Important Takeaways:

• New president José Raúl Mulino has vowed to close the route through which thousands of migrants travel to the US every year
• Last year, a record 520,000 migrants risked their lives, often at the hands of people smugglers, to traverse the Darién Gap, a dense jungle on Panama’s border with Colombia.
• Mulino’s new foreign minister signed a memorandum of understanding with the US government to “allow the closing off of the passing of illegal immigrants through the Darién”, Panama’s government said in a statement.
• The agreement, signed by US homeland security secretary Alejandro Mayorkas who attended Mulino’s inauguration, will see the US agree to “cover” the costs of repatriating migrants who enter Panama illegally.
• The agreement was designed to reduce the number of migrants being “smuggled through the Darién, usually en route to the United States”, a spokesperson for the White House national security council said in a statement.
• Under the terms of the agreement, US homeland security teams on the ground in Panama would help the government there train personnel and build up its own expertise and ability to determine which migrants, under Panama’s immigration laws, could be removed from the country, according to two senior administration officials.
• For those migrants who are to be removed, the US would pay for charter flights or commercial airplane tickets for them to return to their home countries.

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