Christian converts from Islam are among migrants from countries hostile to Christianity who have been deported from the United States – initially to Panama, where they are isolated before possible deportation to their home countries, according to The New York Times.
The Feb. 18 article reported that at least 10 Christians from Iran were among more than 100 people put on a military plane last week for Panama, including migrants from Pakistan, Afghanistan, China and Uzbekistan – respectively ranked eighth, 10th, 15th and 25th on Open Doors’ World Watch List of the 50 countries where it is most dangerous to be a Christian.
Iran, where leaving Islam is punishable by death under sharia (Islamic law), is ranked ninth on the list.
Locked in the towering Decapolis Hotel Panama in Panama City with about 340 other migrants flown from the United States on three military planes, a 27-year-old Christian woman from Iran scrawled “Help us” in lipstick on a window, The Times reported. Its reporter made contact with her and learned that she and her Christian countrymen, including three children, had been desperate to obtain help from the outside world.
Authorities had seized their passports and deprived most of them of their mobile phones before they were locked inside the hotel guarded by armed personnel and prohibited from seeking legal help. The Iranian woman told The Times that one of the other deportees had tried to commit suicide in the hotel; another broke his leg trying to escape.
None of the migrants at the hotel have criminal records, Carlos Ruiz-Hernández, Panama’s deputy foreign minister, told The Times.
The Iranian woman reportedly said she knew when she left Iran in December that soon-to-be President Trump would deport migrants, but that as an educated person with no criminal record and documented conversion to Christianity, she expected to be able to stay. Seeking a better life in the United States, she had first flown to Mexico and paid a smuggler $3,000 to help her climb over a U.S. border wall, then was quickly apprehended, she told The Times.
Like other deportees fearful of retaliatory measures if returned to their home countries, she told The Times, “Only a miracle can save us.”
Another Christian convert from Iran told the reporter that her 8-year-old son was terrified upon seeing the shackles that U.S. authorities put on his parents while on the military plane. Her husband reportedly said that when his wife and son cried on the flight, he told them, “Jesus has said, ‘If you don’t take your eyes off me, I won’t take mine off you.’ So I was constantly signaling that to my wife, saying, keep your eyes on Him.”
Department of Homeland Security spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin said in a press statement that none of the illegal migrants “asserted fear of returning to their home country at any point during the processing or custody,” according to The Times.
Ruiz-Hernández said Panama was holding the deportees temporarily at the hotel in response to a Trump administration request for Panama to hurriedly take them. Threatening to take over the Panama Canal, the U.S. administration has put the Central American country under intense pressure, The Times noted.
After U.S. officials began deporting hundreds of migrants from Asian, Middle Eastern and African countries to Panama on Feb. 12, Panama now bears the onus of what to do with them.
“Because the deported migrants are no longer on U.S. soil, Washington is not legally obligated to make sure they are treated humanely or have the chance to seek asylum,” The Times reported.
The newspaper reported that attorneys in Panama said people cannot be legally detained in the country for more than 24 hours without a court order. The deportees were expected to be sent soon to a makeshift camp called San Vicente in the Darién Gap jungle, according to The Times, citing Panama President José Raúl Mulino.
Calling Panama “a leader and strategic partner in migration management,” Ruiz-Hernández reportedly said his government and the United States had an agreement and were “respecting human rights.”
The U.N.’s International Organization of Migration is one of two U.N. agencies tasked with overseeing the deportees while in Panama, but a spokesman for the agency said they were not involved in their “detention or restriction of movement” and was “facilitating returns where safe to do so,” according to The Times.
A senior U.N. official told the newspaper that the United Nations was “providing Panama with humanitarian and technical support, but the Panamanians were tightly managing the deportees and the process they were following was not entirely clear.”
Costa Rica has also announced that it would receive deportees from the United States as part of what Muzaffar Chishti, a senior fellow at Migration Policy Institute, told The Times was a “totally new era” of Washington pressuring other countries to take part in its “deportation machinery.”
“Panama’s president has said that the plan is to send people back to their home countries,” The Times reported. “But if the United States could not easily send deportees back to certain countries, it is unclear how Panama will do so.”
