An Enduring Challenge: Obstacles and Efforts to Improving Costa Rica’s Protection System
By Nicholas Aimé, Program Assistant at CEDA
In the year since CEDA’s brief, Costa Rica: Access to Protection, the country’s asylum system has come under increasing strain. The forced displacement crisis in the region persists, while Costa Rica’s ability to respond has been undermined by steep cuts to international aid, especially from the United States (US). A decimated aid landscape has resulted in mounting operational challenges for the asylum system, and other pathways to protection have been suspended or eliminated. Despite this adverse environment, the Costa Rican government is taking noteworthy steps to improve its asylum system. Nevertheless, existing conditions continue to limit access to protection for refugees and others in need. This commentary briefly examines key developments since mid-2024.
Nota Bene: While CEDA recognizes the significance of other recent developments impacting Costa Rica’s protection landscape, most notably the emerging reverse flows of migrants moving southward and the February 2025 transfer of asylum seekers from the United States to Costa Rica —an unacceptable breach of protection obligations by both governments—this commentary is limited to updates on the asylum system, as examined in CEDA’s June 2024 brief.
Refugees and migrants continue to constitute a significant portion of Costa Rica’s population, with the latest UNHCR estimate indicating that forcibly displaced persons comprise 5 percent of the country’s population. While many are in need of protection, more than 220,000 asylum applications were still pending as of May 2025. Nicaraguan asylum seekers make up approximately 83 percent of those claims. The growing backlog threatens access to asylum. Drastic cuts to international aid and the resulting decrease in the capacity of the Costa Rican General Directorate of Migration and Foreign Nationals’ (DGME, by its Spanish acronym) Refugee Unit has exacerbated the backlog.
In past years, foreign aid enabled UNHCR to provide essential support to Costa Rica’s asylum system. However, the Trump administration’s foreign aid freeze earlier this year, and subsequent reductions (some of which are still pending) have devastated UNHCR operations worldwide. UNHCR programming in Costa Rica was cut by 41 percent. A key manifestation of this has been the reduction of UNHCR secondments to the Refugee Unit to fill critical positions. According to Refugees International, the secondments have been reduced by one-third as of May 2025. This heavy dependence on international aid, especially U.S. funding, is a structural vulnerability in Costa Rica’s protection system.
As these aid cuts have undermined both access to protection and asylum processing capacity, other pathways for migrants in Costa Rica have either closed to new applicants or been eliminated entirely. For example, Costa Rican officials had previously indicated that the Temporary Special Category (CET), a temporary protected status for people who didn’t qualify for asylum, could be renewed. However, Deputy Security Minister Omer Badilla confirmed in April 2025 that the CET would not be extended for new applications, although current recipients could renew their status for a period of two years.
Another pathway had been the United States’ Safe Mobility initiative, which offered third country resettlement to a limited number of refugees, primarily to the US. This program was abruptly canceled immediately after President Trump’s inauguration, leaving refugees in Costa Rica who had been conditionally approved for resettlement to the US unable to travel.
This effectively means that the overwhelmed Costa Rican asylum system remains the only available protection pathway in the country. As noted in our June 2024 brief, the system has been plagued by inefficiencies. The Costa Rican Comptroller General’s Office released an audit report assessing its weaknesses and issuing directives aimed at improving the asylum system. The directives included developing action plans with procedural changes for accessing, receiving, processing, and granting of refugee status; designing a new methodology for analyzing migratory flows, including updated country of origin information necessary for refugee status determinations; and creating a quality assurance instrument.
While protection actors interviewed by CEDA report that the DGME has yet to address many of the audit’s fundamental findings, there are serious efforts underway—backed by political will—to strengthen the asylum process. One promising initiative is the digitalization of the asylum system, which will establish an online case management platform intended to accelerate and streamline processing. This system is expected to launch by the end of the third quarter of 2025.
Another significant initiative by the DGME and international partners is a profiling exercise involving a representative sample of Nicaraguan asylum seekers. This exercise categorizes individuals into different risk profiles to develop workflow templates and adjudication models for each. Protection actors told CEDA this profiling is at the core of the strategy to reduce the backlog and improve efficiency.
Additionally, the number of weekly slots for asylum eligibility interviews, previously capped at 360, increased to 960 earlier this year before stabilizing at 600. Protection actors report this expansion has meaningfully reduced wait times.
Meanwhile, the Costa Rican government has eliminated barriers to employment for asylum seekers through issuing Executive Decree 44501, which allows them to obtain work permits when formalizing their asylum claims. Between January and September 2024, the government issued more than 31,000 permits – a dramatic rise from the 55 work permits issued the previous year.
Amid these efforts, the new obstacles confronting Costa Rica’s protection system cannot be overstated. The gutting of international aid by the U.S. government and broader donor community is both counterproductive and deeply irresponsible. This funding collapse and the resulting loss of registration capacity illustrates how the international aid system is now failing to uphold support to both the Costa Rican government and the hundreds of thousands of forcibly displaced people who depend on it. Compounding this crisis, the termination of alternative protection pathways places even greater strain on an already overburdened asylum system.
Despite this highly unfavorable environment, the Costa Rican government continues to advance substantive reforms to strengthen its protection framework. The digitalization of the asylum system, the profiling initiative, and the expanded issuance of work permits all point to a forward-leaning protection commitment. While significant challenges remain, CEDA commends those leading these initiatives. Providing protection to asylum seekers in Costa Rica has been and will continue to be a herculean task. To preserve hard-won gains and strengthen safeguards for asylum seekers, it is imperative that Costa Rica’s international partners mobilize adequate resources and support at this critical juncture, as the architecture of global aid is being redefined.
As CEDA highlighted in its June 2024 report, the long-term viability of Costa Rica’s asylum system depended on continued international backing and decisive internal reforms to ease reliance on UNHCR. That imperative is even more acute today. The United States must immediately recommit funding to sustain Costa Rica’s protection infrastructure, including direct support for the asylum system and implementation of the audit’s directives. At the same time, Costa Rica must also acknowledge and address its own responsibility to reduce operational overreliance on UNHCR—a structural weakness the Comptroller General explicitly flagged in the audit, even warning of systemic collapse. Meanwhile, other partners, including private philanthropy, European donors, multilateral development banks, and the private sector, must step up their support to safeguard and expand protection for displaced persons in Costa Rica. Failing to invest at this juncture is counterproductive to the goal of building shared, sensible systems of migration governance across the region.
