, but also in the array of languages spoken by migrants from around the globe who are increasingly showing up at the southern border of the United States.

In Mandarin, the route from South America to the United States is called “zouxian” or “trek.” In Hindi, Haryanvi and Punjabi, languages spoken in India, it is part of “dunki,” a reference to a “donkey” or informal route. In Haitian Creole, the Darién jungle is “raje” or “ditch.” In Pashto and Persian, languages spoken in Afghanistan, migration through the Americas is often referred to as a “game.”

Ankush Malik, a migrant influencer from India, documented his journey from India to the United States last year, kissing his grandmother goodbye at the start of his multipart YouTube series. His channel has been viewed nearly seven million times by congratulatory, loyal viewers.

“This looks so much fun. I want to do this too,” says one.

“Eagerly awaiting part 16 of this video,” writes another, “love and blessings from Gujarat.”

Some influencers, like Mr. Monterrosa, who studied communications in Venezuela, are bringing in a few hundred dollars a month from companies like YouTube — often a lot more than they were making at home. During a good month, Mr. Monterrosa says he has earned $1,000 in payouts, four times the minimum wage in Colombia, where he lives now.

But the content can be more profitable for social media companies, which make money from posts about migration the same way they do from cat videos, experts say: the longer viewers watch or scroll, the more advertisements they can be shown.

“Eyeballs = $$ for Fb,” said Harriet Kingaby, co-founder of the Conscious Advertising Network, a coalition of advertisers, technology providers and others.

Spanish-language posts with the tag #migracion on TikTok have nearly two billion views, according to figures reported by the platform. So do posts marked #darien, which sometimes appear between ads for H&M and the iPhone15.

On Facebook, migration-related groups flourish — one has more than half a million members — creating an open marketplace for smugglers who call themselves “advisers” or “guides.”

The company says that offering smuggling services violates its policies, and that it makes an enormous effort to identify and remove such content, including working with the United Nations. Still, The New York Times found more than 900 cases of Facebook users offering passage toward the United States.

“Accompanying you toward your dreams!” read one recent Facebook post, where a group calling itself a “travel agency” advertises several routes through the Darién.

Facebook removed this and hundreds of other smuggler posts flagged by The Times. A company representative called “the safety of our users” a priority, acknowledging that it was a challenge to keep up with the “mind-melting” amount of information on the site.

“We have every incentive to remove violating content from the platform,” said Erin McPike, a spokeswoman, adding that some of the posts did not violate the company’s rules.

At the center of this digital conversation is the Darién Gap, the perilous jungle straddling South and North America that has grown from a dense, rarely traversed forest into a migrant thoroughfare.

The Darién is the only way into the Northern Hemisphere by foot. Long trekked by just a few thousand people a year, it’s quickly become a harrowing rite of passage, crossed by more than 500,000 migrants — from more than 100 countries — this year alone, according to the authorities in Panama, where the jungle ends.

Political turmoil and the economic havoc of the pandemic are fueling the increase, but officials from Colombia to the United States say cellphones and social media are undoubtedly accelerants.

“I saw their stories on Facebook,” Irismar Gutiérrez, a 22-year-old Venezuelan about to venture into the Darién Gap, said of all the posts from friends and family who had made it the United States.

Farther up the trail, the path through the jungle filled with people taking selfies.

Gustavo Rainer Lugo, 26, hiking up a hill slick with mud, described himself as an aspiring TikToker documenting his own trek to the United States. Moved by what he had already seen about the Darién online, he wanted to show his fellow Venezuelans the realities of the gap — “the good parts and the bad,” he said.

That night, after arriving at a first camp in the jungle, he rushed to a nearby river to record a dispatch.

The Darién, once barely known around the world, has drawn so much attention that it may soon become a reality television show, with a team of 24 adventurers planning a Jeep expedition through the jungle. The producers say they hope to get “as many as 40 million eyeballs a month through TikTok alone.”

To the alarm of the Biden administration, the number of Venezuelans crossing the Darién took off last year as photographs and videos raced across TikTok, Instagram and Facebook showing Venezuelans who had made it into the United States.

Since then, the Darién social media universe has only exploded. On TikTok, a cheery and almost heartwarming Darién video montage featuring waving migrants and a leap into an emerald-colored river has almost 13 million views. A Facebook user with nearly 500,000 followers, named El Chamo (“the young guy” in Venezuelan Spanish), posted videos from the Darién, and then a follow-up called “My first job in the United States.”

