They arrived at the United States border from around the world, hoping to seek asylum. Instead, they were detained, shackled and flown by the U.S. military to a faraway country, Panama.
They were stripped of their passports and most of their cellphones, they said, and then locked in a hotel, barred from seeing lawyers and told they would soon be sent to a makeshift camp near the Panamanian jungle.
At the hotel, at least one person tried to commit suicide, according to several migrants. Another broke his leg trying to escape. A third sent a plaintive missive from a hidden cellphone: “Only a miracle can save us.”
When President Trump took office in January, his plan for sweeping deportations faced a major challenge: what to do with migrants from countries like Afghanistan, Iran and China where the United States cannot easily send deportees, because the other nations will not accept migrants or for other reasons.
Last week, the new administration found a solution: Export them to a country willing to take them in.
On Wednesday, U.S. officials began flying hundreds of people, including people from Asian, Middle Eastern and African countries, to Panama, which is under intense pressure to appease Mr. Trump, who has threatened to take over the Panama Canal.
Now it will be Panamanian officials who decide what happens to them. Because the deported migrants are no longer on U.S. soil, Washington is not legally obligated to make sure they are treated humanely or have the chance to seek asylum.
Costa Rica announced on Monday that it would also receive a flight from the United States, carrying 200 deportees from Central Asia and India. Panama and Costa Rica have said that the operations would be supervised by United Nations agencies and financed by the United States.
Panama’s president has said that the plan is to send people back to their home countries. But if the United States could not easily send deportees back to certain countries, it is unclear how Panama will do so.
Muzaffar Chishti, a senior fellow at the Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank, called the Panama plan part of “a totally new era of enforcement,” in which Washington is coercing other nations into becoming part of its “deportation machinery.”
Panama’s deputy foreign minister, Carlos Ruiz-Hernández, said at a news conference on Thursday that Panama and the United States were adhering to international protocols in their treatment of migrants.
Lawyers in Panama say it is illegal to detain people without a court order for more than 24 hours. Yet roughly 350 migrants deported by the United States on three military planes have been locked in a soaring, glass-paneled hotel, the Decapolis Hotel Panama in Panama City, for nearly a week, while officials ready a camp near the jungle.
Armed guards prevent any of the deportees from leaving the hotel. Several of them are children.
In a statement, the Department of Homeland Security said the migrants deported to Panama were in the United States illegally. “Not a single one of these aliens asserted fear of returning to their home country at any point during processing or custody,” said Tricia McLaughlin, an agency spokeswoman. “They were properly removed from the country.”
The Panamanian government has barred journalists from visiting the migrants. But The New York Times managed to interview several people inside the hotel, all of whom said they were asylum seekers being held against their will.
In one window visible from a sidewalk below the hotel, a woman clawed at a latchless glass pane in an attempt to escape. When she noticed journalists below, she held up a piece of paper that read “Afghan.”
She made hand motions that indicated an airplane, then her head falling off. The message seemed to be clear: A flight home meant death.
A migrant from Iran, Artemis Ghasemzadeh, 27, wrote “Help us” in lipstick on one window. The Times, which was able to contact Ms. Ghasemzadeh and other deportees by cellphone, conducted interviews with her, several other Iranian deportees and a migrant from China. Many of the deportees wanted only their first or last names used out of fear that they would suffer reprisals if returned to their countries.
It was Ms. Ghasemzadeh who sent a reporter the text saying “only a miracle can save us.”
She said she was an English teacher who, in Iran, had converted to Christianity in an underground church. According to Iran’s Islamic Shariah law, converting from Islam is considered apostasy and is a crime punishable by death.
She left Iran in December, she said, hoping to build a new life in the United States. She knew that Mr. Trump was deporting migrants, she added, but thought, “I’m not a criminal, I am educated, I will show them my qualifications, my conversion to Christianity papers.”
