For a Venezuelan migrant family, the U.S. election is another crossroads in a perilous journey

After spending her last five dollars on a child’s inflatable life vest, Kerli Vasquez gripped the hand of her rambunctious 4-year-old son Greike, told her boyfriend Xavier to lock up their rented room one last time, and took them on an hour-long walk through the scrublands on the edge of town to a litter-strewn spot in the trees. She had earlier given a handful of banknotes to stone-faced men from a Mexican cartel – the price, they told her, to come to this riverside spot in the city of Matamoros without being beaten, raped or abducted.

At the bottom of a steep mud slope, a rope had been stretched across the turbulent waters of the Rio Grande. A line of migrants shouted and struggled against the current as they pulled themselves across, some clinging to inflatables with one arm as the other gripped the rope. Kerli stood at the edge, eyed the line of police waiting on the opposite shore, put the life vest on her son, and waded in.

That was 18 months ago. It was the moment Kerli, then 24, reluctantly joined a surge of South American and Caribbean people crossing the U.S.-Mexico border that had begun after pandemic restrictions ended in late 2021 and made 2023 a record-breaking year for illegal entries.

This mass border crossing also plunged Kerli, and hundreds of thousands of fellow Venezuelans, into the centre of U.S. politics. They’re a small subset of the almost 8 million Venezuelans who were forced to flee their country after 2015, when authoritarian leader Nicolás Maduro unleashed a storm of economic ruin and violence on his once-wealthy country. Although the surge of migrants to the U.S. all but ended during 2024, the fate of those who crossed – and Kerli’s future in the United States – has become a central issue in the Nov. 5 presidential election.

I have spent the past two years following Kerli and her family’s northward journey, receiving texts and photos of their struggles and texting with her regularly. As she trekked through deadly jungles, dodged gunshots at unofficial border crossings, survived a kidnapping, fought to get asylum in several countries and finally plunged into the border river, her decisions and destinations were constantly shaped by the ever-changing policies of President Joe Biden and Vice-President Kamala Harris, whose early efforts to dampen the border controversy had the perverse effect of forcing migrants into more dangerous paths.

Key Republican policies also affected her fate. After crossing the Rio Grande, being arrested by immigration police, and spending four days in a detention cell in Brownsville, Tex., her onward journey was determined, and paid for, by a Republican Texas governor whose ideas have shaped Mr. Trump’s proposals. And the ultimate fate of undocumented immigrants and refugee claimants such as Kerli has been a constant theme in the speeches and rallies of both Ms. Harris and Mr. Trump, the latter of whom has vaguely promised a mass deportation of tens of millions.

I recently visited Kerli, Greike and Xavier in what has been their home since late spring of 2023: the Brooklyn neighbourhood of Williamsburg, one of the most expensive districts in North America, home to a sizable share of the 200,000 post-2022 migrants who’ve challenged New York’s resources to the breaking point. They’re living, for now, in a single tiny room in a former boutique hotel-turned-refugee shelter, one of more than 200 hotels and buildings New York authorities bought or leased to handle the rush of newcomers.

After a very difficult year that began with Xavier and Kerli collecting deposit bottles from bins and skipping meals to feed her child, they have found some footing: Kerli is working shifts in the kitchen of a McDonald’s for $16 an hour as she saves up to find her own place to live, and Xavier is installing air-conditioning units on construction sites while they both wait for a court ruling on their asylum claims. In this, they join a backlog of more than a million U.S. asylum cases that have been in process for more than 6 months.

Most importantly to his mother, Greike, now 6, is now in his second year at P.S. 319, a public school that has enrolled, and provided considerable assistance to, some of the 40,000 shelter-dwelling migrant children who now attend the city’s schools.

“The only thing that really kept me going on the road, when things were really bad for us in Central America last year, was my hope that one day my boy would be able to go to school every day like a normal kid, before he was too old,” Kerli told me as her son climbed a tree in a Brooklyn park one afternoon. “I didn’t know if it would be possible, but I kept going for him. It was the best day in my life when he got on the bus to school. It made me forget everything else.”

I first met Kerli at the end of 2022 in the city of Necocli on the Caribbean coast of Colombia, when she was camped in an improvised lean-to with eight members of her extended family on a crowded beach. In a routine she’d learned from years on the road, she sold bottles of water, kids’ toys and candy to the hundreds of fellow migrants who came to this beach town each day. Most of them – Venezuelans, Haitians, and a few Chinese people – were here to take a jet boat to the Panama border to make the profoundly dangerous five-day hike across the Darien Gap, a vast unpoliced stretch of dense and roadless rain forest, into Central America.

