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Panama will release 112 migrants who had been deported from the United States last month and were being held in a remote jungle camp, a minister said on Friday, after lawyers and advocates said the conditions violated Panamanian and international laws.<\/p>\n
The migrants come from countries that the United States cannot easily return deportees to, often because those nations will not receive them.<\/p>\n
Panama was issuing 30-day temporary humanitarian passes to the migrants to give them time to arrange their return to their homelands, or to other countries willing to take them, Panama\u2019s security minister, Frank \u00c1brego, told reporters on Friday. He said the passes have a possible extension of up to 90 days.<\/p>\n
The decision to release the migrants could represent another challenge to President Trump\u2019s efforts to deport millions of migrants from the United States.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
In mid-February, when the United States began sending planeloads of people from Asia, Africa and the Middle East to Panama and Costa Rica \u2014 and then those countries began locking up the deportees \u2014 it appeared that he had enlisted two pliant nations to help with his ambitious deportation plans.<\/p>\n
The images of people locked in a hotel<\/a> in Panama seemed a potentially powerful deterrent for those thinking about migrating to the United States.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n But the decision by Panama to release the migrants suggests that it may be harder than the Trump administration had hoped to press other nations into helping carry out mass expulsions.<\/p>\n The decision to release the migrants did not involve the United States and was made solely by Panamanian officials, according to a person familiar with the discussion among those officials, who was not authorized to speak publicly.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n The release amounted to offering the migrants a form of temporary protected status, the person said.<\/p>\n While the government would not offer the migrants hotels or other lodging after they left the camp, known as San Vicente, the migrants would be directed to options for shelter and other assistance, including petitioning for asylum in countries other than their own, the person said. He did not provide further details.<\/p>\n The U.S. State Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s hard to outsource immigration policy because other countries have their own constraints,\u201d said Andrew Selee, the president of the Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan research organization. <\/p>\n \u201cThis was a bid by the Panamanian government to buy some good will with the Trump administration,\u201d he added. \u201cBut it was not yet a developed strategy.\u201d<\/p>\n Mr. \u00c1brego said that of the 299 migrants that had arrived from the United States, 177 had already returned voluntarily to their countries of origin and another 10 were waiting for flights.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n The remaining 112, including several children, come from Afghanistan, Iran and other nations and had been held for more than two weeks in a camp about four hours from Panama\u2019s capital. They would be released in the coming days, Panamanian officials said.<\/p>\n People detained in the United States who cannot be easily repatriated present a hurdle for the Trump administration\u2019s plans for deportations.<\/p>\n Migrant families are also a challenge because under U.S. law, the authorities cannot detain families with children for extended periods.<\/p>\n The administration appeared to have found a workaround last month by sending migrants from other parts of the world to countries willing to take them in, like Panama. The country is under enormous pressure to placate Mr. Trump, who has threatened to take over the Panama Canal.<\/p>\n The migrants held in the San Vicente camp were among those flown to Panama in February and locked for several days in a downtown hotel. Those who did not agree to be deported back to their countries, or who could not easily be sent back for logistical reasons, were bused to the remote camp in eastern Panama, at the edge of the Dari\u00e9n Gap.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n The decision to release them comes as Panama\u2019s president, Jos\u00e9 Ra\u00fal Mulino, faces growing pressure from human rights groups over the country\u2019s decision to detain the group without charges.<\/p>\n It was also becoming apparent to officials that it was going to be very difficult to deport some of the migrants \u2014 as Panama said it was planning to do \u2014 because many came from countries that do not have diplomatic relations with the Central American nation.<\/p>\n If the government of Panama had chosen to hold these people until it could deport them, it might have been holding them for months or more.<\/p>\n