Nearly 100 migrants, recently deported by the United States to Panama where they had been locked in a hotel, were loaded onto buses Tuesday night and moved to a detention camp on the outskirts of the jungle, several of the migrants said.
It is unclear how long the group, who were deported under the Trump administration’s sweeping effort to expel unauthorized migrants, will be detained at the jungle camp.
Conditions at the site are primitive, the detainees said. Diseases, including dengue are endemic to the region, and the government has denied access to journalists and aid organizations.
“It looks like a zoo, there are fenced cages,” said one deportee, Artemis Ghasemzadeh, a 27-year-old migrant from Iran after arriving at the camp following a four-hour drive from Panama City. “They gave us a stale piece of bread. We are sitting on the floor.”
The group includes eight children, according to a person with knowledge of the situation who was not authorized to speak on the record. Lawyers have said it is illegal to detain people in Panama for more than 24 hours without a court order.
The transfer is the latest move in a weeklong saga for a group of about 300 migrants who arrived in the United States hoping to to seek asylum. The group was sent to Panama, which has agreed to aid President Trump in his plan to deport millions of undocumented migrants.
The agreement is part of a larger strategy by the Trump administration to export some of its most difficult migration challenges to other nations. The United States, for varying reasons, cannot easily deport people to countries like Afghanistan, Iran and China, but by applying intense pressure it has managed to convince Panama to take some of them.
After being sent to Panama, the deported migrants are no longer subject to United States law.
Asked for details about the transfer of migrants to the jungle camp, a spokesman for Panama’s security ministry, Aurelio Martínez, said he was unaware that migrants had been moved there.
Costa Rica is also taking some deportees, migrants originally from Central Asia and India and has said it plans to repatriate them. A flight from the United States was expected to arrive in Costa Rica on Wednesday.
Upon arrival in Panama City last week, the 300 or so migrants were taken to a downtown hotel, called the Decapolis, and barred from leaving, several of them told The New York Times in calls and text messages. A lawyer seeking to represent many of them, Jenny Soto Fernández, was blocked at least four times from visiting them in the hotel, she said.
On Tuesday morning, an article published by The Times attracted enormous attention to the migrants’ situation, and members of the Panamanian news media began surrounding the hotel.
On Tuesday night, guards at the hotel told people to pack their bags, said Ms. Ghasemzadeh, the migrant from Iran. Several buses arrived and guards led them aboard, as witnessed by a reporter working for The New York Times. Then the bus traveled out of Panama City, east and then farther east, to the province of Darién.
On the bus, at least one woman cried, according to a photograph sent by a person on the bus.
The camp where the 100 or so migrants will stay is called San Vicente, and sits at the end of a jungle, also called the Darién, which links Panama to Colombia. The camp was built years ago as a stopover point for migrants coming north from Colombia through the Darién jungle and into Panama, a harrowing part of the journey north to the United States.
Now, the Panamanian government is using it for deportees.
On Tuesday, Panama’s security minister, Frank Ábrego, told reporters that 170 of the 300 or so migrants had volunteered to be sent back to their countries of origin, journeys that would be arranged by the United Nations International Organization for Migration.
He added that the migrants were not “detained” by the Panamanian government, but rather “are under our protection.”
“What we agreed with the United States government is that they remain and are in our temporary custody for their protection,” he said.
The Panamanian government has previously said the migrants had no criminal records.
On Wednesday morning, from the Darién region, Ms. Ghasemzadeh described a sweltering encampment, overrun with cats and dogs.
Then, she sent a text message saying that the authorities were confiscating all phones. Her last words: “Please try to help us.”
Annie Correal contributed reporting from Mexico City and Alex E. Hernández from Panama City.
