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...