The Colombian beach had been nearly vacant for months, until rumours had spread that U.S. courts would be ending the pandemic-era policy that automatically deported anyone crossing the Mexico-U.S. border. That caused a rush of migrants, mostly Venezuelan, to the Panama border, hoping to make a risky dash to the United States. In fact, over the next few months the Biden administration’s border policy changed several times following a sequence of court challenges and executive orders – but by then, tens of thousands were already on the road, most unable to go back.

Those coming to the beach were less aware of another, more effective Biden policy. The Los Angeles Agreement on Migration and Protection, signed in June of 2022, saw the U.S. and other countries, including Canada, pledge billions of dollars each year to pay South American and Central American countries to settle and house Venezuelans, Haitians and other fleeing populations, and for legal-migration alternatives to be created for those migrants who had the right IDs and credentials.

Much of the agreement’s budget (including a new Biden expenditure of US$1.2-billion for 2024 alone) has been devoted to Colombia, whose government has settled more than 3 million of those Venezuelans, providing them with schooling, health care and de facto citizenship (the United States, by comparison, has received about 250,000 Venezuelans). This has meant that the overwhelming majority of Venezuelans have stayed in South America. But the small percentage who came to the U.S. border created a political panic, and could certainly have been reduced in number, and avoided a terrible experience, with better policies.

Kerli’s case was unusual in that hers was a true refugee case, and that she wasn’t particularly interested in the United States. She hoped to find asylum in Canada or Spain or some other European Union country – any safe place that would take her.

She had originally fled Venezuela to Colombia at age 17 with her then-boyfriend, a member of the violent Tren de Aragua, an international narcotics- and human-trafficking gang with documented ties to the Maduro regime. Shortly after she gave birth to Greike, the man became abusive and tried to force her into criminal activities. She grabbed the baby one night and fled, with a friend, to the Ecuador border. She ended up trying to live in five South American countries, for as long as four months, but the vengeance-seeking gang kept catching up with her.

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It was Kerli’s mother, Iris, who suggested the trip across Panama, for more typical reasons: She wanted a better life in the United States for herself and her five small children, and gave little heed to the high probability of failure and deportation.

A few weeks after I’d completed my month of reporting in Colombia, Kerli contacted me from Panama, after her family had made a harrowing Christmas-week trip through the Darien Gap, and offered to chronicle her journey using WhatsApp (smartphones are now near-universal among even the poorest international migrants, and cellphone data is inexpensive in Latin America).

With a reporter’s gift of self-documentation and a Generation-Z penchant for sharing her inner monologue, Kerli would send me hundreds of texts, photos and video clips: horrific scenes of dead and dying people splayed along the steep muddy paths of the Darien Gap; little Greike chasing pigeons in the main squares of Central American capitals as his mother sold empanadas and bottles of water; the small family bedding down in rented shacks and parks and alleyways; the three of them being chased through border forests and tossed off buses by armed men.

The big extended family, after surviving five nights huddled in pup tents in the jungle, fell apart in northern Panama, leaving Kerli alone with Greike and Xavier, her 21-year-old boyfriend, also Venezuelan, whom she’d met in Peru. It was an emotionally devastating time: Kerli’s joy at reuniting with her mother and her larger family had given way to a deep distrust of her mother’s current partner, a man she had fled in her youth. And Iris, along with Kerli’s sister-in-law Samary, was seeking a quick trip with her kids to the U.S. border, a place Kerli wanted to avoid if possible because of the high chance of deportation or abduction. This was far from unique: Around the world, the stress and suffering of migration frequently breaks up families and marriages.

Soon after leaving Panama, it became apparent to Kerli that the Biden-Harris policies had placed her in a trap. Her hopes of finding safety in Central America came to naught: By 2023, Costa Rica and Panama, which had previously welcomed and settled some Venezuelans but now felt overwhelmed, were rounding up any they could find and busing them to the next country north. “I now know I would have been better off staying in Colombia,” she told me after a day without food or shelter in Nicaragua, another failed country that even United Nations organizations have abandoned. “But I can’t go back, there’s no way to do it.”

