US to pay for flights to help Panama repatriate migrants

WASHINGTON (AP):

The United States is going to pay for flights and offer other help to Panama to remove migrants under an agreement signed Monday, as the Central American country’s new president has vowed to shut down the treacherous Darien Gap used by people travelling north to the United States.

The memorandum of understanding was signed during an official visit headed by Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas to Panama for the inauguration Monday of José Raúl Mulino, the country’s new president.

The deal is “designed to jointly reduce the number of migrants being cruelly smuggled through the Darien, usually en route to the United States,” National Security Council spokesperson Adrienne Watson said in a statement.

The efforts to send some migrants back to their homelands “will help deter irregular migration in the region and at our southern border, and halt the enrichment of malign smuggling networks that prey on vulnerable migrants,” she said.

“Irregular migration is a regional challenge that requires a regional response,” Mayorkas said in a statement.

Shortly after Mulino’s inauguration, the Panamanian government released a statement saying Mayorkas had signed an agreement with Panama’s Foreign Affairs Minister Javier Martínez-Acha in which the US government committed to covering the cost of repatriation of migrants who enter Panama illegally through the Darien.

The agreement said the US would support Panama with equipment, transportation and logistics to send migrants caught illegally entering Panama back to their countries, according to Panama.

Mulino, the country’s 65-year-old former security minister and new president, has promised to shut down migration through the jungle-clad and largely lawless border.

Under the terms of the agreement, US Homeland Security teams on the ground in Panama would help the government there train personnel and build up its own expertise and ability to determine which migrants, under Panama’s immigration laws, could be removed from the country, according to two senior administration officials.

They spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity to give details of the agreement that had not yet been made public.

For those migrants who are to be removed, the US also would pay for charter flights or commercial airplane tickets for them to return to their home countries. The officials didn’t specify how much money the US would contribute overall to those flights or which countries the migrants would be removed to.

The officials said the US would be giving assistance and expertise on how to conduct removals, including helping Panama officials screen migrants who might qualify for protections. But the US is not deciding whom to deport, the officials said.