Mexico (AP) – A group of human rights lawyers is pursuing Costa Rica, alleging that the Central America nation violated the rights of dozens of migrant children by holding them in a rural camp for almost two months after their expulsion from the United States in February.
Children, some as young as 2 years, are part of a group of hundreds of mainly Asian countries migrants – Afghanistan, China, Russia and others – which have been expelled from the United States Wider effort of the Trump administration to increase deportations.
Many had hoped to seek asylum in the United States and expressed the fear of returning to their own country. Instead, they were abandoned in Costa Rica and Panama, where they do not speak the local language. The countries were originally designed as a kind of deportation, but migrants have now spent 50 days in limbo.
Critics have described it as a means for the United States to export its expulsion process, while human rights groups have warned that the Two countries turned into a “black hole” for deportees.
In Costa Rica, around 200 migrants, including 81 children, were taken to a transformation center for rural migrants along the border of Costa Rica-Panama and detained in an old factory building.
The World Council for Strategic Disputes and other human rights groups was deposited before the United Nations Committee which monitors the implementation of the Convention on the Rights of the Children Thursday evening, and alleys that Costa Rica violated the Convention.
Silvia Serna Roman, one of the lawyers fileing the complaint, said that migrants were held in detention without legal status, without access to educational services or mental health services in their mother tongue. This has fueled the long -term impacts that prolonged detention could have on children because many parents reported that their children seemed isolated or sad.
“Children are in a very crucial part of their development, and they all flee complicated contexts in their country. And now they are subject to detention for different time and inhuman treatment houses,” said Serna Roman on Friday. “Parents are worried.”
Serna Roman said migrants had little access to a legal advisor. The Costarian government said migrants may leave the detention center if they agree to return to their country of origin or request asylum from Costa Rica.
But the lawyer said that many families feared that they have nowhere to go and find themselves potentially in the street, they therefore remained in “indefinite detention” in the establishment known as Catem.
“Many people are afraid of leaving Catem because at least it means shelter, means three meals a day, means a roof above the head,” said Serna Roman. “The Costarian government was not frank on the way they plan to protect these people more.”
The Associated Press has repeatedly denied access to the detention center since the arrival of migrants, but when Journalists visited the camp in 2023, Families were sleeping on cardboard or in tents on the ground where some say that the liquid of portable toilet leaks with sparse foods.
Costarian officials challenged the reports of the country’s mediator’s office that the deportees arrived at Costa Rica in visible distress and that the authorities have not guaranteed the appropriate conditions for arrival deportees.
Costaist president Rodrigo Chaves said in February that by accepting Asian migrants, his country “helped the economically powerful brother in the north”.
The pursuit of GSLC and local human rights groups is only the last of a number of legal fighting that arose the deportees sent to the countries of Central America. The same lawyer group filed a similar case against Panama, which held migrants Hotels and in distant camps Near the Darien Gap, where the deportees said they had been stripped of their phones. Strong criticisms caused the Panamanian government release migrants in the streets of the city of Panama Last month, leaving many migrants to fend for themselves.
More recently, the deportation of groups of venezuelans migrants and a American citizen in Salvador, Where they were detained in a high security prison for gangs, with little evidence to support the alleged affiliations of the gangs, also fueled legal battles and ferocious political fighting.
