Migrants Deported to Panama by Trump Find Themselves Stranded and in Limbo

When the first buses of newly freed migrants arrived this month in Panama City from a detention camp at the edge of a jungle, three people were visibly ill. One needed H.I.V. treatment, a lawyer said, another had run out of insulin and a third was suffering from seizures.

Confusion, chaos and fear reigned. “What am I going to do?” one migrant wondered aloud. “Where am I going to go?”

These are questions being asked by dozens of migrants deported to Panama last month by the Trump administration, part of the president’s sweeping efforts to expel millions of people from the United States.

At first, Panamanian officials had locked the group of about 300 people in a hotel. Then, those who did not accept repatriation to their home countries were sent to a guarded camp at the edge of a jungle. Finally, after a lawsuit and an outcry from human rights groups, the Panamanian authorities released the deportees, busing them back to Panama City.

Now, the remaining migrants — from Iran, Afghanistan, Cameroon, Ethiopia, Uzbekistan and elsewhere — are free but stranded in a country that doesn’t want them, many sleeping in a school gymnasium made available by an aid group, with no real sense of what to do next.

Interviews with 25 of the deportees offered a revealing look at who is being pushed out of the United States by the Trump administration, and what happens once they arrive in Central America.

The region has emerged as a key cog in the deportation machinery President Trump is trying to kick into high gear.

But Washington’s decision to send migrants from around the world to Central America has also raised legal questions, tested governments seemingly unprepared to receive migrants and left people marooned in nations where they have no support networks or long-term legal status.

Most of the migrants in Panama said that when they arrived in the United States they told officials they were fearful of returning to their countries, but were never given an opportunity to formally ask for asylum.

A spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security, Tricia McLaughlin, said in an email that the migrants had been “properly removed” from the United States. She added that “not a single one of these aliens asserted fear of returning to their home country at any point during processing or custody.”

“The U.S. government coordinated for the welfare of these aliens to also be managed by humanitarian groups in Panama,” she said.

Since taking office, Mr. Trump has sent hundreds of migrants from around the world to Panama, Costa Rica and El Salvador, though it is unclear if the U.S. government plans to continue doing so.

“Whether there will be more planes from the United States or not, I honestly don’t know,” Panama’s president, Raúl Mulino, said this month. “I’m not very inclined to do it, because they leave us with the problem.”

Those now stranded in Panama include Hedayatullah Zazai, 34, a man who said he had served as an officer in the Afghan Army, working alongside U.S. Special Forces and American consultants. After the Taliban took over, he fled to Pakistan, he said, then Iran, then flew to Brazil and trekked through South and Central America to get to the U.S. border.

The deportees also include Iranian Christians who said they were under threat at home, and several Afghan women from the Hazara ethnic minority who say they face persecution under the Taliban.

Another deportee is Simegnat, 37, an Amhara woman traveling alone from Ethiopia who said she had been targeted by her government because her ethnicity led the authorities to suspect her of working with a rebel group. She said she fled after her home was set on fire, her father and brother were killed and the police told her she would be next.

“I was not a person who wanted to flee my country,” she said. “I owned a restaurant and I had a good life.”

“We are humans, but we have nowhere to live,” she said of the Amhara people.

She and several of the other migrants, fearing for the safety of relatives back home, asked not to be identified by their full names.

Most of the migrants described crossing the Mexico-U.S. border early this year, being held for about two weeks in detention, then shackled by U.S. officials and put on a plane to an unknown destination. Some said they had been told they were headed from California to Texas; most said they were never given an opportunity to ask formally for asylum.

One 19-year-old woman from Afghanistan said U.S. officials had permitted her parents and five younger siblings to cross the border into the United States. As the only sibling over 18, she was separated from them, detained and flown to Panama, she said.

Some said they owed hundreds or thousands of dollars to people who helped them fund their journeys.

“If I go back to Ethiopia without their money,” Simegnat said, “they would kill me.”

Panama has given the deportees 30-day permits that allow them to stay in the country for the time being and has given them the option of extending their stay to 90 days.

While Panama has an asylum program, migrants have received mixed messages about the likelihood of receiving long-term legal protections in the country, they said.

Another option is for individuals to find another country that will take them. But that would require a case-by-case legal effort, said Silvia Serna, a lawyer who is part of the team that filed a lawsuit that called Panama’s detention of the migrants at the hotel and border camp illegal.

Ms. Serna said she had been interviewing the migrants to see what assistance her team could offer but cautioned that it might be very hard for people to find welcoming countries.

In interviews, three of the Iranian deportees said they planned to turn around and head back to the United States and were already negotiating with a smuggler. A fourth had already left for the U.S. border.

One is Negin, 24, who identified herself as a gay woman from Iran, where openly gay people face government persecution. “At least if I’m lingering idly,” she said, “I’ll be inside an American detention camp and on American soil.”

The smuggler quoted one woman a price of $5,000 to get her across the U.S.-Mexico border in Tijuana, and $8,000 to secure her a visa and put her on a plane to Canada.

For now, most of the group is staying at a school gymnasium-turned-shelter outside Panama City run by two Christian charities. The migrants sleep on thin mattresses and eat meals from plastic foam containers. A group of them went door to door at various embassies this past week asking for help but said they had been rejected at every one.

Elías Cornejo, who works with one of the aid groups, Fe y Alegría, was unsparing in his criticism of the new U.S. administration.

“We think that the policies of the Trump administration are part of a machine that grinds the migrant like meat,” he said. “And that obviously is a serious problem of inhumanity.”

A smaller group of deportees, mostly families with children, has been staying at a hotel in Panama City paid for by UNICEF. Among them is a married couple, Mohammad and Mona, who are Christian converts from Iran. One night, as their 8-year-old son broke down, both parents leaned over him, stroking his face.

“He doesn’t go to school, and life has become repetitive for him,” Mohammad said.

The couple had considered re-entering the United States illegally, they said, and eventually decided they could not put their child through more suffering. They are holding out hope that a lawyer on Ms. Serna’s team can persuade the Trump administration to grant them entry as persecuted Christians.

If that doesn’t work, Mohammad said, he was considering staying in Panama and was already looking for work.

Not far from the hotel recently, Artemis Ghasemzadeh, 27, another Iranian Christian, entered a white-walled church and knelt in a pew. Ms. Ghasemzadeh became something of a leader of the group after she posted a video online from detention at the Panama City hotel, pleading with the world for help.

She said that a priest had offered the migrants group housing north of Panama City, where they would be welcome to stay as long as they were in the country. The houses have kitchens, and they would have no curfew, she added. She was mulling over the offer.

“I don’t know what will happen next,” Ms. Ghasemzadeh said. “I don’t know my next step. At the moment, we are in God’s hands.”

Reporting was contributed by Alex E. Hernández from Panama City, Ruhullah Khapalwak from Vancouver, British Columbia, and a New York Times reporter from Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.