The number of migrants traveling through Latin America to the United States plummeted in 2025 and sent organized crime groups scrambling to plug a multibillion-dollar hole in their profits.
Between February and October 2025, US authorities encountered an average of 9,620 people per month on the southern border with Mexico, a 92% drop from the average 123,202 monthly encounters recorded during the same period of 2024, according to data from US Customs and Border Protection (CBP).
Countries serving as corridors to the United States also recorded dramatic declines in migrant flows. Between May and September 2025, Panamanian authorities recorded just 78 people crossing the Darien Gap, a treacherous stretch of jungle on the Colombia-Panama border. This marked a stark contrast with previous years, especially during 2022 and 2023, when the region served as a major staging ground for the tens of thousands of migrants funneled every month onto clandestine trails, tightly controlled and taxed by criminal groups.
SEE ALSO: As Migrant Flows Drop, Crime Groups Adapt in Ciudad Juárez
The abrupt turnaround is the result of major policy changes in the United States. In the first year of his second term, President Donald Trump gutted the country’s asylum programs, rescinded the protected status of many migrant groups, and ramped up deportations. The administration also detained thousands of suspected undocumented migrants, removing some without trial to a “Terrorist Confinement Center” in El Salvador, a high-security prison notorious for human rights abuses.
“People throughout the region are changing their decisions to migrate, not because their situations have changed, but because they no longer see the United States as a viable option,” Maureen Meyer, Vice President of Programs at the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA), told InSight Crime.
The policies have brought a near decade-long criminal boom that transformed human smuggling from a small-time racket into a multibillion-dollar enterprise to a crashing halt. Profits were so big they pulled in even the largest criminal groups. By 2021, human smuggling was generating as much as $13 billion for organized crime in the region, according to estimates from the Department of Homeland Security. InSight Crime’s own investigations have reached similar conclusions, finding that in many border areas the migrant smuggling economy rivaled the profits of the drug trade during that period.
As these revenues dry up, criminal groups are facing a financial reckoning.
From Mom-and-Pop to Criminal Powerhouses
The first signs that migration could become a burgeoning criminal enterprise emerged around 10 years ago in Colombia.
Colombian authorities detained 1,111 undocumented migrants transiting the country in the first three months of 2015, about double the number from the same period in 2014. The numbers were tiny in comparison to what was to come, but the nationalities of the travelers attracted the attention of authorities. While the majority were Cuban, people also came from African and Asian countries, including Afghanistan, Bangladesh, India, and Somalia.
The internationalization of US-bound migrants in Latin America was driven in part by tougher border restrictions in Europe that pushed some to look towards the United States.
This initial uptick in migration remained, at best, a fringe interest for the region’s criminal groups. Migrants had long proved attractive targets for robberies and kidnappings, but early revenues from these rackets remained small.
The criminal economy linked to human smuggling in Colombia was pegged at just $5 million per year in 2016 by one estimate, a fraction of the country’s drug trade profits. However, the human smuggling market started to grow, driven by an increase in the demand for these services combined with measures deployed by law enforcement agencies to stamp out flows.
The number of people fleeing Venezuela surged in 2018, for example, as insecurity spiked and the country sank ever deeper into an economic crisis. The first move for most Venezuelan migrants was to cross the border into Colombia, where members of criminal groups, including Tren de Aragua, awaited them on international bridges and tucked away on clandestine border trails, offering them services that sought to profit from the growing hardship in the country.
Some Venezuelans headed for the United States, though most remained in Latin America, making it to Peru, Chile, and Argentina. Tren de Aragua followed its migrant countryfolk in the region and developed a knack for trapping them. Young women and girls were frequently forced into prostitution rings to pay off “debts” to the group.
Meanwhile, Mexico and Central America further militarized their borders after the first Trump administration leaned hard on its southern neighbors to stop migrants from reaching the United States. But as the journey became more treacherous, the need for human smugglers’ services surged, and the prices they charged for safe passage through Mexico doubled.
SEE ALSO: Trump Blurs the Line Between Immigration and Organized Crime
Two policies enacted by the first Trump administration created the context for a further boom in criminal revenues. The Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP) forced people to remain in Mexico while waiting for their asylum applications to be processed, while Title 42 effectively closed the border, citing public health concerns around the COVID-19 pandemic.
Both policies increased the vulnerability of migrants, who became sitting ducks for large and small criminal groups in Mexico that ratcheted up extortion and kidnapping operations. Ransoms ranged from $1,000 to $10,000, and many migrants were victimized repeatedly after making fruitless attempts to cross into the United States only to be expelled back into Mexico.
The reopening of the region after the deadliest period of COVID-19 triggered a further surge in the number of people looking to migrate. In 2023, the number of migrant encounters at the US southern border peaked at over 2.4 million, and criminal groups developed new strategies to profit from the surge.
As criminal groups industrialized their exploitation of undocumented migration, they also expanded their reach into legal economies that supported the trade. On the Venezuela border, Tren de Aragua opened low-cost migrant lodging called pagadiarios. On the US-Mexico border, smuggling operators sold a variety of goods to their customers, from camouflage boots to bedding and pillows. In the Darien Gap, the Gaitanistas offered smuggling packages of varying comfort levels, minting as much as $100 million from migrants in 2024.
