Costa Rica announced on Monday that it would receive a flight this week from the United States carrying 200 migrants from Central Asia and India, making it the second nation in Central America to accept deportees from faraway countries who had crossed illegally into the United States.
Last week, Panama received three U.S. deportation flights, carrying migrants from countries in Asia, the Middle East and Africa.
Such flights appear to be the Trump administration’s new tactic for dealing with unauthorized migrants from countries to which it might not be easy to return them, as the administration seeks to ramp up deportations. Rather than keep such migrants in detention centers on the southern border, the administration is recruiting other countries willing to accept them, where it is not clear what will ultimately happen to the deportees.
While traveling through Central America and the Caribbean earlier this month, Secretary of State Marco Rubio received assurances from several governments, including Panama’s and Costa Rica’s, that they were committed to working with the Trump administration on migration issues. But few details were offered.
In its Monday announcement, the Costa Rican government said the first group of deportees would arrive on a commercial flight on Wednesday afternoon.
Costa Rica said its territory would “serve as a bridge” for the migrants’ return to their countries of origin, and that the repatriation process would be “fully funded by the U.S. government, under the supervision of the International Organization for Migration,” a United Nations agency that Costa Rica said would be responsible for the care of the migrants during their stay in the country. Panama has described a similar process for the deportees sent there by the United States.
The U.N. agency’s representatives in Costa Rica did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
After arriving in the main airport serving San José, the capital, the deportees will be transported to a migrant shelter in the canton of Corredores, in the country’s south, Costa Rica said.
Costa Rican officials did not say how many migrants they expected the United States to ultimately send, or how long they would remain in Costa Rica before being sent to their countries of origin.
Not long ago, Costa Rica was grappling with how to cope with thousands of migrants passing through on their way to the U.S. border. Its shelters were crowded with people who, in many cases, had passed through the perilous Darién Gap, between Colombia and Panama, to reach Central America.
In the last year, the number of migrants passing through Costa Rica has dropped dramatically as the United States, Mexico and Panama have hardened their borders and enhanced immigration enforcement.
