Almost a year after Donald Trump strong-armed a deal with Costa Rica to receive 200 people from other countries who were being deported from the United States after being denied the right to request asylum, a small handful remain there in legal limbo and fighting for compensation.
The asylum seekers flown to Costa Rica in chains last February, despite not being criminals, were from 20 other countries, chiefly parts of Asia and Africa and included 81 children. They had all tried to request refuge at the US-Mexico border but were quickly removed from American soil after Trump returned to the White House and effectively closed the US asylum system. In the face of a variety of political difficulties with deporting them to their native countries, the Trump administration sent them to Costa Rica, as he did others to Panama.
Among the deportees to Costa Rica was Alexander, a 37-year-old Russian man, his wife and their young son, who remain there and are trying to come to terms with how they were handled by the Trump administration. They are also fighting for justice from the Central American authorities for putting them in detention after they arrived from the US. His real name is being withheld by the Guardian and his wife and son’s names are not being disclosed, to keep the family safe from the Russian government.
“They threw us out like baggage,” Alexander said of the US, in an interview with the Guardian in Costa Rica.
Already bewildered at being flown to, from their point of view, a mystery country, Alexander and his family were then horrified that they and the other deportees from the US were locked up for two months in Costa Rica, which Human Rights Watch at the time called “reprehensible”.
The Costa Rican government had claimed it would be a safe haven for those deported and would act as a bridge, helping people return to their home countries – even though many of the people had fled danger in the first place. Alexander knew that not only had he escaped political risk in Putin’s Russia but that if he went back he faced a high risk of being sent straight to the frontline in Ukraine.
The family had left Russia in a hurry after he flagged alleged election irregularities to people who had been working with the late opposition leader, Alexei Navalny, he said, hoping to find sanctuary in the US.
They flew to Turkey then Mexico in the spring of 2024, while Joe Biden was still in the White House, and managed to secure an asylum appointment with the US authorities that was scheduled for 2 February 2025 in California. But after Trump returned to the White House last January, the appointment was abruptly canceled. The family crossed the border into the US to request help anyway but they were arrested, detained and ultimately deported.
They were initially detained in the US, a miserable experience, then flown out involuntarily to Costa Rica. They didn’t even know where that was on a map, Alexander said.
This was just one of many high-profile scandals from the earliest days of the second Trump administration as it unleashed its anti-immigration and mass deportation agenda.
It was part of a Trump mission to get more people out of the US, deporting some migrants and asylum-seekers to so-called “third countries” willing to receive them if the US has trouble deporting them back directly to where they came from.
In Central America alone, five countries – Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Panama – agreed to US requests to receive deportees from other nations.
Alexander said he and his family had been living in St Petersburg, where he worked as a fitness coach. In 2018 he became interested in how elections function and became a poll worker.
He collected ballots, mostly on behalf of elderly people who were unable to travel to voting sites. But, he said, during Russia’s 2020 presidential election he noticed that many ballots had already been filled out in advance and placed in some of the containers he was supposed to fill with the ballots of elderly and disabled individuals.
By the time the 2024 elections came around, Alexander said he could no longer stay silent. He filmed the irregularities he said he had witnessed and attempted to leak the video to a source associated with Navalny, who had recently died in Russian government custody. But his action was discovered by the authorities, he said, and two Russian soldiers took him to a room in the facility where he worked as a poll worker and forcefully confiscated his phone.
The Guardian has verified that Alexander was a poll worker but is not able to independently verify his interactions with the Russian authorities.
The family decided they must leave. After eventually reaching the border between Mexico and California, they rented a room and downloaded a Biden-era phone app, known as CBPOne, that migrants could use at the time to try for an appointment in the US to ask for asylum. It was a highly imperfect system and some asylum seekers waited many months trying every day to get one of the rationed appointments. But it was a legal system, at least. And eventually, Alexander got lucky, or so he thought at the time.
“We had an appointment for 2 February 2025 in Calexico, California, but on 20 January, a couple hours after Trump’s inauguration, it [the CBPOne system] was cancelled. So we drove to the border anyway, gave ourselves up to the American officers and showed our passports. But they ignored our requests for asylum,” he said.
Not only that, Alexander and his wife were handcuffed in front of their little boy and transferred to the Otay Mesa detention facility in California. Alexander was separated from his wife and son, and they were all held for one month. Then the Trump administration put them on a military plane to Arizona and then another plane. Terrified, they had no idea where they were being taken. It turned out to be Costa Rica.
There, the frightened family were escorted by Costa Rican national police and transported to a secure migrant care center, also known as Catem, located in Puntarenas, six hours away from San José, the country’s capital.
