Illustration: Patrick Leger

On a rainy evening in March, a Russian man named Dimitry stumbled through the dark, looking for a hole in a fence. In a former life, Dimitry worked as a fitness trainer for cops and bureaucrats in St. Petersburg, so he figured he could jump the barrier — “Honestly, with the shape I’m in, it wouldn’t be a problem.” But he was less confident about landing cleanly on the jungle terrain on the other side. Better, he thought, to look for a break in the chain-link.

The fence enclosed CATEM, a de facto immigrant detention center in Costa Rica where Dimitry, his wife, and their 6-year-old son were sent in February, along with 200 other asylum-seekers from Armenia, Afghanistan, Iran, Turkey, and Russia, among others. They were part of the first wave of migrants and asylum-seekers to be deported by the Trump administration to third countries — places other than their country of origin where, generally, the migrants had never been.

Dimitry’s plan, quickly formed a year earlier in an attempt to evade Russian authorities, had seemed straightforward. The family would fly to Tijuana, where they would download the U.S. Customs and Border Protection’s app, file a claim for political asylum, and wait to be given an appointment. But on January 20, 2025, after eight months of waiting, their appointment was canceled. They drove to the Tecate border crossing and restated their political-asylum claim. After being handcuffed and fingerprinted, the family was placed in a holding facility at the Otay Mesa border crossing. They spent a month there, separated, before they were put on a military plane to Arizona. In Arizona, they were led to a bus. One of the migrants asked the driver where they were being taken next.

“Costa Rica,” the driver replied.

Costa Rica, Dimitry thought. Is that a city or a country?

Dimitry’s first impression of CATEM, a converted pencil factory, was that it was hot: so hot and humid that in the mid-afternoon, when the sun was strongest, the migrants would descend to an underground parking garage to wait it out. He and his family shared a cramped space with eight others. It was like “being held in a total vacuum,” he said. There was no sense of what came next, no information from the Costa Rican government about its plan for the detainees — how long they would be in detention or what their options were. They had no government health care or work permits. They could leave the facility only with a police escort to purchase items they needed. Dimitry, like the other migrants, couldn’t speak Spanish. He wanted to take lessons and to put his son in school, but the Costa Rican government hadn’t made provisions for the migrant children to attend school and didn’t provide language classes. Left on their own, migrants contacted human-rights organizations and spoke to local press in the hope of finding a way out of CATEM. (Dimitry asked to be identified by a pseudonym to protect his family members who remain in Russia.)

One month later, Dimitry felt that the family was in a desperate situation. “When are we going to leave here?” His son had started to ask. “I’ve seen every inch of the place;I’m tired of it.” Dimitry and his wife worried about how much school he was missing. Without anything to do, he and his Armenian friend spent the days climbing and playing with cars. Meanwhile, other migrants had begun to lose hope and return home. In the cafeteria one morning, Dimitry’s wife broke down. She wanted to go back to Russia and put their son back in school. Her parents urged her to do the same. They had already been through so much. When they were separated at the U.S. Border, nobody had enough food; Dimitry told me that the men in his cell knew their kids were hungry because the guards would sometimes move the small children to a cell opposite their fathers so that the fathers could hear them cry.

The thought of his family being apart again terrified Dimitry; if his wife and son left, it wasn’t clear when they would see one another. “Please,” he asked his wife, “I don’t want to be left without you here.” Dimitry knew he couldn’t return to Russia. He asked her to hang on and give him a bit more time to work something out, to find housing and some way to make money.

In early March, he’d exchanged numbers with a Costa Rican YouTuber he’d seen hanging around CATEM, and now the YouTuber was nearby, asking for an interview. Dimitry was not allowed to leave CATEM, but he didn’t care. Maybe, he thought, if he talked to the YouTuber, someone would be able to help them. Dimitry slid through the gap in the fence, jumped over a narrow canal, and called the YouTuber on WhatsApp. The rain was pounding so hard that he could hardly hear a voice on the other end of the line, but the YouTuber directed him to a bar, where he was waiting with some friends.

That night, the YouTuber suggested that they take Dimitry, his wife, and his son to Costa Rica’s capital, San José, for a couple of days. If they saw a bit of the country beyond CATEM, maybe his wife would be willing to give it another chance. Dimitry jumped at the idea. “These people love their country, and they say, ‘It’s not so bad here, take a look,’” Dimitry recalled. “It was so our family might not fall apart.”

