Costa Rica is the second country in Central America to take in deportees from distant nations who entered the country illegally. On Monday, the country announced that it would receive a flight from the United States this week that would include 200 migrants from Central Asia and India.
Three U.S. deportation aircraft carrying migrants from Asia, the Middle East, and Africa landed in Panama last week.
As the Trump administration looks to increase deportations, these planes seem to be their new strategy for handling undocumented migrants from nations to which it may be difficult to send them. The government is looking for other nations that are prepared to take in these migrants instead of holding them in detention facilities along the southern border.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio was assured by a number of nations, including those of Panama and Costa Rica, during his earlier this month’s trip across Central America and the Caribbean that they were dedicated to collaborating with the Trump administration on immigration matters. However, not much information was provided.
The repatriation process would be “fully funded by the U.S. government, under the supervision of the International Organization for Migration,” a United Nations organization that Costa Rica claimed would be in charge of the migrants’ care while they were in the country. Costa Rica also claimed that its territory would “serve as a bridge” for the migrants’ return to their countries of origin. For the deportees the United States sent there, Panama has outlined a comparable procedure.
A request for comment from the U.N. agency’s Costa Rican officials was not immediately answered.
The deportees will be sent to a migrant shelter in the southern Costa Rican canton of Corredores after landing at the major airport that serves the city, San José, according to Costa Rica.
Thousands of migrants were traveling through Costa Rica on their route to the U.S. border, and the country was recently struggling to deal with the situation. People who had frequently traveled over the dangerous Darién Gap, which lies between Colombia and Panama, to go to Central America were packed into its shelters.
As the United States, Mexico, and Panama have tightened their borders, the number of migrants traveling via Costa Rica has drastically decreased over the past year.
