Duperat Laurette fled Haiti after her country’s massive 2010 earthquake, making her way first to the Dominican Republic, then Chile and five years later to Panama, all with the dream of reaching the U.S. and finding a job to help support 14 siblings left behind in Haiti. Panama, the slender bottleneck between the North and South American coninents, is a transit point for virtually every migrant heading from South America to the United States by land and it closed its borders on March 16 to halt the spread of COVID-19. The closure left nearly 2,000 migrants from Haiti and a handful of African and Asian countries stuck in camps in the jungle along Panama’s northern and southern borders.