In April, in response to pressure from lawyers and journalists, the Costa Rican government allowed the migrants free movement in and out of CATEM. Dimitry and his family made the trip to San José several weeks later in July. Walking around a big, modern city felt expansive. The weather was cooler, very close to the climate of St Petersburg in the summertime. The family hung out in the parks and played Ping-Pong at a sports center. They could imagine themselves finding an apartment, buying vegetables at the markets.

When they returned to CATEM, there was news from the lawyers who’d been working to help the migrants find temporary housing and financial support. They had found a place for Dimitry and his family to stay in a Quaker community in the mountains near Monteverde. Dimitry knew nothing about Monteverde, but he loved the novels of Theodore Dreiser, who wrote about Quaker characters, and he felt he had a sense of the faith. Dimitry’s wife was still uncertain. “I told her, ‘Let’s stick around for at least two weeks, and then we’ll see.’” She agreed.

Around the time Dimitry entered university, in 2006, Alexei Navalny began to publish some of his first investigations into corruption and cover-ups at Russia’s state-owned companies. Dimitry had chosen to study journalism and public relations. In class, “we were studying propaganda, how to control mass consciousness, but for some reason Russia was never mentioned,” Dimitry told me. “At that very same time, Navalny was putting out articles showing how the Russian state was trying to influence us, our minds, through the media.”

Dimitry started reading Navalny’s blog, but “I didn’t think of myself as a great political actor,” he told me. He didn’t go to public demonstrations or consider changing the course of his life. Dimitry graduated and began working in the fitness industry. Relatives and friends “were opposition-minded, but none of us really did anything about it,” Dimitry told me. But in his peripheral vision, he tracked Navalny.

In 2018, Dimitry’s son was born. Between fitness clients, he took a job as a poll worker to make extra money. The workers spent six months preparing for each election, notifying and turning out voters and then staffing the polling place during elections.

The second election Dimitry worked, in 2020, he was sent to collect ballots from voters who were too old or infirm to come to a polling place. “You’re not an idiot,” one of his supervisors said. “You understand how it works.” “I said, ‘Of course I understand,’” Dimitry recalled. “But I didn’t understand anything.” So one of Dimitry’s fellow poll workers explained the “sleight of hand”: Dimitry was to do his rounds collecting ballots and place them into one container. Meanwhile, another set of ballots had been filled out in advance and placed into a second container. The ballots in the second container were counted in addition to the first. “Everything is in position, everything has been prepared in advance, it’s all been decided for you,” he explained. “You just need to follow the plan.”

As he made his rounds, knocking on doors and collecting ballots from “mostly elderly, naïve, kind people,” Dimitry and the voters would often get to talking. “They would say, ‘We support Putin, just so there is no war,’” he told me. Many of them had lived through the Second World War and the Soviet-Afghan War; most lived alone, their apartments exactly as they had been during the Soviet era. Dimitry understood that “they don’t want the horrors that they had to go through happen to us. And then, wham! 2022 comes, and we start a war. And we can’t even call it a war; we have ‘soft language.’ It’s a special military operation.”

Dimitry couldn’t stop thinking about the people he met collecting ballots. It began “eating away at me, this pain and disappointment about these people that the government had screwed over and deluded.” He got angry, and “I just needed to get out my anger,” he told me. His idea was simultaneously simple and grand. He would make a video showing how the sleight of hand took place.

The morning of March 14, 2024, the day before the start of Russia’s presidential elections, Dimitry went for his poll-worker shift at a local school. He had been corresponding with a man he’d met at a protest in Moscow two years earlier who had “the same views as me, but a little more idealist, and we got along because he also went to the gym.” The man told him he was well-connected with the Navalny organization; Dimitry knew that ordinary people often leaked information that was used to investigate corruption. Dimitry described his idea and asked whether the organization could do something with an anonymous video. “And he said, ‘I talked to my people, they’re interested, go ahead and send it to us.’”

Dimitry says he agreed to do a task he hadn’t done before: filling in the fraudulent ballots that would be counted along with those that were legitimately collected. “I was told, ‘Okay, please do the following: Put such and such marks on such and such ballots.’” A handful of people worked the shift, each going through “a huge pile of ballots that needed to be marked.” As he neatly marked ballots, he filmed a video on his phone: “‘Look at what I have to do.’ That was my idea, nothing too original or interesting. It was pure improvisation.” He finished the video, left his classroom, and wrote a note for a supervisor to say he wasn’t feeling well and needed to step out.

