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On a rainy evening in March, a Russian man named Dimitry stumbled through the dark, looking for a hole in a fence. In a former life, Dimitry worked as a fitness trainer for cops and bureaucrats in St. Petersburg, so he figured he could jump the barrier — “Honestly, with the shape I’m in, it wouldn’t be a problem.” But he was less confident about landing cleanly on the jungle terrain on the other side. Better, he thought, to look for a break in the chain-link.

The fence enclosed CATEM, a de facto immigrant detention center in Costa Rica where Dimitry, his wife, and their 6-year-old son were sent in February, along with 200 other asylum-seekers from Armenia, Afghanistan, Iran, Turkey, and Russia, among others. They were part of the first wave of migrants and asylum-seekers to be deported by the Trump administration to third countries — places other than their country of origin where, generally, the migrants had never been.

The second Trump administration has deported more than 8,100 people to places other than their countries of origin — also known as third countries. Some have been sent to foreign prisons or active war zones; other third countries have not offered long-term plans for legal status. A series about what happens next.

Dimitry’s plan, quickly formed a year earlier in an attempt to evade Russian authorities, had seemed straightforward. The family would fly to Tijuana, where they would download the U.S. Customs and Border Protection’s app, file a claim for political asylum, and wait to be given an appointment. But on January 20, 2025, after eight months of waiting, their appointment was canceled. They drove to the Tecate border crossing and restated their political-asylum claim. After being handcuffed and fingerprinted, the family was placed in a holding facility at the Otay Mesa border crossing. They spent a month there, separated, before they were put on a military plane to Arizona. In Arizona, they were led to a bus. One of the migrants asked the driver where they were being taken next.

“Costa Rica,” the driver replied.

Costa Rica, Dimitry thought. Is that a city or a country?

Dimitry’s first impression of CATEM, a converted pencil factory, was that it was hot: so hot and humid that in the mid-afternoon, when the sun was strongest, the migrants would descend to an underground parking garage to wait it out. He and his family shared a cramped space with eight others. It was like “being held in a total vacuum,” he said. There was no sense of what came next, no information from the Costa Rican government about its plan for the detainees — how long they would be in detention or what their options were. They had no government health care or work permits. They could leave the facility only with a police escort to purchase items they needed. Dimitry, like the other migrants, couldn’t speak Spanish. He wanted to take lessons and to put his son in school, but the Costa Rican government hadn’t made provisions for the migrant children to attend school and didn’t provide language classes. Left on their own, migrants contacted human-rights organizations and spoke to local press in the hope of finding a way out of CATEM. (Dimitry asked to be identified by a pseudonym to protect his family members who remain in Russia.)

One month later, Dimitry felt that the family was in a desperate situation. “When are we going to leave here?” His son had started to ask. “I’ve seen every inch of the place;I’m tired of it.” Dimitry and his wife worried about how much school he was missing. Without anything to do, he and his Armenian friend spent the days climbing and playing with cars. Meanwhile, other migrants had begun to lose hope and return home. In the cafeteria one morning, Dimitry’s wife broke down. She wanted to go back to Russia and put their son back in school. Her parents urged her to do the same. They had already been through so much. When they were separated at the U.S. Border, nobody had enough food; Dimitry told me that the men in his cell knew their kids were hungry because the guards would sometimes move the small children to a cell opposite their fathers so that the fathers could hear them cry.

The thought of his family being apart again terrified Dimitry; if his wife and son left, it wasn’t clear when they would see one another. “Please,” he asked his wife, “I don’t want to be left without you here.” Dimitry knew he couldn’t return to Russia. He asked her to hang on and give him a bit more time to work something out, to find housing and some way to make money.

In early March, he’d exchanged numbers with a Costa Rican YouTuber he’d seen hanging around CATEM, and now the YouTuber was nearby, asking for an interview. Dimitry was not allowed to leave CATEM, but he didn’t care. Maybe, he thought, if he talked to the YouTuber, someone would be able to help them. Dimitry slid through the gap in the fence, jumped over a narrow canal, and called the YouTuber on WhatsApp. The rain was pounding so hard that he could hardly hear a voice on the other end of the line, but the YouTuber directed him to a bar, where he was waiting with some friends.

That night, the YouTuber suggested that they take Dimitry, his wife, and his son to Costa Rica’s capital, San José, for a couple of days. If they saw a bit of the country beyond CATEM, maybe his wife would be willing to give it another chance. Dimitry jumped at the........

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