The tropical warmth embraced German Smirnov from Russia, when he stepped out of a Hercules C-130 of the US Air Force in February. A few hours before, he, his arms and legs, was fascinated by American customs officers on a base in the state of Arizona to the military plane. To get out in Costa Rica, a country that he had never heard of.
“We were with about two hundred people, from Africa, Asia, but also at least twenty Russians. They said we would be taken to a hotel.” Smirnov sighs deep. “We were then on the bus for ten hours and had to go outside at a shed in the jungle on the border with Panama.” The telephones and passports of the set migrants were taken away on arrival.
It took Smirnov and his family weeks to get used to the country unknown to them, he says from the Costa Rican Monteverde during a video call. There was no internet, no education for Ronny, the son of Smirnov. “It was the most difficult for my wife Alexandra. She missed Russia, her friends, her work. She even thought to go back, with my child. Fortunately she is still here for the time being.”
Dozens of countries are seduced by the American government with money, threatened with import duties or otherwise put under pressure to record set-out migrants. Usually they are people from these countries, but occasionally they are ‘third -country people’, people without any bond with that country (or continent). Asians and Latinos, for example, ended up in the African Republic of South Sudan.
Landen in Central America has so far received the most extended migrants from the US. There seems to be a good reason for that: out and through this region most migrants have come to the US in recent years. Fleeing to China and India are also going to flee – whether they have promised to cooperate with this. The US is increasingly looking at Africa: in addition to South Sudan, Uganda and Swaziland have also closed deals with Trump. Rwanda has allowed the first seven -set migrants this month. Kosovo would have been moved to cooperation in Europe.
Five days late
The 36-year-old Smirnov worked as a fitness coach in St. Petersburg. Since 2018 he helped organize elections in the country. Because of the corruption he saw up close, he decided in the run -up to the Russian presidential elections of 2024 to record a video to help the opposition prove that fraud was being made. “I was caught and decided to flee Russia. If I hadn’t done that, I would have ended up in prison or sent to the war in Ukraine,” says Smirnov. In May 2024 he took the plane to Mexico and went with his family to the border town of Tijuana.
From a migrant shelter, he tried to make an appointment via the American migration app CBP One, to be able to enter the US legally. “After 34 weeks in the shelter I managed to get an appointment. On January 25 it would be our turn.”
The Russian migrant German Smirnov in March at a shelter for migrants in the Costa Rican Puntarenas.
Photo Ezequize Becerra/AFP
But five days earlier Trump was sworn in for his second term as president of the United States. A few minutes after Trump was sworn in, all agreements of migrants in the BP One app were canceled.
“It was a huge shock. Asylum lawyers advised us to request political asylum at the border, as the last option,” says Smirnov. He drove with his family to the Checkpoint Otay Mesa on the border with California, near Tijuana. He applied for political asylum. “But the customs said we had crossed illegally. We were fixed in a detention center on the border. My wife and my seven son were set apart. We got a mat and an aluminum blanket and sat there for thirty days.”
Promise of mass expansions
Although the previous US President Joe Biden took far -reaching measures to prevent illegal migration to the US, the policy is even stricter under Donald Trump. Migrants in the US, sometimes with temporary residence papers, can be deported without the chance of challenging their business. Sometimes they are turned off to their country of origin within 24 hours, or to other countries. Defraction seems to have become the core of the American migration policy and there is a major role for Central American countries.
The first trip of the American Foreign Minister Marco Rubio went to the countries through which hundreds of thousands of migrants traveled on their way to the US. Panama, El Salvador, Costa Rica and Guatemala are now all participating in reclaiming Trumps promise of ‘massive deportation’ of migrants.
The most striking role is reserved for El Salvador, where Trumps ally Nayib Bukele rules. Bukele made the notorious mega prison Cecot available and received 238 deported Venezuelans in March. According to the Trump government, those were dangerous gang members, but American media could not find any evidence for three-quarters of them that they had a criminal record or were a suspect in a criminal case.
Costa Rica and Panama also contribute. Panama received three hundred migrants and captured them in a shelter in the jungle in the south of the country, in the Darénenkloof. Paradoxically, this camp was once built to offer migrants on their way to the US temporary care.