That was true. Even if you wanted to go back – and Kerli was one of several Venezuelans who told me they’d wished to – in 2023 there were no programs to return mid-journey migrants, and there was no physical way for a migrant without a passport to board a plane or a boat, short of traversing the deadly Darien Gap again. And, because the Maduro regime charges its citizens at least $400 each to get a passport in another country (plus extra fees for required photo ID cards), most Venezuelan migrants on the road have no legal papers.

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In each country, Kerli and Xavier tried to apply for asylum internationally – sometimes by approaching embassies, sometimes by seeking out offices of the United Nations High Commission for Refugees, which is supposed to process refugee-status claims on behalf of governments. But in 2023, Latin American countries were not generally accepting refugees, Canada and the European Union had (and still have) no accessible pathways for resettling or sponsoring refugees who don’t have documents (and years-long waiting lists even for those who do), and UNHCR officials told me their asylum registrations were no longer accepted by Central American countries or Mexico.

What Kerli really needed was a way to apply for asylum without having to make a dangerous journey to a faraway country. In fact, another Biden-era policy was intended to do exactly that: Safe Mobility Offices were established in Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador and Guatemala in 2023, as part of the Los Angeles Declaration, to allow migrants from third countries such as Venezuela to apply for legal resettlement or sponsorship in the United States, Canada and Spain. The offices theoretically allow the resettlement of up to 125,000 people per year. Unfortunately, they didn’t open until June of 2023, when Kerli and hundreds of thousands of others had already reached the United States.

Even if the Safe Mobility Offices had been open, they likely wouldn’t have helped her. According to a new research report by the Copenhagen-based Mixed Migration Centre, about 200,000 migrants have applied at the offices since the summer of 2023. While 21,000 “have been approved for some kind of legal status,” only 9,000 have been moved to the United States (it is not clear if any have been approved by Canada). That’s partly because many of the offices (and the legal migration programs they serve) require migrants to have the sort of official documents that Venezuelans can’t get.

The policies of Vice-President Kamala Harris also offered no help. Misleadingly described by Mr. Trump as Mr. Biden’s “border czar,” Ms. Harris was in fact tasked with reducing illegal migration from Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador, which together, along with Mexico, had been the largest source of irregular immigration to the Mexico-U.S. border before the pandemic. Her policies, which, similar to the Los Angeles Agreement, mostly stimulated local settlement agreements in these impoverished “Northern Triangle” countries, did coincide with a sharp reduction in their emigration numbers. But those policies didn’t attempt to address the largest current sources of irregular migration – which after 2021 became Venezuela and Haiti – and couldn’t have helped, or deterred, Kerli.

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And the road got harder as the winter wore on. Nicaragua was unliveable. Honduras was barren and poor, with no sources of income. In Guatemala they found good jobs cleaning houses for a couple weeks, but they faced threats of violence from gangs and the police would force them to pay large bribes to stay in the city. Kerli had a final plan: Move to Mexico City, whose streets are teeming with Venezuelans, and work there long enough to get proper ID papers and make applications at embassies and international organizations.

In late March, they reached the Guatemala-Mexico border. The clandestine crossing in the isolated jungle town of El Ceibo was controlled by a cartel, whose members demanded far more money than Kerli and Xavier had. She sent me film clips of the men threatening her, and Xavier bargaining – and then a final, ominous clip captured stealthily from the back seat of a car being driven at a high speed by a tense young man, the family of three cowering with other migrants in the back. “I’m frightened,” Kerli texted – and then her line went silent for days. They had been taken hostage by the cartel.

Kerli, Xavier and little Greike were held at gunpoint for two days in a vacant yard. They seized an opportunity to escape, running into the road and screaming when some pedestrians passed, in the hopes they wouldn’t be shot in public. The pedestrians took them to the immigration office, where they were charged and told to get out of town.

Without money or food, Kerli planned to climb atop “The Beast,” the infamous freight train that spans Mexico, with her boyfriend and child. There is a hospital in Chiapas state just for the hundreds of migrants who have lost their limbs to that train.

At that point, I ceased to be an impartial reporter covering a migrant’s story. Kerli was a penniless mother with a small child who would face horrific dangers I could easily prevent. Kerli refused to accept my money, so I organized a crowdfunding campaign among Globe readers that raised a couple thousand dollars to allow the family to travel safely on buses and in hotels – the amount that failed migrants in Colombia had told me was a minimum they would have needed to make it safely.