Ms. Ghasemzadeh took a series of flights to Mexico, she said, and then headed for the southern border, paying a smuggler around $3,000 to help her climb over the border wall. She was soon picked up by border officials.
After five days in federal custody, Ms. Ghasemzadeh said, all the deportees except for the children had their hands tied and their feet shackled by U.S. authorities.
Her group was placed on a gray military airplane — more than 100 people from Iran, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, China and other nations, according to the Panamanian government.
Once on board, an Uzbek woman who was with her two young children fainted, according to Ms. Ghasemzadeh and a couple who were sitting next to them. The children were crying.
A member of the U.S. military who was on board came to Ms. Ghasemzadeh and asked for her help in translating, because she was asking questions in English. He asked why the Uzbek woman was so scared.
“I said it was because we had no idea where we were being taken — can you please tell us?” Ms. Ghasemzadeh said.
“He hugged me gently,” she continued, “whispered into my ear that we were going to Panama, and asked me not to tell anyone about it.”
On Sunday morning, after another deportee attempted suicide at the hotel in Panama, Ms. Ghasemzadeh said, all glass and sharp objects were confiscated from the rooms.
Ms. Ghasemzadeh said that she and nine other Iranian Christians, including three children, ages 8, 10 and 11, had spent their days in the hotel, frantically trying to get help from the outside. At night they read from a copy of the Bible she had on her cellphone.
Mr. Ruiz-Hernández, Panama’s deputy foreign minister, said the migrants were being held in the hotel as a stopgap measure, because the Trump administration had asked Panama to take the migrants quickly and a separate facility for migrants was still being prepared.
Panama, Mr. Ruiz-Hernández said, is “a leader and strategic partner in migration management,” adding that his government and the United States had an agreement and were “respecting human rights.”
He added that the migrants at the hotel had “no criminal records.”
Panama has said that two United Nations organizations, the International Organization for Migration and the U.N. refugee agency, are charged with overseeing the migrants while they are in Panama.
“We are simply here to assist,” Mr. Ruiz-Hernández said.
A spokesman for the International Organization for Migration said the group was “facilitating returns where safe to do so” and was not involved “in the detention or restriction of movement of individuals.”
According to a senior U.N. official who requested anonymity to discuss a sensitive matter, the U.N. was providing Panama with humanitarian and technical support, but the Panamanians were tightly managing the deportees and the process they were following was not entirely clear.
The deportees at the hotel will soon be sent to a camp at the edge of a jungle called the Darién Gap, according to Panama’s president, José Raúl Mulino. Built just a few years ago to house migrants headed north to the United States, the camp will now handle a reverse migration wave.
It is unclear how long the migrants will be held there.
In the past, the camp, called San Vicente, consisted of just a few shacks in a muddy expanse, and officials often kept migrants penned inside. Dengue fever is a common danger in the region.
At the Decapolis hotel, a man in his 50s with the surname Wang wrote “China” on a window. In a phone call, he said he had come to the United States alone, “for freedom.”
He’d left behind his wife and children, he said.
Just a few days before, he had crossed into the United States, where he was detained, cuffed and put on a plane to Panama.
“I thought: America is a free country with respect for human rights,” he said. “I had no idea it was like a dictatorship.”
As far as his home country went, he said, “I would rather jump off a plane than go back to China.”
On the military plane ride from California to Panama, Mona, a 32-year-old Iranian Christian convert, said her 8-year-old son cried, terrified to see his parents shackled. To calm him down, she told him that this was like overcoming the challenges in a video game, and that once the plane landed they would be free.
Her son asked if she would make his favorite Persian dish after the plane landed. Her husband, Mohammad, 33, said that throughout the flight, when his wife and son cried, he reminded them about a Christian teaching they often recited.
“Jesus has said, ‘If you don’t take your eyes off me, I won’t take mine off you.’ So I was constantly signaling that to my wife, saying, keep your eyes on him,” he said.
Ang Li contributed reporting from New York and Federico Rios from Panama City.