Dimitry still doesn’t know how he was caught. At the building’s exit, two members of the national guard pulled him aside and said, “Sir, stop.” They asked to see his phone. Dimitry said no; they led him to a private room and then took it from him forcefully. They started to jeer. Then they told him, “That’s it, we’ve got you, you’re going to war.” This is when Dimitry got a horrible feeling, a mixture of the shame of realizing that he had potentially harmed his co-workers, who were decent people he liked; that his family could be wrapped up in this; and that he could be in danger.

He waited until one of the guardsmen left the room, and then he ran. “It wasn’t like in the movies; it was all very routine,” he said. Nobody chased him; they already had the evidence from his phone. The following day, Dimitry did not show up for work. He stayed at home, thinking about what to do next. The day after that, he heard from his mother. The police had been at her house, looking for him. A week later, his wife’s parents, who live 9,000 kilometers from St. Petersburg, called to say the police had shown up at their door, too. That was when Dimitry and his wife “understood that I’m done, I’m finished.”

They didn’t intend to go to the United States or even, necessarily, to leave Russia. But Dimitry had heard that after 2022, people were more likely to get a sentence or be sent to war for the type of thing he’d done. Better to wait it out elsewhere. The lawyer suggested Kazakhstan, Georgia, or Armenia. Dimitry began to have trouble sleeping. He became convinced that he would “end up in a trench somewhere with a machine gun.” At night, he would have panic attacks. “My heart started beating wildly, and I didn’t understand why that was happening,” he said. “I didn’t call an ambulance because ‘I’m a guy’ and all that. So I sat there wondering whether I was going to die.” He talked with a friend who had been granted asylum in the U.S.; he suggested Dimitry look into the CBP One program. The U.S. had good support for migrants, the friend told him. “I wouldn’t be on my own, and if I was thinking of going somewhere, I should go to an English-speaking country,” Dimitry recalled.

In May 2024, Dmitry, his wife, and their son flew to Istanbul, then on to Mexico. Dimitry’s heart pounded all the way to the airport. “It wasn’t like, ‘Farewell, my beloved birch, farewell, my beloved pine,’” he said. “I was scared, thinking they were lying in wait for me everywhere.” But the trip went smoothly. They arrived with ten-day visas. During the first six, they wandered around like tourists, visiting a museum, amazed at their luck. Then the stress began. They hadn’t realized Mexico City was so far from the border. WhatsApp chats for Russian migrants were full of stories of dangerous buses to Tijuana. So they flew north and rented a room.

Many migrants choose to drive to the border and claim asylum, but the official pathway was to download Customs and Border Protection’s app, file a claim, and wait to be given an appointment. “We wanted to do everything as legally as possible,” Dimitry said. The family waited in Mexico for nearly eight months. On January 14, 2025, they were notified that they had gotten an appointment on February 2. Less than a week later, on Inauguration Day, another notice popped up: The appointment had been canceled. The irony was not lost on him that their desire to go by the book, lest they run afoul of the U.S. government, ultimately cost them an interview.

They had already spent most of their money. There was no going back. So they decided to buy a cheap car and drive to the U.S. As they neared the border, Dimitry felt this time he was really having a heart attack. He couldn’t breathe. When they were taken to the Otay Mesa crossing, the guard told them that the United States was no longer offering political asylum.

The U.S’s political-asylum program was formed as a corrective to a history of restrictive immigration policy. In May 1939, nearly a thousand Jews boarded an ocean liner and sailed from Hamburg to Havana. Most had applied for U.S. visas, but the U.S. would accept only a combined 27,370 immigrants from Germany and Austria each year, and by May, that quota had long since been reached. The ship was sent back, and hundreds of those aboard were later killed in the Holocaust. In the aftermath of World War II, amid the largest refugee crisis in history, the U.S. made a commitment to no longer turning away people fleeing persecution, or legitimately fearing it, in their home countries. The right to asylum for reasons of race, religion, nationality, political opinion, or membership in a particular social group has its roots in this postwar era: it was included in the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948 and written into US immigration law soon after.

On the first day of his second term, President Trump released a proclamation “Guaranteeing the States Protection Against Invasion,” which argued that migrants were effectively invading the southern border; it used this as grounds to deny any right to asylum and to deport asylum-seekers without investigating their claims or providing an alternate pathway to safety. Two weeks later, the ACLU sued the government on behalf of several immigrant legal-aid groups, arguing that the proclamation was “as unlawful as it is unprecedented.” The complaint stated asylum seekers were “being systematically expelled from the United States without being provided credible fear interviews — the absolute minimum that Congress required to ensure that people subjected to expedited removal would not be returned to persecution or torture.”