They spent a couple fruitless weeks in squalid Mexico City hotels in April, 2023, trying to get passports or asylum applications – Greike’s biological father refused to allow his son to get legal ID papers, ending any hopes for settling in Canada, Spain or even Mexico. Kerli’s quest to live legally in another country now had one remaining option. It was another instrument of Mr. Biden’s immigration policy, launched in its current form only two months earlier: The Customs and Border Protection agency’s CBP One app.

In speeches and posts during the last few weeks, Donald Trump has called it “the Kamala phone app for smuggling illegals,” and during the vice-presidential debate, candidate J.D. Vance called it “a Kamala Harris open-border wand.” In fact, CBP One did nothing other than schedule an appointment at a U.S. consulate where migrants could apply for various forms of legal immigration – part of Mr. Biden’s plan to replace illegal crossings with safe paths.

But the criticisms weren’t groundless – especially in 2023. As Kerli discovered, the app only offered appointments at three consulates, all of them in cities along the Mexico-U.S. border; in fact, she found the app didn’t accept applications until you were physically located north of Mexico City. So it effectively forced many migrants to make the dangerous trip across Mexico regardless. And, once on its waiting list, it typically took three to six months just to get an appointment, which could then occur weeks after that. As a result, places like Ciudad Juarez were filling up with Venezuelans.

Kerli got on the appointment list for Matamoros, on Mexico’s east coast, across the border from the southernmost point of Texas. After a three-day bus journey, she reunited with her sister-in-law Samary and her two small daughters there. Together they rented a single room on the edge of town, and bought a hot plate and cooking supplies so they could make empanadas to sell on the streets, as Kerli had done in many other places. They would be self-sufficient during their months-long wait for an appointment. Greike was delighted to have his cousins with him.

As soon as she went shopping, however, Kerli was accosted by guys from the Gulf Cartel, which controls much of Matamoros; they made it brutally clear that Venezuelans were forbidden to sell on the streets. If she wanted employment, it would be with them, and not in anything as innocent as selling snacks. Her journey had begun by fleeing a life of organized crime, and she certainly wasn’t going to return to it now.

Kerli and Samary held on for two weeks. Then they learned that Kerli’s mother, her partner and her five children had tried to cross the border a few weeks before. They’d been arrested, held in detention, then deported back to another city in Mexico.

But things changed, at least briefly, in the spring of 2023. On March 27, a fire broke out in a migrant-detention facility in Ciudad Juarez, killing 40 in the men’s wing, which had been locked from the outside. In the aftermath, both Mexico and the U.S. changed their deportation practices to avoid a similar horror. Kerli’s mother and her family made another border-crossing attempt in April. This time they were arrested, held for a few days, and released in the United States to await their trial. They’re now sheltered in Chicago.

Kerli, unable to live in Matamoros and unable to return south, had one option left. On April 23, joined by Xavier, Samary and their children, she abandoned their rented room and headed to the river.

Kerli joined the more than 250,000 Venezuelan illegal immigrants now living in the United States. It’s a negligible share of America’s 47.8 million immigrants, but a highly visible one. Her arrest on the north shore of the Rio Grande was one of a record-breaking 2.5 million “encounters” at the border during 2023 (a number that counts the same people multiple times if they’ve made repeated or unsuccessful crossing attempts) – what turned out to be a temporary surge that fell to pre-Trump levels in 2024, but was sufficiently chaotic to become political dynamite.

In some ways Kerli fit the profile of most southern-border migrants: Venezuelan, young and with children. But she was also atypical. For one thing, she was from a poor family and had only an incomplete high-school education. The majority of adult Venezuelan immigrants who’ve made it to the United States are university graduates (whereas less than 40 per cent of Americans are), and South American migrants have a higher U.S. labour-force participation rate than the American-born. This fits a worldwide pattern: International migration is expensive and difficult, and generally only people with knowledge and resources can do it.

Also, Kerli had a credible refugee claim, due to the regime ties of the gang that has pursued her. She has, in the language of the United Nations Refugee Convention, a “well-founded fear of being persecuted” if she returns. Although the violence of Venezuela has arguably made all of its emigrants into refugees, most, including Kerli’s relatives, don’t really have a legal case. They’re using the asylum system because, for many, it’s the only form of immigration U.S. policy allows them to apply for.