Costa Rica received two hundred migrants. This month Honduras concluded an agreement with the US government to compensate for migrants from so -called ‘third countries’. Guatemala does not absorb migrants, but serves as a transit port of where extended migrants from the US are flown towards their home country.
Where El Salvador only recorded Venezuelans, the group in Panama and Costa Rica is much more diverse. For example, Panama recorded migrants from Uzbekistan, Vietnam, Nepal, Sri Lanka and Iran, and Costa Rica received migrants from Congo, Angola, Jordan and Russia, among others.
No daycare prepared
Smirnov: “On the day we went to Costa Rica, we were put on a plane to Arizona, then in a bus, and then on the plane to Costa Rica. It was only in that plane that someone said we were going there. While I had not signed anything.”
For five months, Smirnov and his family spent shelter in the far south of Costa Rica. “The food was not bad, human rights organizations tried to help us well. We were treated worse in the US,” he says. “But the hygiene was terrible. We had no privacy. And there were insects everywhere.”
The building where the migrants were held for several years of service as a shelter for migrants on their way to the United States. It was a factory for that. With insufficient ventilation, high temperatures and barely beds, it was not very comfortable, the migrants told human rights organization Human Rights Watch. For months they sat behind high, rusty fences waiting for them to happen to them.
Residence of the family of German Smirnov in the reception center for migrants in Costa Rica, on a photo taken by himself.
Photo German Smirnov
At Angie Cruickshank, the National Ombudsman of Costa Rica, alarm bells went off because of the way the migrants were treated. A day after the arrival of the two hundred migrants in Costa Rica, her office published a report in which, among other things, the inadequate information provision, reception facilities and medical and psychological care were denounced. Last month, her office published an evaluation of the five months that the migrants were held in the reception camp, entitled: “Costa Rica was never prepared to catch deportees.”
“We have urged the government and in parliament that such a company should never take place again in Costa Rica,” Cruickshank told NRC by telephone. “Afterwards we can state that fundamental human rights have been violated here.”
According to the Ombudsman, her office was not informed of what was about to happen prior to the arrival of the migrants. “There is no official document, no treaty or agreement between our government and that of the US in which information is shared about these evictions,” she says.
In retrospect we can state that fundamental human rights of man have been violated here
Her office tries to keep following the deported migrants. After five months, the two hundred migrants were returned to their passports and they were allowed to leave the Jungekamp after a judgment of the judge in Costa Rica. According to government figures, the majority of the group has now left the country, the majority to their home country.
Some migrants, including German Smirnov and his family, are still staying in Costa Rica. A Quaker community in Monteverde, in the north of the country, offers some twenty migrants temporary care. “They do everything they can to make our lives easier here. They pay for food here, they help us. But we are statusless. We are not tourists, we are not migrants, we are not refugees or asylum seekers,” says Smirnov.
The community has said the Russian that the shelter is temporary, until the government comes up with a solution. “We have two options: requesting another country or refugee status in Costa Rica,” says Smirnov. “We have no money. We live on what the Quakers give us. But we can’t stay here. We don’t speak the language, don’t know the country. There is no work here. We will end up on the street soon.” The US has put Smirnov out of its head. “I have established my hope in Canada. But I see it gloomy.”
Human rights
In the meantime, Central American countries continue to help the US to curb migration. A few weeks ago Reuters wrote that the US government wants to help Costa Rica with millions of dollars to set out migrants who cross the country on their way to the US. Whether the country will receive a new group of migrants set out by the US in the short term is uncertain.
Mauricio Herrera, former Minister of Communication, sees that the current government of Costa Rica continues to bow to the US. After the deported migrants were locked up in the jungle of Costa Rica, Herrera submitted a request for ‘Habeas Corpus’ to the Constitutional Court of the Central American country to test whether the capture of this group was legally. “The whole situation was dangerous. The lack of information, the fact that innocent persons were locked up in a camp,” says Herrera on the phone.
There is a lot at stake for Herrera, who was a lot at stake as a minister, human rights activist and as a journalist, a lot. “The current government is not thinking of human rights. But Costa Rica has a reputation. We are not only a country that protects our nature well. We also have to protect our human rights well.”