Costa Rica and Panama officials confiscate passports and mobile phones for migrants, refusing them access to legal services and move them between remote outposts while they are fighting with the logistics of a suddenly reversed migration flow.
During its first month, the Trump administration ordered the Pentagon and the Ministry of Internal Security to prepare a migrant establishment in Guantanamo Bay for up to 30,000 migrants, although so far, only a small number has been sent to this American naval base in Cuba which for more than two decades acted as a high security American prison for foreign terrorism suspects.
The administration has also concluded agreements with Mexico, Guatemala and Salvador to act as stopovers or destinations for migrants expelled from the United States, but none of the agreements has been detailed for the public, which raises concerns concerning the escape of international protections for refugees and asylum seekers.
Panama and Costa Rica, a long transit country for people migrating north, have blurred to approach the new flow of migrants going south and organize the flow.
But now, the two countries have received hundreds of deportees from various nations sent by the United States while President Donald Trump’s administration is trying to accelerate deportations. At the same time, thousands of migrants have been excluded from the United States began to move south through Central America – Panama has recorded 2200 so far in February.
“We are a reflection of the current immigration policy of the United States,” said Harold Villegas-Roman, professor of political science and refugee expert at the University of Costa Rica. “No emphasis on human rights, the emphasis is on control and security. Everything is very troubled and not transparent.”
The American Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, spoke to Fox News, Fox News Cain analyst on January 29, 2025 regarding the upcoming plans of the American president Donald Trump to prepare a installation of migrants in Guantanamo Bay for tens of thousands of migrants. Although Trump said the United States “would hold the worst illegal criminal threatening the American people,” the establishment will be separated from the detention center.
Probably not a final destination
Earlier this month, the United States sent 299 deportees from mainly Asian countries to Panama. Those who were ready to return to their country – around 150 to date – have been placed on planes with the help of the United Nations agencies paid by the United States
Carlos RuiZ-Hernandez, Vice-Minister of Foreign Affairs of Panama, said Thursday that a small number was in contact with international organizations and the United Nations Agency for Refugees when they weigh if asylum in Panama must be sought.
“None of them wants to stay in Panama. They want to go to the United States,” he said in a Washington telephone interview. “We cannot give them green cards, but we can bring them back to them and for a short period of time, provide them with medical and psychological support as well as housing.”
Despite Trump’s threats to regain control of the Panama Canal, he said that Panama had not acted under American pressure.
“It is in the national interest of Panama. We are a friend of the United States and we want to work with them to send a deterrent signal.”
RuiZ-Hernandez said that some of the deportees remaining in Panama would have the possibility of staying in a refuge initially installed to manage the large number of migrants moving north through Darien’s gap.
A Chinese expelled currently owned in the camp, which spoke subject to anonymity to avoid repercussions, said that it had not had the choice.
She was expelled to Panama without knowing where they were sent, without signing expulsion documents in the United States and without clarity of the length of their stay. She was one of the deportees who were moved by a Panama City hotel where some have held panels to their windows asking for help from a distant camp in the Darian region.
Addressing the AP messages on a mobile phone which she kept hidden, she said that the authorities had confiscated the phones of others and offered them no legal aid. Others said they could not contact their lawyers.
“It deprived us of our legal process,” she said.
In Tuesday’s White House briefing, press secretary Karoline Leavitt said the Trump administration considered any migrant who illegally entered the United States. “
Panama president Jose Raul Mulino asked questions about the lack of access to legal services on Thursday, questioned the idea that migrants would even have lawyers.
“Panama cannot become a black hole for expelled migrants,” said Juan Pappier, deputy director of Human Rights Watch in the Americas. “Migrants have the right to communicate with their families, to search for lawyers and Panama must guarantee the transparency of the situation in which they find themselves.”
Venezuela migrants feel “despair”
The Costa Rica, on the other hand, faced criticism from the country’s independent human rights entity, which has focused on the “failures” by the authorities to guarantee appropriate conditions for the arrival deportees. The mediator’s office said that migrants had also been stripped of their passports and other documents, and were not informed of what was going on or where they were going.
Kimberlyn Pereira, a 27 -year -old Venezuelan, traveling with her husband and her four -year -old son, was among them.
Pereira had waited for months for an appointment on asylum in Mexico after crossing the perilous gap of Darien dividing Colombia and Panama and traveled through Central America. But after Trump took office and closed legal journeys in the United States, she abandoned and decided to go home, despite the current crises of Venezuela.
But after a week of detention in a Costarate detention center near the Panamanian border, she expressed “despair”.
Officials had told them that they would be transported by plane to Cucuta, a Colombian city near the Venezuelan border. But they were loaded on buses and led to the Panamanian port of Miramar on the Caribbean Sea.
Before dawn Thursday, Pereira and other migrants rose aboard wooden boats which transported them near the Colombie-Panama border where they planned to continue their trip. They paid the equivalent of US $ 200 each for the trip.
