“Panama cannot end up becoming a black hole for deported migrants,” said Juan Pappier, deputy director of Human Rights Watch in the Americas. “Migrants have the right to communicate with their families, to seek lawyers and Panama must guarantee transparency about the situation in which they find themselves.”

Officials in Costa Rica and Panama are confiscating migrants' passports and cellphones, denying them access to legal services and moving them between remote outposts as they wrestle with the logistics of a suddenly reversed migration flow.

A flight carrying primarily Asian undocumented migrants, 65 of whom are minors, is expected to land in San Jose, Costa Rica on Thursday afternoon.

Costa Rica is the second Central American nation to accept migrants from distant countries as the Trump administration ramps up deportation flights.

Panama received three U.S. deportation flights last week with migrants from China, Uzbekistan, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and other countries.

The flight from San Diego landed in San José, the Costa Rican capital, on Thursday evening. The group of migrants on board included dozens of children, officials said.

A U.S. flight carrying 135 deportees, half of them minors from various countries, is set to land in Costa Rica, making the country the latest Latin American nation to serve as a stopover as U.S.

The migrants were flown from San Diego to San Jose, from where they were sent by bus to a migrant shelter near the border with Panama.

Costa Rica is the third country in Central America to collaborate on repatriating deported migrants from the United States since President Donald Trump assumed office

The first set of US deportees will reach Costa Rica on Wednesday aboard a commercial flight, whereupon they will be transported to a Temporary Migrant Care Center near the border with Panama.

Costa Rica has announced that it will accept illegal migrants deported from the United States who are nationals of other countries, following similar

Costa Rica is the third Central American country to agree to repatriate deported migrants from the US since Donald Trump took office. Panama and Guatemala had made a similar agreement when US Secretary of State Marco Rubio visited them in January.