“In the first weeks I lost 15 kilos and my family was sick, so I started asking questions like: ‘why didn’t we have freedom? Where were our passports?’ One day my son got an inflammation in his teeth and, through organizations, he was sent to a dentist that took a tooth out – without anesthesia,” Alexander said. The boy remains traumatized from the experience, he added.
The Guardian spoke last month to Monserrat Ruiz Guevara, a member of the Costa Rican legislative assembly, who said that at the time there had been concern in the governing body about how long the 200 migrants were going to stay at Catem.
“We wanted to see if their rights were being met but we realized that Catem didn’t have the right infrastructure for these migrants, including children and pregnant women. They were sleeping in poor conditions and they weren’t used to eating the food they were given,” said Ruiz Guevara, who visited the detention center in March last year with other Costa Rican lawmakers.
“Costa Rica has always been an advocate for human rights. It has always been a just country and now it’s becoming a laboratory. Costa Rica can’t be a warehouse for people,” he added.
In June last year, Costa Rica’s constitutional branch of the country’s supreme court ruled that the Costa Rican government had violated the rights of Alexander’s family and the other migrants, breaching their right to personal liberty, and declared that the deportees should be released. The ruling also said the government should determine what forms of assistance the asylum seekers needed, including education, housing and healthcare – and that they should be entitled to compensation.
The Costa Rican government did release the people but did not provide any compensation and still has not, advocates say. Lawyers with the Global Strategic Litigation Council, a legal advocacy and immigrant rights group, are now suing the Costa Rican government along with other organizations on behalf of the migrants, including Alexander and his family, over their detention..
Alexander’s family, including his son, now eight, are now undergoing psychological examinations to assess the impact on them of being at Catem, according to Natasha Pérez, a lawyer with Global Council.
The family is understood to be among only about 10 people deported from the US on that flight to still be in Costa Rica, according to Pérez. The whereabouts of the others is unclear.
The Costa Rican government’s migration agency has pushed back on the court’s ruling and on complaints from the asylum seekers.
“I strongly opposed the constitutional court’s ruling. There were days that we restricted their [the deported migrants’] movements, but we immediately brought the situation under control. They were treated with dignity, they received medical attention and were fed. It seems to us that the constitutional court focused on its political interests in order to undermine the process the government followed with these migrants,” Omer Badilla, the director of the national migration agency, told the Guardian.
In the US, Democratic lawmakers sent a letter to the homeland security, state and defense departments last September demanding “details about the Trump administration’s third-country deportation practices, which may violate US and international law”.
Senator Elizabeth Warren had signed a letter last September from lawmakers demanding “details about the Trump administration’s third-country deportation practices, which may violate US and international law”.
The White House never responded to the letter, according to sources with knowledge of the matter.
Warren sent a further statement to the Guardian this month saying: “Deporting people to countries they have no connection to is not legal immigration enforcement – it’s a violation of immigration law and due process. What is the Trump administration offering countries in exchange for accepting people not from those countries? How will it make sure people don’t face persecution or torture in these countries?”
Lawyers and independent human rights organizations said Central American leaders have agreed to collaborate with the Trump administration’s hardline immigration agenda due to threats of tariffs, visa sanctions and other measures.
Just before the deportations from the US last February, Costa Rican president Rodrigo Chaves said at a news conference: “We’re helping our powerful economic brother in the north, because if [the US] imposes a tax on our export zones, we’re screwed. I don’t think they’ll do it, thank God ... love is repaid with love … 200 will come, we treat them well and they will leave.”
Chaves’s presidential term will come to an end after elections scheduled for 1 February. Despite several requests, Costa Rica’s migration agency did not respond to inquiries about whether the country will receive more deportees from the US in the future.
Meanwhile, Alexander and his wife and son are trying to make the best of things there.
Amid increasing reports of Costa Rican federal officers questioning foreign nationals in public places about their immigration status, the family was recently granted “humanitarian” permits for a year with the possibility of an extension, allowing them to live and work legally in the country.
Post-detention, the family found refuge near Monteverde, a rainforest region in central Costa Rica, at a Quaker community that dates back to the 1950s.
Alexander is back working as a fitness coach, the same job he had in Russia before becoming a poll worker. His wife has also found full-time work, too, and their son is enrolled in school.
“We are going to stay in Monteverde because we got jobs. My wife works 11 hours a day four times a week and I work at the gym. I still don’t fully speak the language, but this is the best for us now,” he said, speaking at the gym where he works.
However, the hurt about their treatment by the US has not gone away.
“Don’t forget, they deported us illegally,” he said.
“They threw us out like baggage to a country with a language we don’t speak. And no one was held accountable for this.”
