What The Hell America!

The text came from inside a Panamanian government outpost, set hours away from the country’s capital, on the edge of the Darien jungle.

It had been written by a migrant who’d managed to smuggle a cellphone into the facility by hiding it in his shorts. He said authorities had detained him without providing him access to a lawyer or any means to communicate with relatives. He was hungry because all he was being fed were small portions of bread and rice. His cellphone was all he had to try to get help.

He was one of the lucky ones. Most of the hundred or so other migrants who were being detained with him had no way to communicate with the outside world. They’d been sent to Panama as part of President Donald Trump’s high-profile campaign to ramp up deportations. In addition to Afghanistan, the migrants had traveled to the U.S. from Iran, Uzbekistan, Nepal, Vietnam, India and China, among other countries. Some told reporters that they had only recently crossed the U.S.-Mexico border when they were detained, and that they were hoping to seek asylum. But, they said, American authorities refused to hear their pleas and then treated them like criminals, putting them in shackles, loading them onto military airplanes and flying them from California to Panama.

Three flights, carrying a total of 299 migrants, including children as young as 5, landed in Panama in mid-February. For the following three weeks, amid an international outcry over what critics described as a stunning breach of U.S. and international law, the migrants who had not committed any crimes were held against their will. As public pressure on Panama mounted and immigrant advocates filed suit against that country, authorities there released the migrants over the weekend, on the condition that they agree to make their own arrangements to leave within 90 days.

Their release has hardly settled matters, however, among those groups that consider themselves part of the international safety net charged with providing migrants humanitarian support. Among them is the International Organization for Migration, which helped Panama return migrants who chose to go home rather than remain in detention. The IOM said it participated in the effort because it believes that without its presence the situation for migrants would be “far worse.” Critics charge that the group’s role shows how much the safety net relies on the United States and as a result can easily come undone.

“I appreciate that some individuals hold the view that providing a more humane detention and deportation or voluntary return is better than a less humane version of those unequivocal rights violations,” said Hannah Flamm, an attorney with the International Refugee Assistance Project, a legal advocacy group in New York. “But in the context of egregious unlawful conduct by the Trump administration, this is a moment that calls for deep introspection on where the line of complicity lies.”

She added, “If everybody abided by their legal and ethical obligations not to violate the rights of people seeking protection in the U.S., these third-country removals could not happen.”

Since taking office, Trump has signed several executive orders that eliminated options for seeking asylum at the border and deemed all crossings illegal, broadly authorizing the removal of migrants encountered there. The American Civil Liberties Union and other advocacy groups sued over the orders. The United States has not responded to the lawsuit in court. The proceedings against Panama, in the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, are not conducted in public. But at a press conference on the day after the first planeload of migrants landed last month, the country’s president dodged, reassuring the public that the migrants were only passing through Panama on their way elsewhere. Their stay would be brief and cost nothing, he said, and added that it had all been “organized and paid for by the International Organization for Migration.”

The IOM, founded in the aftermath of World War II and now part of the United Nations, typically plays a critical, but low-profile, role helping migrants including those who, when faced with deportation, seek instead to voluntarily return to their homes. It provides everything from advice to governments managing sudden mass refugee movements to travel documents, food and lodging for individual migrants. And its mission statement charges it with upholding the rights of people on the move.

However, its role in support of sending home asylum-seekers who’d been expelled from the United States without the opportunity to make a case for protection from persecution has exposed just how easily the safety net can come undone.

In response to the Trump administration’s litany of threats against Mexico and Central America — including imposing tariffs, cutting off aid and, in Panama’s case, seizing its canal — those governments have taken extraordinary steps that upend international and diplomatic norms by agreeing to allow the Trump administration to turn their countries into extensions of the U.S. immigration enforcement system. President Rodrigo Chaves Robles of Costa Rica, whose government has historically gone to great lengths to uphold itself as neutral in regional conflicts and strife, also allowed U.S. migrant flights to land in his country. In a public event last month, he made the stakes plain.

“We’re helping our powerful economic brother in the north,” he said, “because if they impose a tax on our export zones, we’re screwed.”

Meanwhile, groups like the IOM are just as vulnerable to U.S. pressure. Some 40% of the donations that have funded its work come from the United States. And in recent weeks, the organization was forced to lay off thousands of workers after Trump froze billions of dollars in foreign aid. What that means, according to a former Biden administration official who worked on migration issues, is that when the United States makes a request, even ones that risk going against the IOM’s mission, “there is not a lot of space to say no.”

