In 2018, people fleeing Nicaragua’s political crisis arrived in Costa Rica in rapidly growing numbers. On 25 June, about 4,000 people—most of them Nicaraguans—were reported waiting at the immigration authority in La Uruca, San José, to seek asylum. On another day, a woman who had left her daughter in Nicaragua explained that she was in line because her visa was nearing expiry.
What lay at the front of the queue was not an immediate asylum decision but an appointment or reception step that opened the protection process. With applications rising sharply, the authority planned to rent another nearby building to handle roughly 17,000 cases. The line showed that crossing a border did not end uncertainty; it began another sequence in the effort to secure lawful protection.
A long administrative backlog alone would not count as a physical queue. Here, local reporting and image captions identify the date, office, asylum purpose, and people physically waiting outside.