Below is an excerpt from a report by the Center's Todd Bensman in the New York Post about the impact of the Biden-Harris administration's immigration policies on indigenous communities in the Darien Gap, as described by the tribal leaders themselves. The Darien is a roadless jungle on the Panama-Colombia border that huge numbers of illegal immigrants have passed through in response to the Biden-Harris catch-and-release policies, but is also the home of the Embera tribe, whose way of life is being destroyed by the migration flood. For more on this, see a panel discussion featuring one of the Embera chiefs which the Center hosted in 2021.
METETI, Panama — Not far from this small town, the 19,000-mile-long Pan-American Highway ends at a wall of jungle — the Darien Gap, a notorious wilderness that stretches from Colombia into Panama.
In just three years, 1.5 million migrants — lured by the Biden-Harris administration’s open border — have braved the footpaths of this jungle on their way north.
Rather that stop this dangerous flow, the White House has encouraged it.
Top cabinet officials such as DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, State Department Secretary Antony Blinken have repeatedly come to Panama to press for “safe, orderly, and humane” transit for migrants.
The Biden-Harris administration lavished new billions in tax money on United Nations agencies and non-governmental advocacy groups (NGOs) that descended on this region to ease the burdens of Darien Gap travel.
In the process, they have trampled arguably the most vulnerable and important stakeholder of them all in Panama: the Embera-Wounnaan tribe, whose 19,000 people happened to be living smack in the middle of this immigration hurricane.
And they’ve denied the tribes a seat at any table where they might have had a say.
All five chiefs of the Embera-Wounaan reservation, known as the Comarca, told me in an exclusive interview that the mass migration has driven their culture and traditional ways of life to the brink of ruin and must all be stopped with border closures and deportation.
They reserved special fury for the Biden-Harris administration, prior Panamanian governments and the United Nations and its nongovernmental organizations (NGO) proxies for never once asking permission or begging forgiveness as they facilitated an unprecedented international stampede in 2021 that has wreaked environmental and cultural havoc.
“Mr. President and you candidates, you are finishing off and you are killing all the Indians on the Comarca!” beseeched General Chief Leonide Cunampia, whose position oversees the tribe’s four other chiefs in Panama. “You have to pay attention to what’s going on in our territory. The immigration is contaminating us!”
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