Costa Rica tells Trump deportees they can stay and integrate, or leave

By Emiliano Rodríguez Mega

Costa Rican authorities this week said they would make it possible for dozens of migrants deported from the United States to legally stay in the country — or leave if they so choose to.

Omer Badilla, the head of Costa Rica’s migration authority, said that starting Monday, officials were returning passports and other personal documents to people who since February had been detained in a remote facility hours from the capital.

He also said that a resolution passed by the government Monday would open up a path so that the deportees could stay and integrate into Costa Rican society.

Badilla said in an interview with The New York Times that officials had only retained the passports as a protective measure. “If the person has a well-founded fear of returning to their country, we will never send them back,” he added. “We will protect them.”

The move comes after the country’s own ombudsman, human rights groups and a coalition of international lawyers denounced Costa Rica for what they called the wrongful detainment of deported migrants and said the government had violated their rights in the process.

In February, 200 migrants from countries including China, Iran, Russia and Afghanistan arrived in Costa Rica from the United States as part of the Trump administration’s mass deportation plans. They were then bused to a detention center, a former pencil factory, near the border with Panama.

The migrants were not allowed to leave the facility unless they were escorted by police officers, Badilla said in a previous interview. And they were held until they agreed to be repatriated to their homelands, which many had fled, or sought asylum by either Costa Rica or another country, according to the lawyers who filed a lawsuit last week against Costa Rica before a United Nations committee.

Dozens of children, the suit alleges, lacked access to schooling, pediatricians or legal counsel while detained.

About 80 migrants remain at the holding center, mostly families with children, Badilla said. The rest have already returned to their countries of origin, he said.

The country “recognized the urgency and need for humanitarian aid that these people have,” said Juan Ignacio Rodríguez Porras, an attorney with the International Institute for Social Responsibility and Human Rights, one of three organizations that filed the lawsuit.

Still, there was more to be done, he said.

The resolution that Costa Rica published Monday grants deportees a special three-month humanitarian permit to leave the detention center — though it also lets them stay if they need a place to sleep, eat and shower.

But the document does not allow migrants to work in the country, a necessary step to find their footing in a nation they are not familiar with, Rodríguez Porras said.

“So, in practice, what are they offering them?” he said. “What they’re looking for is that people leave as soon as possible.”

Badilla said the government was also working with other countries, including Canada, to see if they would accept some of the migrants. But he added they could all apply for asylum in Costa Rica at any moment — giving them a legal pathway toward employment.

“We want this population to be integrated into our country,” he said. “I know that they can offer us a lot.”