Kerli and Xavier could have entered the United States in less dangerous and politically controversial ways. If they had waited in Colombia, they might have been eligible for the employment-sponsorship immigration program, known as the “Welcome Corps,” launched by Mr. Biden in January, 2023 (though the program provides only two years of residency, and would have required full ID). Or they could have applied, later in 2023, for asylum at an office in Central America. But they, like many of the migrants coming to the southern border, weren’t told anything about these programs, and they felt that it was riskier to wait.

This year, Mr. Biden seemed to justify their fears. In June, he signed an executive order that told authorities to immediately deport anyone who crosses the border between legal entry points (it also provided some limited ways of applying for asylum at legal crossings). This had the effect of forcing some migrants to travel to even more remote and dangerous places along the border, causing an increase in reported migrant deaths in the Mexican desert. But it also caused, or more likely coincided with, a sharp reduction in cross-border numbers.

After Kerli and Greike spent four days in the women’s wing of a detention facility in Brownsville, Tex., they were given their arrest papers and taken to the bus station (Xavier was kept a couple days longer, and Samary and the girls went their separate way after detention, winding up with her husband in Manhattan). The only option they were offered was to pay for a daylong bus trip to San Antonio. After a couple nights at a dormitory shelter in that city, they were asked two questions: Who do you know in the United States, and how are you going to get out of Texas?

The shelter clerk had an offer for them, directly from Republican governor Greg Abbott: They could get a free flight to either Chicago or New York. Mr. Abbott had already made headlines by busing tens of thousands of migrants to Democratic-governed cities, including a few to the Washington homes of Kamala Harris and then-Senate speaker Nancy Pelosi. In 2023, he added free flights to his arsenal, at considerable public expense. Kerli chose New York because her brother was there, living in a sprawling men’s shelter in a gymnasium.

It was her first time on an airplane, and it terrified her.

On the morning of May 2, 2023, I got a WhatsApp text from Kerli: “We are at a place called LaGuardia, and we need to go to the Bronx. How do I get there?” It’s a challenging question even for many New Yorkers. The three of them got in an Uber, and joined a thick crowd of fellow Venezuelans outside the Department of Homeland Security assessment centre. Greike had a high fever, so it was a day of anxiety, emergency wards and fitful sleep on sidewalks. Shortly before midnight, they took a long subway trip to Brooklyn, where they were given the hotel room that is still their temporary home.

Although it has played out on the national stage as a border crisis, the Venezuelan surge has manifested itself most acutely as a municipal issue – and nowhere as dramatically as New York, which absorbed more than 200,000 southern-border newcomers over two years (Chicago, with 40,000, comes a distant second). Some of this was due to the actions of Mr. Abbott, the Texas governor, but most migrants would have likely settled in the big cities of the north anyway, because migrants tend to go where others like them have already settled.

In their first months, Kerli and Xavier had a very difficult time. They had shelter, but no food – and they weren’t allowed to cook in their hotel room. And precooked food in Brooklyn, they discovered, is very expensive.

At first, they engaged in the lowest form of urban labour, gathering bottles from garbage bins for deposit money. A 12-hour day might yield the two of them $20. Kerli then tried something she’d done in Central American capitals: buying stickers and balloons at a wholesale shop, finding a place where children are on field trips, and selling them. She set up shop at the entrance to a Brooklyn subway station, and was shocked to find herself making $200 on her first day. “I was asking $4 and people were giving me twenties and telling me to keep the change,” she told me. Then she realized that sympathetic Brooklynites were viewing her not as a vendor but as a beggar – something she never wanted to be. She gave that up, and sought out restaurant work – first, through the rest of 2023, at a Dominican restaurant in a distant part of Queens, though the long commute made Greike’s school pickups challenging; then, for less money but closer to home, at the local golden arches.

Xavier worked as an Uber food-delivery driver, first on a bike and then a small motorcycle, using the account of someone with a U.S. bank card and drivers’ licence, for the cost of 50 per cent of his earnings (a common arrangement in big cities, and New York’s bike lanes are crammed with South American migrants). He broke his leg badly in a motorcycle crash; after weeks of recovery, he got a car, then his current job in construction. They saved, and looked for opportunities.

