Costa Rica to accept 25 ‘third country’ deportees from U.S. every week
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SAN JOSÉ, Costa Rica — Costa Rica said Thursday that it would accept 25 migrants deported from the United States per week as part of an agreement to help the Trump administration’s latest policy of deporting immigrants to “third countries.”
The Central American nation joins a growing number of countries across Africa and the Americas that have signed contentious, often secretive agreements with the U.S. to accept deportees from other countries as President Trump pressures governments to help him advance his agenda. In many cases, migrants who previously hoped to seek asylum in the U.S. are left in a legal “black hole” in foreign countries where they don’t speak the language.
Countries who have agreed to receive third-party migrants include South Sudan, Honduras, Rwanda, Guyana, and several Caribbean islands like Dominica and St. Kitts and Nevis.
“Costa Rica is prepared to see this flow of people,” said Costa Rican Public Security Minister Mario Zamora Cordero in a video statement on Thursday.
Deported not to their homelands but to unfamiliar cities deep inside Mexico, thousands of migrants are stranded in a dangerous, bureaucratic limbo with little support and no clear path forward.
Costa Rica’s government signed the pact on Monday during a visit by U.S. special envoy for the so-called “Shield of the Americas” Kristi Noem to Costa Rica. Noem, who was fired earlier this month from her role as secretary of Homeland Security, has been traveling through Latin America, with recent stops in Guyana and Ecuador.
“We are very proud to have partners like President [Rodrigo Chaves Robles] and Costa Rica, who are working to ensure that people who are in our country illegally have the opportunity to return to their countries of origin,” Noem said on Monday.
Costa Rica’s government called the pact a “non-binding migration agreement” and said the deal allows the Trump administration to transfer foreign nationals — who are not Costa Rican citizens — and that the Central American nation can accept or reject proposed transfers.
The government said the deportees will be processed under Costa Rica’s migration laws under a special migratory status and that the country will avoid returning people to countries where they might face risk of persecution.
Such transfers have been sharply criticized for putting vulnerable populations further at risk and in some cases sending them to dangerous nations or where they face risk. Costa Rica has already faced controversy for its treatment of 200 deportees from countries like Russia, China, Uzbekistan and Afghanistan it received last year.
Deportees, half of whom were minors, had their passports seized and were locked up for months in a rural detention facility near the Panama border, an incident that fueled lawsuits and accusations of human rights abuses. The country’s supreme court ordered their release last June.
The Democrats on the Foreign Relations panel, led by Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, criticize the practice of third country deportations as ‘costly, wasteful and poorly monitored’ in the report and call for ‘serious scrutiny of a policy that now operates largely in the dark.’
Many deportees who said they were too scared to return to their country were later given temporary permits to stay in Costa Rica. Panama, which locked up hundreds of deportees around the same time, came under similar criticism.
Zamora on Thursday made assurances that the new round of deportees would be held in better conditions, and that the government would work with the U.S. to return migrants back to their countries and with the U.N. International Organization for Migration to house deportees in Costa Rica. He didn’t immediately detail where they would be held or for how long.
“This will ensure they remain in the best possible conditions while in Costa Rica and guarantee their safe return to their countries of origin,” Zamora said.
At least seven African nations have signed deals with the U.S. to facilitate deportations of third-country nationals, which legal experts said are effectively a way to circumvent laws that forbid countries from sending people to places where their lives would be threatened.
Many deportees received legal protection from U.S. judges shielding them against being returned to their home countries, their lawyers said.
The Trump administration has spent at least $40 million to deport about 300 migrants to countries other than their own, according to a February report by the Democratic staff of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
Córdoba and Janetsky write for the Associated Press. Janetsky reported from Mexico City.
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