Officials in Costa Rica and Panama are confiscating migrants’ passports and cellphones, denying them access to legal services and moving them between remote outposts as they wrestle with the logistics of a suddenly reversed migration flow.
In its first month, the Trump administration ordered the Pentagon and the Department of Homeland Security to prepare a migrant facility at Guantanamo Bay for as many as 30,000 migrants, though so far only a small number have been sent to that U.S. naval base in Cuba that for over two decades has acted as a high-security U.S. prison for foreign terrorism suspects.
The administration has also reached deals with Mexico, Guatemala and El Salvador to act as stopovers or destinations for migrants expelled from the U.S. But none of the agreements have been detailed for the public, raising concerns about evading international protections for refugees and asylum seekers.
Panama and Costa Rica, long transit countries for people migrating north, have scrambled to address the new flow of migrants going south and organize the flow.
But now both countries have received hundreds of deportees from various nations sent by the United States as President Donald Trump’s administration tries to accelerate deportations. At the same time, thousands of migrants shut out of the U.S. have started moving south through Central America — Panama recorded 2,200 so far in February.
“We’re a reflection of current United States immigration policy,” said Harold Villegas-Roman, a political science professor and refugee expert at the University of Costa Rica. “There is no focus on human rights, there is only focus on control and security. Everything is very murky, and not transparent.”
U.S. defence secretary Pete Hegseth spoke to Fox News analyst Will Cain on Jan. 29, 2025 about U.S. President Donald Trump’s upcoming plans to prepare a migrant facility at Guantanamo Bay for tens of thousands of migrants. Although Trump said the U.S. would ‘detain the worst criminal illegal aliens threatening the American people,’ the facility will be separate from the detention centre.
Likely not a final destination
Earlier this month, the U.S. sent 299 deportees from mostly Asian countries to Panama. Those who were willing to return to their countries — about 150 to date — were put on planes with the assistance of United Nations agencies and paid for by the U.S.
Carlos Ruiz-Hernandez, Panama’s deputy foreign minister, said Thursday a small number are in contact with international organizations and the UN Refugee Agency as they weigh whether to seek asylum in Panama.
“None of them wants to stay in Panama. They want to go to the U.S.,” he said in a phone interview from Washington. “We cannot give them green cards, but we can get them back home and for a short period of time provide them with medical and psychological support as well as housing.”
Despite Trump’s threats to retake control of the Panama Canal, he said Panama had not acted under U.S. pressure.
“This is in Panama’s national interest. We are a friend of the U.S. and want to work with them to send a signal of deterrence.”
Ruiz-Hernandez said some of the deportees remaining in Panama would be given the option of staying at a shelter originally set up to handle the large number of migrants moving north through the Darien Gap.
One Chinese deportee currently detained in the camp, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid repercussions, said she wasn’t given a choice.
She was deported to Panama without knowing where they were being sent, without signing deportation documents in the U.S. and without clarity of how long they would be there. She was among the deportees who were moved from a Panama City hotel where some held up signs to their windows asking for help to a remote camp in the Darien region.
Speaking to the AP over messages on a cellphone she kept hidden, she said authorities confiscated others’ phones and offered them no legal assistance. Others have said they’ve been unable to contact their lawyers.
“This deprived us of our legal process,” she said.
In Tuesday’s White House briefing, press secretary Karoline Leavitt said the Trump administration considers any migrant who has entered the United States illegally ‘a criminal.’
Panama President Jose Raul Mulino, asked about the lack of access to legal services on Thursday, questioned the idea that migrants would even have lawyers.
“Panama cannot end up becoming a black hole for deported migrants,” said Juan Pappier, deputy director of Human Rights Watch in the Americas. “Migrants have the right to communicate with their families, to seek lawyers and Panama must guarantee transparency about the situation in which they find themselves.”
Venezuela migrants feels ‘hopelessness’
Costa Rica, meanwhile, has faced criticisms from the country’s independent human rights entity, which has raised alarm over “failures” by authorities to guarantee proper conditions for deportees arriving. The Ombudsman’s Office said that migrants were also stripped of their passports and other documents, and were not informed about what was happening or where they were going.
Kimberlyn Pereira, a 27-year-old Venezuelan travelling with her husband and four-year-old son, was among them.
Pereira had waited months for an asylum appointment in Mexico after crossing the perilous Darien Gap dividing Colombia and Panama and travelling up through Central America. But after Trump took office and closed legal pathways to the U.S., she gave up and decided to go home, despite Venezuela’s ongoing crises.
But after a week of being held in a Costa Rican detention facility near the Panamanian border, she expressed “hopelessness.”
Officials there had told them they would be flown to Cucuta, a Colombian city near the Venezuelan border. But they were loaded onto buses and driven to the Panamanian port of Miramar on the Caribbean sea.
Before dawn Thursday, Pereira and other migrants boarded wooden boats that carried them to near the Colombia-Panama border where they planned to continue their journey. They paid up to the equivalent of $200 US each for the ride.
