by Lomi Kriel, Perla Trevizo and Mica Rosenberg

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The text came from inside a Panamanian government outpost, set hours away from the country’s capital, on the edge of the Darien jungle.

It had been written by a migrant who’d managed to smuggle a cellphone into the facility by hiding it in his shorts. He said authorities had detained him without providing him access to a lawyer or any means to communicate with relatives. He was hungry because all he was being fed were small portions of bread and rice. His cellphone was all he had to try to get help.

I am Hayatullah Omagh, from Afghanistan, 29 years old.

I arrived in February, 07 in USA.

They took me to the San Diego detention center and on Feb, 12 they deported to Panama.

Now we are like prisoners.

He was one of the lucky ones. Most of the hundred or so other migrants who were being detained with him had no way to communicate with the outside world. They’d been sent to Panama as part of President Donald Trump’s high-profile campaign to ramp up deportations. In addition to Afghanistan, the migrants had traveled to the U.S. from Iran, Uzbekistan, Nepal, Vietnam, India and China, among other countries. Some told reporters that they had only recently crossed the U.S.-Mexico border when they were detained, and that they were hoping to seek asylum. But, they said, American authorities refused to hear their pleas and then treated them like criminals, putting them in shackles, loading them onto military airplanes and flying them from California to Panama.

Three flights, carrying a total of 299 migrants, including children as young as 5, landed in Panama in mid-February. For the following three weeks, amid an international outcry over what critics described as a stunning breach of U.S. and international law, the migrants who had not committed any crimes were held against their will. As public pressure on Panama mounted and immigrant advocates filed suit against that country, authorities there released the migrants over the weekend, on the condition that they agree to make their own arrangements to leave within 90 days.

Their release has hardly settled matters, however, among those groups that consider themselves part of the international safety net charged with providing migrants humanitarian support. Among them is the International Organization for Migration, which helped Panama return migrants who chose to go home rather than remain in detention. The IOM said it participated in the effort because it believes that without its presence the situation for migrants would be “far worse.” Critics charge that the group’s role shows how much the safety net relies on the United States and as a result can easily come undone.

“I appreciate that some individuals hold the view that providing a more humane detention and deportation or voluntary return is better than a less humane version of those unequivocal rights violations,” said Hannah Flamm, an attorney with the International Refugee Assistance Project, a legal advocacy group in New York. “But in the context of egregious unlawful conduct........

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