Caitlin Dickerson on the Darién Gap’s Humanitarian Catastrophe

The Darién Gap, the perilous mountain region connecting Central and South America, was thought for centuries to be all but impossible to cross. But now, hundreds of thousands of migrants are doing just that to reach the U.S. Pulitzer Prize-winning immigration reporter Caitlin Dickerson took three trips to the Darién Gap over five months, following groups of migrants on their 70-mile trek from northern Colombia into southern Panama. They risked hunger, thirst, drowning, disease, violence, sexual assault and death. We talk to Dickerson about what she witnessed and what she calls the “flawed logic” of U.S. immigration policy – “that by making migration harder, we can limit the number of people who attempt it.” Her new article in the Atlantic is “Seventy Miles in the Darién Gap.”