The number of child migrants who crossed the treacherous Darien Gap between Colombia and Panama has spiked, the United Nations Children's Fund said Friday. UNICEF said that in May 2021, 500 children were detected crossing on the jungle trail. But in May 2022, that number had risen to 2,000.

The fund estimates that about 5,000 children have crossed the Darien Gap so far this year.

Plagued by wild animals, swollen rivers, rough terrain and thieves, the gap claims many lives each year. The overall number of migrants crossing the land bridge between South and North America doubled.

The overall number of migrants crossing the land bridge between South and North America doubled, with about 32,000 crossing so far this year, compared to 16,000 in 2021.

Every week, hundreds of migrants make the dangerous journey from Latin America to the U.S. border. The journey is even more concerning for a group of children.

“The stories are all the same, their parents send them north because they want them to survive," said Margo Cowan with Keep Tucson Together. "Whether it’s starvation or the horrific violence in their countries of origin.”

Cowan frequently works with unaccompanied minors to prevent deportation.

“There are legal mechanisms that allow people to present themselves at the border and apply for asylum, and it shouldn’t be a hostile environment,” Cowan said.

Latin American families are making use of this legal process. Last week, the Tucson Sector of Border Patrol processed around 107 unaccompanied migrant children.

“Smuggling organizations will bring these people and children, sometimes toddlers to these places in the middle of the desert, in the middle of nowhere,” said Jesus Vasavilbaso, a U.S. Border Patrol Agent.

An agent at the Tucson sector says they don't usually deal with children migrants. Around 85% of migrants encountered at the tucson sector are adults that have to be tracked down and apprehended. Recent groups of children came from Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador, led by smugglers to turn themselves in to Border Patrol.

“The smuggling organizations sell this to the migrants saying that when you show up to the border, you just turn yourself in to Border Patrol, and they just let you in,” Vasavilbaso said.

But that’s not always how it works. The Tucson sector did a medical exam on each child then sent them to either health and human services or the office of refugee resettlement. Now those children have been sent to family members, child protective services, or back home.

This story was originally published by KGUN in Tucson, Arizona.

Police in Honduras arrested former President Juan Orlando Hernández on Tuesday charging him with taking millions of dollars in bribes from drug traffickers to help them smuggle hundreds of tons of cocaine into the United States. The U.S. is now seeking extradition for Hernández.

As the Wall Street Journal reported, police fitted the former president in a bulletproof vest and he was seen in images cuffed at his hands and feet and being led out to the street at his home in a wealthy area of Tegucigalpa, the capital city of Honduras. Police drove Hernández in a convoy of black SUVs to a police base where he was put on stage as cameras broadcast the moment his charges were announced.

According to an extradition request obtained by the Guardian, Hernández is accused of being part of a "violent drug-trafficking" conspiracy and is said to have helped smuggle around 500,000 kilos of cocaine since 2004.

Elmer Martinez/AP

The accusations have reportedly been long-rumored and the indictment comes a little over two weeks after Hernández left office.

As he was arrested on Tuesday, Hernández was wearing a dark blue baseball cap when he was taken into custody where police patted him down before cuffing him. The scene was broadcast on national television.

Hernández was scheduled to attend a court hearing on Wednesday.

DEL RIO, Texas —

Marianela Rojas huddles in prayer with fellow migrants after trudging across a slow-flowing stretch of the Rio Grande and nearly collapsing when she stepped on American soil for the first time.

"I won't say it again," interrupts a U.S. Border Patrol agent, giving orders in Spanish for Rojas and a group of 14 other Venezuelans to get into a detention van. "Only passports and money in your hands. Everything else — earrings, chains, rings, watches — in your backpacks."

It's a frequent scene across the U.S.-Mexico border at a time of swelling migration. But these aren't farmers and low-wage workers from Mexico or Central America, who make up the bulk of those crossing. Among them are bankers, doctors and engineers from Venezuela, and they're arriving in record numbers as they flee turmoil in the country with the world's largest oil reserves and pandemic-induced pain across South America.

Two days after Rojas crossed, she left detention and got a bus out of the Texas town of Del Rio. The 54-year-old fled hardship in Venezuela a few years ago, leaving a paid-off home and career as an elementary school teacher for a fresh start in Ecuador.

But when the housecleaning work she found dried up, she decided to uproot again.

"It's over, it's all over," she said on the phone to loved ones. "Everything was perfect. I didn't stop moving for one second."

Last month, 7,484 Venezuelans were encountered by Border Patrol agents along the U.S.-Mexico border — more than all 14 years for which records exist. The surprise increase is a harbinger of a new type of migration that has caught the Biden administration off guard: pandemic refugees.

Many of the nearly 17,306 Venezuelans who have crossed the southern border illegally since January had been living for years in other South American countries, part of an exodus of millions since President Nicolás Maduro took power in 2013.

