Panama accepted asylum-seekers the US didn’t want. Then its troubles began.

Mellona Takie can barely make it through a game of Uno these days, though on a recent afternoon she tries. Anything to keep her mind from going to a place so dark that she tried to take her own life in February, after the United States deported her, an East African, to Panama.

“Even if I see something good, in my eyes, it’s bad,” says the woman in her late 20s, who fled mandatory military service in Eritrea, under a totalitarian government, and planned to seek political asylum in the U.S.

Ms. Takie was among 299 people, mostly from countries that wouldn’t or couldn’t accept deportations from the U.S., who were sent on three planes to Panama City between Feb. 12 and 15. They didn’t know where they were until they disembarked and saw migration officials with the word “Panama” printed on their uniforms. Most had assumed they were being flown to another city inside the U.S. Once in Panama, the deportees were detained in hotel rooms in the capital and later in a bare-bones jungle camp, barred from access to phones, lawyers, media, and medical care.