An ocean-view prison for Trump’s deportees: ‘They don’t want us, but they won’t let us go’

Exhausted after traveling through several countries, excluded from any legal protection and desperate to escape their confinement, hundreds of migrants have been detained in Lajas Blancas and San Vicente, two communities in Darién, the province that marks where Panama disappears into the impenetrable jungle that forms its border with Colombia. Until the new U.S. president took office last January, both places had been overflowing with people crossing the jungle, heading north. Now, they are full of women, children and others who have been deported or are simply terrified by Donald Trump’s anti-immigrant crusade.

“I crossed this same jungle five months ago and nearly lost my daughter in the river twice,” says Yojana. The 32-year-old Venezuelan left her country with husband José Luis, their 10-year-old daughter and six-year-old son in September 2024. They made their way to Mexico, where they were kidnapped and released after paying $400. They eventually made it to a Mexican town on the U.S. border, waiting for their appointment to apply for asylum. When Trump won the election and their options for entering the country legally evaporated, they retraced their steps. “We were making a huge effort to leave and look at us now — back in the same jungle, with no way out,” Yohana laments at the entrance to the Lajas Blancas detention center.

The town once operated as a checkpoint for people arriving from Colombia without proper documentation. Officials used to detain migrants in this spot, many unable to leave unless they took a bus to the Costa Rican border or to San Vicente, another town in the Darién province. Now, Lajas Blancas receives those who don’t want to return to their homes in the south: 2,925 people in the last four months, 75% of which arrived in February, according to official statistics. They are adding up to a phenomenon known as “reversed flow.” In San Vicente, home to the province’s second migrant shelter, the government has detained 103 of the 299 people who were deported by Trump to Panama, most of whom are from Asian countries.

The official name for these camps is Migrant Reception Station, but in reality, they are enclosures of dust, sweat, and filth — places from which no one can leave and where entry is restricted without a permit. Migrants describe Lajas Blancas as a prison.

“We are prisoners here, because they don’t let us leave and they won’t tell us when will be able to leave,” says José Luis, Yojana’s 37-year-old husband. “There are people who leave, who escape, and they catch them and bring them back here,” adds Bryan, a 19-year-old Colombian who has been on the road for a year.

The migrants who have been locked up in Lajas Blancas have survived the hell of the Darién Gap, the Mexican cartels and, in Bryan’s case, Texas immigration detention centers. Some prefer not to talk about the months-long journeys they’ve made along routes plagued by criminals and state surveillance, but they will talk about what they experienced in this camp. They speak of injured and sick children. They show videos of pregnant women sleeping on a ground of hot rock. They say they receive three meals a day, but at 5 p.m., the water is cut off and mosquitos emerge whose bites can cause one to bleed to death.

The Panamanian government says that it provides these detainees with food and a safe place to stay and guarantees the presence of United Nations agencies like the International Organization for Migration and UNICEF. The view from the entry seems to match up with the migrants’ descriptions: makeshift shacks without flooring or beds, with cardboard or rubber mats to sleep on. Until February 25, 500 people were staying here, the majority of them Venezuelans and a few Colombians, all of them anxious to leave.

“They took us from a shelter there [Costa Rica] saying that they were going to bring us to an airport, but they didn’t take us to an airport. They brought us back to the jungle,” says César, a 53-year-old Venezuelan who has been at Lajas Blancas for two weeks. “They don’t want us here, but they won’t let us go.”

Panama, deportee hub

With his back against the wall due to Trump’s pressure regarding the Canal, Panamanian President José Raúl Mulino proposed turning Panama into a hub for deportees and migrants. Since he had previously severed diplomatic ties with Venezuela, the idea was that those who arrived from that country would be flown to Cúcata, a Colombian border town. But Colombian President Gustavo Petro rejected the notion, blocking flights, according to a source from the Colombian embassy in Panama who asked to remain anonymous. And so, the exit routes for migrants are few and risky: via the Caribbean Sea or the Darién Gap. Panamanian authorities have tried to solve the problem by sending them by water, a strategy that has ended in tragedy.

An eight-year-old girl named Irene Sofía drowned on February 22 when the vessel she was traveling on sank after embarking from a port in the Guna Yala comarca [Indigenous territory]. The government had coordinated a private service for those who wanted — and could pay — to arrive by land and board one of the barges bound for La Miel, a town on the country’s southern border. From there, they could continue by foot. Despite the tragedy, the plan was to continue these trips, but Guna Yala officials put their foot down. “We don’t have the right conditions,” said Anelio López, a representative from the General Congress of Guna Yala. “There isn’t enough lodging, food or water transport for that many people.”

Just like any other time that there has been no path forward, the migrant wave creates a new one, always more dangerous, and at times, lethal. The Guna people discovered a new route between a coastal point in the Colón province and Gaigirgordub, the capital of their territory, from which boats embarked bound for Necoclí, a Colombian city that historically has been the primary access point to the Darién Gap.

The Venezuelans and Colombians in Lajas Blancas had hoped to access the alternative that had been coordinated by the Costa Rican and Panamanian governments two weeks ago, returning to their countries on airplanes paid for by the United States. But with Colombia’s refusal to receive the flights, they’ve been pushed back to the sea.

A few minutes away, other migrants are refusing to return home. Of the 299 individuals who have been deported by Trump’s administration to Panama — 155 women and 144 men, including 12 families and 24 children — 113 have left and 83 are planning to do so, according to the country’s authorities. More than a hundred have refused to return to their home countries, alleging that to do so would pose a danger to them, and have been sent to the detention center in Darién’s San Vincente.

Entrance to the camp is controlled by security. Although the Panamanian government initially said that it would give a tour of the Darién shelters to journalists, it later refused to do so. San Vicente detainees were sent to Panama by the U.S. government and are in the country without clear immigratory status, which has been described by experts as “illegal.”

Although Panamanian authorities have said the migrants would be offered the possibility of asylum, they prevented the access of lawyer Jenny Soto Fernández, who was contacted by the deportees’ relatives in Iran and who had intended to represent the individuals. “They all qualify to apply for refugee status because they are families who have converted to Christianity, but I have been denied access for them to sign the powers of attorney,” said Soto Fernández.

Given the current situation, Panama is not a safe third country, but rather a deporting third country. Experts contacted by EL PAÍS criticized the uncertainty into which the migrants have been thrust and questioned why the governments that are involved have failed to specify their legal status, why they have been sent to Darién and why they have been treated as criminals, given that they have no criminal record.

The answer lies in politics. Although deportations by the Trump administration did not exceed the monthly average of former President Joe Biden’s final year in office — 37,660 versus 57,000 — the Republican is obsessed with showing progress towards one of his campaign’s primary promises: the removal of millions of foreigners. To do so, he erased political and legal obstacles, forcing other countries to accept deportees. In Panama’s case, he threatened to “take back” the Canal.

And so now, in addition to those who arrived on the deportation flights from the United States, there are people in Panama who have given up on traveling north, like Yojana — but who do not know how to safely return to their own countries. “They tell us to go by sea, but we’ve already seen that of the first boats that left, one capsized. I will not risk my children’s lives,” she said on Monday at the entry to the enclosure in which she has been detained. The next day, authorities brought her and her family to the port of the Caribbean city of Colón. Her husband José Luis sent word of their whereabouts via WhatsApp: “They told us that tomorrow at four in the morning we are leaving for the 🚢 boats.”

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