Ali Herischi, a Washington, D.C.-based human rights lawyer, has very limited contact with his dozen or so clients trapped in legal limbo in Panama. He, like the other lawyers attempting to represent the more than 100 migrants deported to the Central American country from the United States earlier this month, has largely been kept from communicating with them directly. To contact them, Herischi said he’s occasionally able to reach them through the single, hidden cell phone they share but has mostly had to go through their families in Iran instead.
Their situation is untenable. They felt unsafe staying in the San Vincente migrant reception center on the outskirts of the dense Darién Gap jungle they were hauled to, so they protested and were permitted to stay on benches outside the camp, Herischi told Salon in a phone interview. That’s where they’ve remained since Feb. 20, receiving little water and stale food as they swelter in the Panamanian heat. To make matters worse, he said, their fates are uncertain — they received no formal documentation of their removal or prevention of entry from the U.S. and have no records of entry or detention in Panama.
While his clients’ experiences don’t usually affect him emotionally, Herischi said the gravity of these immigrants’ circumstances have weighed on him. He said he received a “heartbreaking” voice note from a member of one of the migrant families he’s representing on Tuesday.
“This one was really hard,” Herischi recalled. “It said, ‘Please don’t let this situation affect us for the rest of our lives. It’s become too much — the situation that we are [in]. I think it’s going to create a scar in my son and all of us forever. It shouldn’t be like that.'”
Herischi’s clients comprise just a fraction of the more than 300 migrants from China, Afghanistan, India, Iran and other countries captured at and deported from the U.S.-Mexico border to “bridge countries” across Central and South America in recent weeks. The Feb. 12 deportations to Panama garnered national attention after reports that migrants were placed on a military plane, carted to the country without their knowledge in handcuffs and shackles, and transferred to and detained in a Panama City hotel by armed guards for days, fled the airwaves. Images of the migrants pleading for help through the windows of the 4-star Decapolis topped articles detailing their plight: injuries from attempts to escape, having nearly all their cellphones seized, being cut off from legal counsel and faced with the impossible choice of remaining in detention or returning home to severe persecution.
“They are devastated,” Herischi said, noting that a majority of his clients had to find a way to get to Brazil in order to begin their weeks-long trek up through the Americas to reach the U.S.
“Country after country, they had to pass [through], dealing with different groups of people, different types of transportation, to walking through jungles, and they don’t know Spanish when dealing with all this,” he said. “Then they arrived in the US, they felt okay, at least they’re safe and [will] be able to apply for asylum and get status, and then they [were transferred] back again to this situation, which is really harsh.”
Such is the reality of President Donald Trump’s mass deportation plans, actualized by the executive orders and proclamations he signed during his first week in office to tamp down irregular crossings at the southern border. As he attempts to deliver on his most ambitious campaign promise — cracking down on immigration — the president has cut deals with Latin American countries to free up space in U.S. detention centers, enlisting them as stopovers to repatriate nationals of countries with whom the U.S. has a tenuous diplomatic relationship.
The tactic is something of a revival of a first-term Trump immigration policy that required migrants to seek asylum in these “third safe countries” before continuing to the U.S., according to Diego Chavez-González, the senior manager for the Migration Policy Institute’s Latin America and Caribbean Initiative. But the current model differs in its mandate that these transit countries instead handle migrants’ deportations back to their countries of origin, which makes those who fear going back vulnerable, strips them of their rights and traps them in a “legal limbo,” he said.
“Instead of having a bridge situation, what we’re seeing is that, for many of them, actually this is a dead-end,” Chavez-Gonzalez told Salon in a phone interview. “They cannot legally stay in the transit countries. They cannot return to their home countries, and of course, they were deported from the United States.”
Complicating matters are the power differences at play between the Trump administration and the third countries he’s enlisted the help of.
Officials across Central America have rejected claims of coercion from the Trump administration to participate in his deportation plan. But Trump’s threats to impose tariffs, seize control of the Panama Canal and deny visa applications to their nationals—as he did when Colombia refused to accept a plane of deportees—make these Central American nations’ participation in the scheme appear less egalitarian than their leaders suggest, Chavez-Gonzalez said.
Trump’s deportation model “is in clear violation of international law and [the UN Refugee Agency] and [the International Organization for Migration], who have been strained of resources because of the cutting of foreign aid, they are being asked, without a lot of resources, to do something that is not part of their mandate,” he added, warning of the risk this plan poses to the international system.
Chavez-Gonzalez said that the region should expect to see more of these deportations in the coming months — but it won’t last much longer than that. Trump’s aim to deliver on his campaign promises around immigration far outpaces the government’s capacity to make that narrative a reality, he said.
“For now, what we are seeing is a game that is more focused on the numbers, on the hundreds,” Chavez-Gonzales added, predicting legal challenges will bring it to a swift end. “It’s more about sending the message. It’s more about responding to the electoral base.”
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But for the migrants detained at the San Vincente camp, that game is a nightmare. All of Herischi’s clients in Panama are Iranian, ranging in age from 11 to just under 40. The lawyer also counts among his clientele of recent deportees a small family with a three-year-old in a similar circumstance who were instead removed to Costa Rica. They each fled the country after converting to Christianity from Islam, which Iran’s Shariah law classifies apostasy punishable by death, and sought refuge in the U.S. to practice their newfound faith freely.
CBP detained them shortly after they crossed the border from Tijuana, and they were transferred to an ICE detention facility in San Diego, Herischi said. They said they told the officers that they are asylum seekers, which would usually grant them the opportunity to apply for asylum under international mandates. From there, they were randomly selected to be transferred and told they would be moved to a Texas detention facility, Herischi said. Instead, they were taken by military plane directly to Panama, did not go through customs upon arrival and were immediately detained in the hotel until they were bussed to the camp. Lawyers say it is illegal to detain people in Panama without a court order for more than 24 hours.
A spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security previously told The New York Times that none of the migrants captured at the border and removed to Panama “asserted fear of returning to their home country at any point during processing or custody.” Instead, they “were properly removed from the country.”
Herischi said that the Trump administration’s treatment of his clients — and other deportees facing political persecution in their home countries — flouts the nation’s long-term, generous commitment to granting political and religious asylum to those who sought it. He said they have plans to file suit in the Inter-American Court of Human Rights against Panama and the U.S. next week to ensure their rights to apply for asylum, immigrate, seek legal counsel and more are restored.
“This is not right,” Herischi said. “Even despite the broad policy of the immigration ban, they fail to account [for] this kind of situation, that they are real people, real lives, and they should not be the victim of political decisions and campaign promises. They are humans.”
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