Many migrant content creators say they are acting as citizen journalists and educators, helping others understand what the route demands and make informed decisions whether to risk it.

Mr. Monterrosa, the YouTuber, said his family fled to Venezuela in the 1980s to escape violence in Colombia. Then he went back to Colombia in 2017 to escape the turmoil in Venezuela. He said he tried to make a living in Colombia before heading north, at one point selling chocolates and cigarette lighters on public buses and sleeping on the floor of a shared apartment.

He and his family have fled violence and poverty so often that migration is part of his identity, he said, something “I carry with me.”

In the miniseries about his journey to the United States, he passes the body of a man who looks near death and considers the terrible question, faced by nearly every migrant on the route, of whether to stop and aid a person who cannot go on.

“Is it inhuman not to help?” he asks.

He has been told by others that he inspired them to go north, including Miguel Alejandro Rojas, 27, who used Mr. Monterrosa’s work as a blueprint for his own popular Darién miniseries.

But Mr. Monterrosa does not see himself as incentivizing large-scale migration.

He says much bigger factors are to blame for that — like the crises in migrants’ home countries, the demand for cheap labor in the United States, immigration policies that force people onto illegal routes, and the social media platforms that benefit from the onslaught of new content.

Migrants who narrate and share their own journeys “are just a few more survivors” in a world that offers them few other options, he added.

Much of the content about the Darién and the rest of the journey is aspirational, featuring everyday people overcoming great odds, sometimes accompanied by religious music. One TikTok video of a disabled person making his way through the jungle on the back of another man has more than 10,000 comments.

Even a Darién parody subgenre has emerged, built on a long tradition of using humor to confront tragedy. A video featuring a fake Hugo Chávez, the father of Venezuela’s socialist revolution, migrating through the Darién has been shared more than 23,000 times.

In it, Fake Chávez curses his successor, President Nicolás Maduro, who has held onto power for the last decade. The bit carries the hashtag #hunger #corruption and #fear.

Facebook and TikTok are also flooded with the faces of people who have disappeared or died in the Darién, often accompanied by desperate pleas from family members asking for any information about their loved ones.

“It’s been 34 days without any news from them,” says one post on Facebook, above the photographs of two boys from Ecuador.

Another, with an image of a diapered toddler, includes a plea for the child’s name and relatives because her mother “drowned in a swamp.”

Sasha Arteaga, 33, a Venezuelan immigrant in Colombia, has built a TikTok following by posting these cases, then scrolling the internet for hours looking for signs of the missing person in the videos of other migrants. She has sometimes located people in the jungle this way, and then begged the Panamanian police to perform a rescue.

Her channel, which she started in August, has soared in popularity, though she says she makes no money from it. “As soon as I opened it, I had 10,000 followers,” she said.

Another series of TikTok videos speaks to the journey’s deep toll. Staring at the camera, Yorthin Alexander Valera and Jessica Hernández begged for help finding their son Ignacio, 6, who they lost in the forest. They feared he had drowned or been kidnapped.

In an anguished follow-up video, Mr. Valera begs God for forgiveness.

“I only wanted to try to give something to my children,” he says. “Why, God?”

And yet, the number of people making this journey continues to grow.

In a statement, YouTube said that it does not allow videos that promote human smuggling. The company also removed some content after it was flagged by The Times.

A representative from TikTok said the company had the same policy, and that it uses automated and human moderation to identify posts that violate its guidelines.

TikTok, which says its goal is to “inspire creativity and bring joy,” has handled images of migrants navigating dangerous terrain by placing labels on these videos.

One such post showed a frightened toddler clinging precariously to a man’s back as he crossed a fast-running river up to his neck. The soaking toddler screamed as the water spilled over them and the man gripped a rope to reach the other side.

“The actions in this video are performed by professionals or supervised by professionals,” the warning read, as if the child or migrants were professional stuntmen. “Do not attempt.”

With just a few clicks, migrants can now move so easily from TikTok videos to Darién-related Facebook groups and WhatsApp conversations with smugglers that a trek toward the United States can be conceived, planned and arranged in a matter of hours.

This has posed an enormous challenge for the Biden administration, which tries to counter with its own messaging on X, Instagram and Facebook. It highlights the consequences for people who show up at the border — including deportation — and offers an alternative, reminding them of legal pathways to immigration.

Blas Nuñez-Neto, assistant secretary for border and immigration policy at the Department of Homeland Security, said that trying to thwart the messaging from smugglers online is “a constant kind of daily battle.”

