A deportee from the United States detained in a camp in rural Panama, among a hundred who refused to return to their countries, described on Saturday waiting in limbo under “harsh conditions” and cut off from access to legal council and other rights.
The testimony comes after an uproar in Panama this week over the treatment of nearly 300 migrants who were deported from the United States and are being held in Panama as authorities return them to their own countries.
The camp, located near a small town known as San Vicente, Metetí, was originally constructed as a migrant reception center built to address the flow of hundreds of thousands of migrants traveling north through the Darien Gap in recent years.
The migrant said that people in the camp were having their personal freedoms restricted, and that migrants faced both poor conditions in the camp and a strict vigilance from guards.
Those who refused have been sent to a rural migrant camp the southern Darien province, near the Darien Gap a perilous jungle migrant passage between Panama and Colombia.