This is all gone now. In October, CBP released numbers indicating that irregular crossings on the US-Mexico border had plummeted, reaching a 55-year low.
Smaller Flows, Higher Stakes
Despite the sharp drop in the number of migrants traveling to the United States, criminal groups continue to look for ways to exploit what remains of this criminal market to offset lost profits.
On one hand, there are still a few migrants traveling north, according to InSight Crime interviews with experts in Panama and Mexican border cities. This indicates that a minimal smuggling economy continues to operate in the Darién Gap and throughout Central America. On the US-Mexico border, however, smuggling services have become more sophisticated to evade heightened surveillance and may include air travel, forged documents, or routes that are less visible and more dangerous.
“We could say these are a sort of ‘VIP Packages’ for migrants who have the resources to afford them,” said a migration official in the Mexican border city of Ciudad Juárez, who spoke on background as they were not authorized to speak publicly on the matter.
Some experts estimate costs to cross the border may have doubled or even tripled.
“The cost to cross from Tijuana was previously around $8,000, and it can now go up to $20,000 to cross through the Sonoran Desert or even $30,000 to travel via sea,” said Manuel Ayala, director of Nómadas Press, a media organization based in Tijuana that focuses on migration.
These networks now require greater infrastructure and resources. Higher barriers to entry likely mean that the smuggling economy no longer spills across a wide range of smaller, more predatory criminal actors as it once did. It also means that fewer migrants are able to afford these services, and are either deciding not to make the trip, or are making the journey alone, without the costly guidance of smugglers.
However, this does not mean that other criminal groups have stopped preying on migrants,. Migration within Latin America continues as many people remain stranded in cities along migration routes. By some estimates, there were still around 5,240 migrants in Mexican border cities as of November 2025.
“These migrants are now facing less support to provide for their basic needs, and the lack of international funding means that there is less capacity to provide them guidance,” said Meyer.
There is also a growing trend known as “reverse migration,” in which people who were detained and deported from the United States, or who decided not to continue their journey due to fear or lack of resources, are now seeking to return to their home countries or to other destinations in the region.
More than 14,000 people had made that journey after Trump took office, most of them Venezuelans traveling back from Mexico and Guatemala heading primarily towards Colombia and Chile, according to a United Nations report published in August.
Criminal networks spanning Panama and Colombia have moved to exploit this reverse flow. Many are the same groups that previously profited from transporting migrants through the Darién Gap, including the Gaitanistas, and are now offering return trips to Colombia.
To raise profits, these groups increasingly offer boat journeys along Panama’s Caribbean and Pacific coasts instead of the traditional land routes through the jungle. Migrants pay at least $230 per person for these trips, according to InSight Crime’s reporting, though prices can rise to more than $300 and often fluctuate at the whim of criminal groups.
Once in Colombia, migrants continue their journey by land or air to their final destination, which is often constrained by their remaining resources. In its report, the UN warned that many people stranded along the route are highly vulnerable to forced recruitment and ongoing exploitation by criminal groups.
Substitute Income Streams
These adaptations in the human smuggling industry — and the growing flow of people traveling home — are likely still not enough to compensate for the loss of what was once a multibillion-dollar business. For now, criminal groups across the region also appear to be filling the gap through other illicit economies. These are often predatory activities with low barriers to entry, which provide quick but unstable sources of income.
On the Colombian border with Panama, for example, the Gaitanistas have reportedly expanded their extortion operations beyond businesses linked to migrant flows, targeting sectors such as cattle ranching.
On the US–Mexico border, similar dynamics are emerging. Criminal groups are allegedly allowing lower-ranking members to generate income by turning the same crimes they once committed against migrants in transit — such as kidnapping — on the local population and the migrants that remain. During 2025, kidnapping reports in Ciudad Juárez rose to levels not seen in a decade. The perpetrators were mostly young people who, according to State Police Chief Gilberto Loya, had prior experience targeting migrants and were now targeting local businesspeople, cab drivers, merchants, and even passersby.
But this strategy proved unsustainable. The groups lacked the organization and infrastructure needed to evade authorities. And while ransom demands initially reached into the millions, the amounts typically obtained ranged from $1,000 to $2,600, which were divided among cell members, Loya explained. In Tijuana, criminal groups once involved in the migration industry have turned to extorting small- and medium-sized businesses, according to Ayala, the migration reporter. This has driven reports of the crime to record levels and resulted in the murder of several business owners who spoke out against it.
There has also been a renewed focus on drug trafficking. At the height of the migration boom, many criminal networks prioritized migrants over drugs. But many now appear to be shifting back toward the more profitable drug trade. More sophisticated organizations, such as the Gaitanistas in Colombia, have likely concentrated their efforts on transnational cocaine trafficking through the Darién and the nearby Urabá region, their long-time stronghold.
On the US–Mexico border, groups with the capacity to control international drug crossings — including remnants of the Juárez and Tijuana cartels, as well as the Sinaloa and Jalisco cartels — continue to vie for control. Meanwhile, smaller, less sophisticated gangs have instead turned to street-level drug sales.
In this year’s event, we’re looking back at the last year and the last decade to better understand what’s to come in 2026. Our donor-exclusive event will brief you on the most important criminal shifts in the region and what to expect in the coming year from organized crime and the governments tackling it in the Americas.
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