Speaking of the IOM, the official added that it “almost can’t exist without the U.S.”

Without the legal protections established under international law, asylum-seekers like those that the United States transported to Panama have been left to fend for themselves. By the time many of them had made it to the United States, they had little more than the clothes on their backs and the money in their pockets. And U.S. authorities expelled them exactly as they’d come. Upon landing in Panama, authorities confiscated any cellphones they found in the migrants’ possession. Omagh was one of the few who’d managed to keep his phone from being discovered.

Distressed texts like those provided the only information about what the migrants were going through while they were in detention. Before being sent to the Darien camp, Panamanian authorities kept the migrants under 24-hour watch by armed guards at a hotel in downtown Panama City. But when scenes of them standing in the hotel windows with handwritten pleas for help, some scrawled in toothpaste on the glass, triggered an international outcry, IOM officials quickly moved to fly out more than half of the migrants who agreed to be sent home and the Panamanian government shuttled the rest to the remote Darien camp.

On at least two occasions, Panamanian officials offered to allow journalists into the camp to speak with the detainees, but they canceled both times without explanation. Since then, they have declined multiple requests for interviews. Panamanian lawyers said they were also denied access to the migrants.

Secret cellphone chatter filled the void, offering glimpses of the conditions inside the camp. Migrants wrote that bathrooms and showers had no doors for privacy, and that they were held in sweltering temperatures without air conditioning. One migrant had gone on a hunger strike for seven days. Omagh wrote that when he and others complained about the quantity and quality of the food, authorities offered to buy more if the detainees paid for it.

On Friday, the Panamanian government announced it would release the 112 migrants left. The authorities said that those migrants who stayed beyond the three-month time limit risked being deported. Migrants said they were also told they would only be allowed to leave the camp if they agreed to sign a document saying they had not been mistreated — potentially making it hard for them to file legal claims later.

The following day, IOM and Panamanian officials entered the camp again and told the migrants that they would be asked to vacate the premises in a matter of hours, setting off a new wave of pandemonium and anxiety among the detainees, most of whom speak no Spanish and have no contacts or places to stay in Panama. Omagh, who understood what was happening because he’d picked up some Spanish when he migrated to the United States through Mexico, texted about the upheaval.

When asked about these comments, the IOM said that because its staff helped Panamanian officials with interpretation, migrants in the camp often confuse who is who. Jorge Gallo, a regional spokesperson for the IOM in Latin America and the Caribbean, defended his group’s involvement in Panama. He said the agency’s work “empowering migrants to make informed decisions, even in the face of constrained options, is preferable to no choice at all.”

He and other IOM officials said the organization helps migrants find “safe alternatives,” including helping them go to other countries where they can obtain a legal status if they don’t choose to go home.

The State Department and Department of Homeland Security did not respond to detailed questions about the expulsions. However, a State Department spokesperson expressed gratitude to those countries that had agreed to cooperate, saying they showed that they are “committed to ending the crisis of illegal immigration to the United States.”

Within the human rights community, advocates are at odds with one another about what to do. As the Panamanian government prepared to move migrants out of the Darien camp, IOM officials reached out to faith-based shelter managers seeking places for the migrants to stay. Elías Cornejo, migrant services coordinator for the Jesuit ministry Fe y Alegría in Panama City, said some of the managers hesitated because they worried that anything that gave the appearance that they were advancing policies that run contrary to the law could taint their reputation.

The IOM, Cornejo said, might be trying to do the right thing, but its actions can have unintended consequences that would be hard to undo. He said the agency was “whitewashing” Panama’s collusion and “dirtying its own hands” by participating in an improvised effort “without control and without the possibility of doing something good for the people.”

As the migrants at the Darien camp scrambled to figure out what they’d do after leaving, they felt free to openly use their phones and to share them with one another.

Tatiana Nikitina got a message from her 28-year-old brother, who’d migrated to the United States from Russia. He had been detained after crossing the border near San Diego, but her family hadn’t heard from him for days and was panicked that he might be forced to return home. Not knowing where to turn for answers about his whereabouts, his sister sought information in public chat groups and then began communicating with ProPublica about her desperate search for him.

Her brother, Nikita Gaponov, using Omagh’s phone, also communicated with ProPublica and explained why he fled home.

He said he spoke with IOM representatives about his fears.

Omagh, too, said he was terrified about the prospect of returning to Afghanistan. He said he is from an ethnic minority group that is systematically persecuted by the ruling Taliban and that he’d been briefly jailed.