While some are government opponents, the vast majority are escaping long-running economic devastation marked by blackouts and shortages of food and medicine.

With the pandemic still raging in parts of South America, they relocated again. Increasingly, they're being joined at the U.S. border by people from the countries they initially fled to — like Ecuador and Brazil — as well as far-flung nations hit hard by the virus, like India and Uzbekistan.

Compared with other migrants, Venezuelans garner certain privileges — a reflection of their firmer financial standing, higher education levels and U.S. policies that have failed to remove Maduro but nonetheless made deportation all but impossible.

The vast majority enter the U.S. near Del Rio, a town of 35,000, and don't evade detention but turn themselves in to seek asylum.

Like many of the dozens of Venezuelans The Associated Press spoke to this month in Del Rio, 27-year-old Lis Briceno had already migrated once before. After graduating with a degree in petroleum engineering, she couldn't get hired in the oil fields near her hometown of Maracaibo without declaring her loyalty to Venezuela's socialist leadership. So she moved to Chile a few years ago, finding work with a technology company.

But as anti-government unrest and the pandemic tanked Chile's economy, her company shuttered. Briceno sold what she could to raise the $4,000 needed to get to the U.S.

"I always thought I'd come here on vacation, to visit the places you see in the movies," Briceno said. "But doing this? Never."

While Central Americans and others can spend months getting north, most Venezuelans reach the U.S. in as little as four days.

"This is a journey they're definitely prepared for from a financial standpoint," said Tiffany Burrow, who runs the Val Verde Border Humanitarian Coalition's shelter in Del Rio, where migrants can eat, clean up and buy bus tickets to U.S. cities.

They first fly to Mexico City or Cancun. Smugglers promoting themselves as "travel agencies" on Facebook claim to offer hassle-free transport to the U.S. for about $3,000.

The steep price includes a guided sendoff from Ciudad Acuna, where the bulk of Venezuelans cross the Rio Grande and which had been largely spared the violence seen elsewhere on the border.

"If you're a smuggler in the business of moving a commodity — because that's how they view money, guns, people, drugs and everything they move, as a product — then you want to move it through the safest area possible charging the highest price," said Austin L. Skero II, chief of the U.S. Border Patrol's Del Rio sector.

Once in the U.S., Venezuelans tend to fare better than other groups. In March, Biden granted Temporary Protected Status to an estimated 320,000 Venezuelans, protecting them from deportation and allowing them to work legally.

Also, Venezuelans requesting asylum — as almost all do — tend to succeed, partly because the U.S. government corroborates reports of political repression. Only 26% of asylum requests from Venezuelans have been denied this year, compared with an 80% rejection rate for asylum-seekers from poorer, violence-plagued countries in Central America, according to Syracuse University's Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse.

"I can write their asylum requests almost by heart," said Jodi Goodwin, an immigration attorney in Harlingen, Texas, who has represented over 100 Venezuelans. "These are higher-educated people who can advocate for themselves and tell their story in a chronological, clean way that judges are accustomed to thinking."

Even Venezuelans facing deportation have hope. The Trump administration broke diplomatic relations with Maduro in 2019, so air travel is suspended, even charter flights, making removal next to impossible.

Briceno said that if she had stayed in Venezuela, she would earn the equivalent of $50 a month — barely enough to scrape by.

"The truth is," Briceno said, "it's better to wash toilets here than being an engineer over there."

GUATEMALA CITY — During her first international trip as Vice President, Kamala Harris talked about the need for leaders in Central America to restore hope for residents, as a way to slow the increasing numbers of migrants coming to the U.S.'s southern border.

Speaking at the start of bilateral meetings with Guatemalan President Alejandro Giammattei in Guatemala City, Harris said people don't want to leave their homeland, where they were born and grew up, but are forced to because of living conditions.

She said it was up to leaders to act to improve the situation for Guatemalans, to give them hope.

"The power of hope, the ability that each of our governments has to give people a sense that help is on the way," Harris said.

"To let them know that they are seen, that they are heard, that we see their capacity, but we also understand their challenges and their need for support and the resources that any human being needs to be able to survive much less thrive."

Harris talked about financial partnerships with Guatemala and the U.S. setting up an anti-corruption task force in the region.

She also had a clear message for those considering making the long and dangerous trek north to the United States.

"Do not come. Do not come. The United States will continue to enforce our laws and secure our border. There are legal methods by which migration can and should occur," Harris said.

The Biden administration is grappling with a two-decade record-high number of migrants coming to the southern U.S. border. Nearly half of the migrants encountered at the border between the U.S. and Mexico are originally from Guatemala, El Salvador or Honduras, sometimes referred to as the Northern Triangle countries.

The vice president has been spearheading the administration's efforts to fight the root causes of the increase in migration.

During the visit, Harris is also planning to address vaccine sharing and other issues.