Panama’s Minister of Public Security, Frank Alexis Abrego, talks to journalists after seeing people get on a repatriation flight to Colombia at Albrook airport in Panama City on February 3.
Mark Schiefelbein / Pool AP
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Mark Schiefelbein / Pool AP
Panama City – Panama is holding in a hotel nearly 300 people from various countries expelled under US President Donald Trump, not allowing them to leave while the international authorities are organizing a return to their country.
More than 40% of migrants, according to the authorities, will not voluntarily return to their homeland. The migrants in the hotel rooms held messages to the windows by reading “Help” and “We are not saved (sic) in our country”.
Migrants were from 10 mainly Asian countries, notably Iran, India, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Afghanistan, China and others. The United States is struggling to expel directly towards some of these countries so that Panama is used as a stopover. On Wednesday, Costa Rica was to receive a similar flight from deportees from the third country.
Panama Minister of Security, Frank Abrego, said on Tuesday that migrants received medical care and food as part of a migration agreement between Panama and the United States
The Panamanian government has now agreed to serve as a “bridge” or transit countries for deportees, while the United States has borne all the costs of the operation. The agreement was announced earlier this month after the visit of the US Secretary of State Marco Rubio.
Panamanian president José Raúl Mulino, who faces the political pressure on Trump’s threats to regain control of the Panama Canal, announced the arrival of the first expulsion flights last Thursday.
The confinement and legal limbo with which the deportees face made the alarm in the country of Central America, in particular when the images spread migrants culminating by the windows of their rooms to the upper floors of the hotel and displaying the Help notes.
Abrego has denied that foreigners are detained even if they cannot leave the rooms of their hotel, which is kept by the police.
Abrego said that 171 of the 299 deportees agreed to voluntarily return to their respective countries with the help of the International Organization for Migration and the United Nations Refugees Agency. United Nations agencies speak with the other 128 migrants in order to find a destination for them in third countries. Abrego said that an expelled Irish citizen had already returned to his country.
Those who do not accept to return to their country will be temporarily held in an establishment in the distant province of Darien through which hundreds of thousands of migrants have gone through their trip to the north in recent years, said Abrego.
The Panamanian mediator’s office was to provide more details on the situation of deportees later on Tuesday.