“There’s no doubt that the U.S. government can sometimes not move as quickly as some of the bad actors that we’ve seen working online.”

Mr. Monterrosa is planning to leave soon for the Darién. To save money for the trek, he has produced new videos for his channel, sometimes interviewing Venezuelans in Colombia about their lives. A recent dispatch features an Australian podiatrist who decided to trek the jungle in a Spiderman outfit, helping migrants with foot injuries — and filming his own journey along the way.

Ms. Arteaga, the Venezuelan who broadcasts the most tragic stories from the jungle, now has a new project: preparing her own journey through the Darién to the United States.

When she first arrived in Colombia, she said she made money dancing at stoplights, eventually opening her own dance studio. But when rent rose, she was forced to close it. Today, she lives in a home with 12 others, sleeping six to a room.

“Sometimes you try so, so, so hard to get ahead,” she said, “you work so much, and in the end, it’s not what you expect.” She has her backpack and boots, and is leaving behind two children, ages 13 and almost 2.

“Many people know about the danger,” she said. “They do this because they need to.”

She will film her own journey as well, she said, hoping to help people hurt or stuck along the route.

Reporting was contributed by Federico Rios in Medellín, Colombia; Simón Posada in Bogotá, Colombia; Isayen Herrera in Caracas, Venezuela; Harold Isaac in Port-au-Prince, Haiti; Sabah Gurmat in New Delhi, India; Claire Fu in Seoul; and Ruhullah Khapalwak in Vancouver.

Audio produced by Adrienne Hurst.

By Federico Rios

They were a tiny part of a ceaseless surge: Venezuelans bound for the U.S. in the hope, however illusory, of a new life. But Luis Miguel Arias could not go on.

It was Sept. 23, 2022, and he was only two days into the notoriously brutal Darién Gap. Already he was so spent he could not even speak.

His daughter, Melissa Arias, 4, was making the journey with him. She had eyes only for her father as he faltered.

Their boots told a tale of peril: For years, few dared cross the Gap, which links Colombia to Panama. The mud is so deep it can swallow a person whole.

Behind them was the trail of debris migrants leave behind as they go through their provisions — or just try to lighten their load.

The sleeping mat was bought in Colombia, as the family was about to enter the Gap. Many migrants bring them. Many end up abandoning them.

When I first met Mr. Arias, something extraordinary was happening.

Venezuelans in never-before-seen numbers had given up on their country, an economic basket case, and were heading north. By the end of that year, more than 150,000 of them had arrived at the border between Mexico and the United States.

Mr. Arias, 27, was traveling not just with his daughter, who was on his shoulders much of the time, but with his wife, Desyree, and 7-year-old son, Luis Breyner. His mother-in-law and brother-in-law were also with them.

It was still early in the morning when I took this photo. A long day of travel lay ahead of the family, and more long days after that. A strong hiker might make the end of the Gap in four or five days. For travelers with young children, it could easily be double that.

But Mr. Arias had a more immediate problem: a hill. When he came to it, he just stopped, put down his pack, and sat. It was not clear if he could go on, but after about 15 minutes, he did.

Later, he told me that back in Venezuela, he studied industrial mechanics and worked at his father’s auto repair shop. He and his wife also had a food stall. But struggling to feed their family, they decided to try their luck elsewhere.

In 2019, they went to Colombia, where they opened another food stall and Mr. Arias also drove a motorcycle taxi and did some construction. But again it was not enough. It was time to move again.

As we made our way through the Gap in September, I saw the family from time to time, but eventually our ways parted. Later, as they crossed Central America, we kept in touch through social media. In mid-March, I heard from them again: They had just made into the U.S., applying for asylum as they crossed through border control in Texas in March.

Nearly a year later, Mr. Arias remembers the day he came to a halt on the Darién Gap.

“It was all very sudden,” he recalled. He said: “I felt like my stomach was empty. I started to vomit, and I felt very bad. Because those hills are very bad.”

The family is living in Palo Alto, Calif., now. Mr. Arias is waiting for a work permit, and his wife is occasionally doing manicures. Their son will enter fourth grade in the fall, and their daughter will start kindergarten.

Mr. Arias remembers something else about the moment the photo was taken: how ashamed he felt of his weakness, with his children looking on. But that feeling seems lost to the past now.

“I took a risk but I made it,” he says. “I risked it for them. For me it’s an achievement because of that, because I managed to bring my whole family.”