As the boat bounced across choppy Pacific waters, Mariela Gómez and her two children huddled for 17 hours on top of sloshing gas tanks, uncertain of what lay ahead in the dense jungle.

The 36-year-old Venezuelan mother was among a million migrants who journeyed across the continent in recent years in the hopes of reaching the United States.

In recent years, migrants fleeing Venezuela once crossed the perilous jungle of the Darien Gap between Colombia and Panama and waited months in Mexico for an asylum appointment in the U.S.

Now, with legal pathways slashed under President Donald Trump, Gómez and thousands of other Venezuelans are trying to make their way back in a "reverse migration.”

Families like Gómez’s are making the trip in increasingly precarious conditions, and returning to a country facing greater turmoil than the one they fled.

"We are tired of the hardships in another country, where we are humiliated and treated however they please,” she said.

Over 14,000 migrants, mostly from Venezuela, have returned to South America, according to figures from Colombia, Panama and Costa Rica.

But a growing number of migrants strapped for cash – struggling to pay for even food after making the brutal journey across the Americas – are unable to pay the $250 a head to get back.

Instead, they’re taking a new route that’s half the price and twice as dangerous.

They travel along rickety boats packed with merchandise along Panama’s other coast in the Pacific Ocean for days, sometimes weeks.

Boats often travel packed, carrying 15 to 30 people daily.

Hundreds so far have traveled the route.

"People come with barely anything on them," said 56-year-old boat driver Nacor Rivera.

"I have to help them out by giving one or two free rides. Just to give them a push, mostly doing them favors."

In June, one of those boats carrying 38 people crashed at sea, leaving people injured, including a pregnant woman, children and a person with a disability who lost their wheelchair.

They land in the jungled swathes of Colombia in a region rife with armed groups that prey upon migrants where there are no shelters and little access to medical care, according to a recent report by the UN.

Gómez's family, spent months saving up money in Panama City to afford travel back to Venezuela.

When they came up short, they decided to take the cheaper route along the Pacific.

The family fled the South American country in 2017 in the face of a spiraling economy and mounting government repression of street protests.

For years, she lived in Colombia and Peru, like millions of other Venezuelans who have fled the country in recent years.

When she crossed the U.S.-Mexico border to Texas in October last year, she had hoped to build a new life in the U.S., but her family quickly swept up by Border Patrol and dropped in southern Mexico.

Shortly after, when the Trump administration slashed access to asylum along the southern border and began to ramp up immigration raids in the U.S., she decided her only pathway forward was to return home.

Without work and with cartels preying on migrants like her, staying in southern Mexico wasn't an option.

At least in Venezuela she has her home and her family, she said.

"It's a longer trip, but more economical," Gómez said.

"We come from a humble family that doesn't have the means or the possibility to send us money."

Now returning home, she's not sure what she will find in Venezuela, which has faced an ongoing crackdown on dissent by the government following last year's contested elections.

"We are just slugging it with God's blessing.”

AP video by Matías Delacroix