Costa Rica President Luis Guillermo Solís spoke Monday at Washington D.C.'s Wilson Center about the country's growing role in hosting migrants and refugees.
Panama and Colombia both announced this week that they're essentially letting undocumented migrants stuck in their countries move on. Most are headed for the United States.
Around 1,200 Cubans are still holed up in a 2,000 square-foot (200-square-meter) warehouse on private property. Colombian authorities are waiting for a court permit to remove the migrants.
Colombia has deported more than 5,800 migrants over the past two months, most of them from Haiti and Cuba, according to official figures released last week.
The decomposing bodies of eight undocumented migrants, likely African or Haitian, apparently headed to the U.S. have been found in Nicaragua's vast southern freshwater Lake Nicaragua.
As many as 200 refugees at a time from El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras — the so-called Northern Triangle — will be allowed to stay in Costa Rica for up to six months while they are processed for potential asylum in the U.S. or elsewhere.
Six months after U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry announced plans to expand options for Central Americans fleeing violence and persecution in their home countries, those plans have yet to emerge.
Hundreds of migrants from Africa, Asia and the Caribbean are camped out near the Costa Rican border town Peñas Blancas, trying to find a way to continue their journey north to the United States.
Judicial and immigration officials in Costa Rica on Tuesday arrested two men suspected of forming part of a criminal group responsible for smuggling migrants across the Americas on their way to the U.S.
As Central and South American countries seek a regional solution to the latest migrant crisis, migrants stuck in Costa Rica say they’re running out of money and becoming increasingly desperate.
