Police are searching for a Chinese woman who escaped from a downtown Panama City hotel where she was being held following her deportation from the US under Donald Trump’s intensified campaign against immigrants.
Zheng Lijuan was one of 299 migrants – from China, Afghanistan, Iran and other countries with which the US lacks extradition agreements – who have been flown in shackles to Panama since last Wednesday. Panamanian authorities say they believe that Zheng was aided by locals who had been “prowling” outside the Decapolis hotel in the capital city where the deportees had been held.
News of her escape came as 170 of the deported migrants were taken to the Darién region, close to the border with Colombia, according to a Panamanian lawyer representing one of the migrant families. The Panamanian government has said it would expand a camp previously used to house migrants arriving in Panama after crossing the Darién Gap, the dangerous jungle separating Central and South America.
After his election last July, Panamanian president José Raúl Mulino signed a deal with the US to control the flow of migrants through the jungle, stringing up barbed wire, upping border patrols and deporting mainly Ecuadoran and Colombian citizens on flights from the runway close to the town of Metetí.
Amid Trump’s threats to “take back” the Panama Canal, the Panamanian government has agreed to receive hundreds of migrants who the US cannot easily deport.
Mulino has said that the runway at Metetí will be expanded, in order for larger planes – presumably those able to make transatlantic flights – to land and take-off.
Representatives of the International Organization for Migration, a UN-related body responsible for undertaking the plan, were unable to comment.
However, Panama also lacks the flight agreements to deport the migrants to their home countries. They could, therefore, remain incarcerated in the San Vicente facility that will be “like a concentration camp”, according to one person with knowledge of the plan.
Many of them fear they will face punishment, or even death, should they return.
Artemis Ghasemzadeh, a 27 year old Iranian English teacher who had been held at the Decapolis hotel, told the New York Times that she was a Christian convert and would face possible execution under Shariah law should she return. “Only a miracle can save us,” she told reporters.
On Wednesday afternoon, the incarcerated guests at the Decapolis hotel peeked from behind the curtains. One woman in a hijab waved a hand.
A family of four dressed in red T-shirts made hand gestures to sign that they had had their phones taken away from them. Finally, the police arrived to escort the Guardian’s reporter from the premises.
Panamanian politicians are aware that, in a state of political duress following Trump’s threats, their country has come to play an ugly role in his aggressive deportation policy.
On Wednesday, the government of neighbouring Costa Rica also agreed to receive 200 migrants from Central Asian countries and India. The move was prompted by the potential threat of trade tariffs, president Rodrigo Chaves said, adding: “We’re helping our powerful economic brother in the north, because if [the US] imposes a tax on our export zones, we’re screwed.”