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What is striking, after two years, is how successfully New York’s institutions and communities have responded to this challenge, often at enormous expense. A city with an already severe housing crisis managed to shelter, fairly quickly, all the migrants with children (single men have been less fortunate; they’ve been relegated to dormitories, and sometimes, to the street). This was done, in part, by turning more than 200 hotels, motels and office buildings into short-term family shelters and spending US$4.3-billion (as of this August) on services for the migrants – much of it from federal funds. Health care, transit and work permits are available there to people without papers. And the city’s thirsty labour market soaked up a large share of the newcomers, officially or otherwise.

A humanitarian crisis was averted – but it triggered another political crisis, as scandal-plagued mayor Eric Adams lashed out at the cost of the migrant flood and blamed not just the Republican governor Mr. Abbott, but also his fellow Democrat, Mr. Biden. Indeed, when Mr. Adams was indicted on corruption charges in late September, his response was to blame Mr. Biden’s border policies. “When the federal government did nothing as its broken immigration policies overloaded our shelter system with no relief … I always knew that if I stood my ground for all of you, that I would become a target – and a target I became.”

The mayor’s message has been amplified on the campaign trail by Mr. Trump, who in recent weeks has promoted a conspiracy theory that claims that Washington used false corruption charges to silence a prominent critic of its border policies.

But New York is not limited to its mayor, and many of its institutions not only moved mountains to welcome the migrants, but even saw the newcomers as a benefit. Kerli discovered that for herself when her little boy was enrolled in a school within weeks of her arrival, which provided him with clothes, school supplies and a daily lunch that was deliberately large enough to give his whole family a dinner on many days. More than 45,000 migrant students have enrolled in New York schools since July of 2022, almost half of them last year.

“Regardless of their immigration status or language spoken at home, every student deserves access to high-quality schools that meet their unique needs,” said Nicole Brownstein, an official with the New York schools department. “We ensure that newcomer students have what they need in our public schools and our schools are well equipped to support those needs.”

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Greike was a recipient of Project Open Arms, an initiative to support migrant students living in temporary housing. With a budget in the tens of millions, the school board hired 400 staff to work in schools and shelters, and set up 165 migrant health centres and 202 on-site trauma-focused, mental-health clinics within schools.

“For some of the schools, the migrants coming here has been a godsend,” New York schools chancellor David Banks told the New York Times in September, because the city’s aging demographics had reduced the public-school student population by more than 100,000. “Some schools were being threatened with whether we’re going to be able to keep the doors open.”

In August, Kerli and Xavier were told they’d have to leave their shelter hotel within 60 days (though they were allowed to appeal for an extension). This wasn’t a surprise: In the spring, New York had changed its laws, which guarantee a right to shelter to all residents, to cover this right for only 30 days for single individuals or 60 days for families. Kerli and Xavier are saving their earnings to rent a shared room, though they don’t quite know where. They’re looking at options to move to a less expensive part of the United States, including a state scheme to settle migrant families in upstate agricultural towns (they’ll likely need to complete their asylum hearings first). Kerli spends many of her mornings contacting agencies and filling out forms.

In August, Kerli stayed up late to follow the Venezuelan election and its violent aftermath, as her remaining relatives back at home texted her videos of street shootings and lines of police beating protesters. When Mr. Maduro seized power in spite of his second election loss, she realized that a return to her home country would not be a possibility in the foreseeable future. “When I saw those scenes of people getting beaten in my town, I knew I have to stay here, no matter how hard it is,” she told me. “I often wish I hadn’t come here, it’s a very hard life for us, but now I know I have to be here for good.”

On Nov. 5, Kerli will be following another election – one in which her life and her future have become the most hotly debated topic. A victory by Mr. Trump could turn her into a target for deportation, leaving her to rely on the generosity of New York and the unpredictable grace of the courts. Ms. Harris has also talked tough about controlling the border, but also about the buoyant U.S. economy and its need for millions of new workers. The outcome of November’s vote, Kerli knows, could determine whether she and her child will ever need to cross another border.

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Undercurrents: More from The Globe and Mail

The Decibel podcast

Previously in this series

The Afghan refugee crisis is a migratory time bomb that may soon go off

Along the trans-Saharan path, African migrants weigh the risks and rewards of heading to Europe

Climate change is displacing a million farmers in Vietnam’s Mekong Delta – but for most, migration is not an option

On a busy migration path, Venezuelans seek fragile hope