For more than a week, it has held more than 100 asylum-seekers from around the world. Surrounded by fences and armed guards, they sleep on cots or hard benches.
Journalists have been barred, lawyers say they have been blocked from speaking to their clients and it is the government in charge — not the international aid groups Panamanian officials say are the ones organizing the operation.
The migrants are among several hundred people who arrived in recent weeks at the U.S. southern border, hoping to seek asylum in the United States, and were swiftly deported to Central America.
They have since become test cases in the Trump administration’s effort to send some of its most challenging-to-deport people to other countries. Of the roughly 300 people sent to Panama, more than half have agreed to be repatriated, according to President Jose Raúl Mulino.
An additional 112 have said that it is too dangerous for them to go home or that they lack documentation allowing them to do so. Now they are at the camp by the jungle with no sense of how long they will be held or where they may be sent next. Though their numbers are small, their cases point to the tension between the Trump administration’s aims of expelling vast numbers of migrants and the limits of Latin American countries working to facilitate those ambitions — under enormous pressure from President Donald Trump. Panama, like the United States, cannot easily deport people to places like Afghanistan and Iran, often because those countries refuse to take back their citizens.
Those trapped at the camp include at least eight children, as well as women fleeing the Taliban in Afghanistan and Christian converts fleeing the government in Iran. None have been charged with crimes, according to Panamanian officials.
A few people inside the camp still have access to cellphones and have been able to communicate with The New York Times.
“We told them: You are treating us like prisoners,” said Sahar Bidman, 33, a mother of two from Iran. “When I want to take my children to the shower, they escort us.”
As Panamanian officials struggle to figure out what to do with this group, they have faced growing criticism from lawyers and human rights activists.
Gehad Madi, a United Nations special rapporteur who was permitted to visit the camp in recent days, emerged with a pointed critique. He called it a “detention center” and said he was “extremely concerned” about the legal basis for holding the migrants.
A petition of habeas corpus presented by a Panamanian lawyer to the country’s Supreme Court claims the group’s internment is illegal.
Mulino told reporters Thursday that the migrants at the camp, called San Vicente, were awaiting documentation, which some lacked and would need to travel. He did not explain how the government planned to deport people, or say if it would offer people asylum in Panama or facilitate passage to a different country willing to take them.
Asked why the detainees had not been allowed to speak to lawyers, he answered: “I don’t know.”
The United States, through the U.N. Refugee Agency, is paying for food, lodging and other needs of the deported migrants, said Carlos Ruiz-Hernández, Panama’s vice minister of foreign affairs.
Panamanian officials have denied that the conditions at San Vicente are prisonlike.
A spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security, Tricia McLaughlin, said questions about the migrants should be directed to Panama.
“These individuals are in the custody of the Panamanian government,” she said, “not the United States.”
Mulino had earlier said that the migrants’ arrival in his country was “being organized” by two U.N. agencies, “not by the government of Panama.”
But one of those agencies, the U.N. Refugee Agency, said in a statement that it was not actually working inside the camp and was simply providing funds.
The other agency, the International Organization for Migration, has also not been regularly present in the Darién camp, according to a person with close knowledge of the situation who was not authorized to speak about it publicly.
It has focused on arranging repatriation for those who volunteered for it.
At least two groups, the Red Cross and UNICEF, have begun providing aid in the camp in recent days, according to migrants.
Ruiz-Hernández, in a written response to questions from the Times, said, “We want to assure the public that all migrants at San Vicente continue to receive comprehensive support.
“Our government,” he continued, “remains dedicated to upholding human dignity and addressing the needs of every individual within our care.”
Bidman is one of 10 Iranian Christians at San Vicente who said they had left their country in the hopes of practicing their religion freely in the United States.
Instead, the U.S. government in mid-February flew them from California to Panama City, where they were locked in a hotel for about a week. After they refused deportation, they were bused to the San Vicente camp.
Converts from Islam to Christianity in Iran face a possible punishment of death.
The group is given three meals a day, and when Bidman’s son, Sam, 11, injured his leg he was taken to a clinic where a doctor examined him and provided painkillers.
After a visit from the Red Cross and UNICEF, conditions inside improved slightly, several of the Iranians said, with camp authorities cleaning living quarters and the showers and providing a water cooler.
“At the beginning when we arrived here the kids cried every day,” Bidman said. “I keep telling them this is temporary and at the end of it we will go someplace nice.”
The people held at San Vicente are part of a much larger migration challenge for Central American nations.
Starting in 2021, enormous numbers of people began trekking from South America into Panama, through the Darién jungle, in an attempt to reach the United States. With Trump promising mass deportations, the wave is starting to go in reverse, with migrants trudging south from Mexico.
Mulino has said he is considering flying Venezuelan migrants from Panama to Colombia, where they could cross by land back into Venezuela. (Lacking relations with Venezuela, he cannot simply send them to Caracas.)
This has drawn at least 2,000 people, including many Venezuelans, to Panama in recent weeks, said Mulino, even though no flights have materialized.
Instead, some returning migrants have begun taking dangerous, hourslong boat rides from Panama to Colombia, over choppy waters. One boat shipwrecked in February amid bad weather, resulting in the drowning of an 8-year-old girl, according to border police.
Many returnees are now waiting at a different government migrant camp, called Lajas Blancas, about 40 minutes from San Vicente. There, six migrants told the Times that Panamanian officials were the ones signing people up for the boat journeys.
Mulino has acknowledged the existence of these maritime trips. Asked about official involvement, Ruiz-Hernández said the country had “implemented a comprehensive approach to ensure the safety and protection of migrants being repatriated to their home countries.”
Zulimar Ramos, 31, one of the Venezuelans at Lajas Blancas, said she was considering taking one of the boat rides, despite the dangers.
“The American dream is dead,” she said.
Panama is not the only country pressed by the Trump administration to accept deportees from around the world. In February, Costa Rica received 200 people from Central Asia, the Middle East and Eastern Europe, including dozens of children.
As in Panama, the migrants are being held at a remote facility some six hours from the capital. Omer Badilla, the head of the country’s migration authority, has said people were being held to protect them from falling prey to traffickers.
For family members of the deportees, the lack of clarity about the length and terms of their detention has been painful.
Farzana, 22, who lives in Canada, said her sister was among those held at the Panamanian camp. The sister had entered the United States earlier this year, hoping to traverse the nation and seek refuge in Canada, Farzana said.
Concerned her sister would face retaliation at the camp if a family member spoke out, Farzana asked that only her first name be used.
A lawyer working with the women, Leigh Salsberg, said she has been trying to get in touch someone at the camp with no success.
“It feels like these people are in a black hole,” she said, “and it seems that no one is actually in contact with them at all.”
Farzana cried as she told her sister’s story.
“It’s really hard for me,” she said. “I’m really worried about her. But I can’t do anything.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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