“What I don’t think is fully appreciated is that this new law doesn’t simply make revisions to the asylum process but does away with it completely,” Lee Gelernt, deputy director of the ACLU’s Immigrants’ Rights Project, told me. “The fact that the U.S. has no asylum system is just a remarkable thing after the commitment we made after World War II. No Western country lacks an asylum system; almost no country in the world doesn’t have one. I don’t think people realize what that actually means. I think they believe it means getting rid of anybody who has a frivolous claim while keeping the pathway for people who are in real danger. But there is no pathway.”

In its push to remove asylum-seekers, administration officials started forming agreements to send them to “third countries,” often places where migrants had no ties and no language proficiency. The government secured these deals by applying overt economic and political pressure. “We are helping the economically powerful brother to the north, who if they impose a tax in our free zones, it’ll screw us,” Costa Rica’s president, Rodrigo Chaves, said of his decision to accept deportees from the U.S.

By April 2025, the other families sharing a room with Dimitry, his wife, and his son were all gone. Each morning, the family woke up, ate breakfast, began the process of hand washing and drying their clothing — an endless task in the heat and humidity — and exercised. Dimitry tried to do interviews and chase leads that could get them out of CATEM, while his wife practiced math with their son or showed him how to work on his English with Duolingo.

“These little micro-problems take up your time,” Dimitry told me. “But even while you’re reading or doing something, you understand that you don’t know what will happen next, how much more time you’ll waste here, and for what? What did the children do to be stuck here? The depressive thoughts start, and I don’t want to eat anything, to read, to study. It starts to destroy your psyche.”

Soon after the migrants were brought to CATEM, lawyers with the Global Strategic Litigation Council filed cases on their behalf in a Costa Rican court and with international human-rights organizations, arguing that the migrants’ detention violated national and international laws. “The U.S. is the origin of the problem — they sent people here to get rid of them,” Silvia Serna Román, one of the litigators, told me. “And then Costa Rica said, ‘Well, they’re not our responsibility,’ even though they willingly decided to receive them. They had no infrastructure for people who were potentially going to stay to live in Costa Rica; now they’re washing their hands of their responsibility” to provide for them.

In August, a Costa Rican judge wrote that the deportations of asylum seekers were “a ‘silent shipment’ of the poor of the Earth, who are so numerous. In all my years in the Constitutional Chamber,” he continued, “I had never seen a case that was so damaging to people’s fundamental rights, especially dignity and freedom.” In early July, a federal judge in Washington, D.C., found that the administration had overstepped its authority, and declared the invasion proclamation unlawful. “It is clear that, even though asylum is itself a discretionary form of relief, providing aliens with the opportunity to apply for asylum (and the opportunity to be heard) is mandatory,” the judge wrote. The government immediately appealed, and while the case is ongoing, asylum-seekers remain in limbo; the D.C. judge has said he will wait to decide about any remedy for those impacted until the case is resolved. It will almost certainly be appealed to the Supreme Court.

Dimitry and his family moved to Monteverde in mid-July; when they got there, late at night, they were met by more than a dozen members of the Quaker community — many the descendants of Americans who moved to Costa Rica to dodge the draft in the ’50s — who’d stayed up to greet them. They showed Dimitry and his family to a small house. A couple weeks later, neighbors offered to drive Dimitry’s son to school with their children.

Dimitry and his wife’s work permits are good for six months with the possibility for another six. Dimitry is trying to offer fitness classes, and his wife to find clients who might want manicures and pedicures. Without Spanish, they don’t have many options. “Work in Monteverde isn’t some normal thing. It’s like a privilege,” Dimitry told me. Most of his neighbors have remote jobs for companies based in the U.S. For now, they attend Quaker meetings and pick up odd jobs — turning compost, feeding farm animals, or repairing buildings. Dimitry is grateful, but he knows he’s far from a stable income. “I don’t want to disappoint all these people who are trying to help us,” he said. “We still don’t know what to do next.”

Late at night, he will sometimes try to wrap his head around how he came to be living in the mountains of Costa Rica. “If I hadn’t gone collecting ballots from the elderly, I’d probably have gone on living, working, grumbling about the government, being dissatisfied, but I wouldn’t have the problem I have now,” he said. “It wasn’t for nothing that I was so cautious my whole life. One political act, and now look where I am. Causes and effects, causes and effects, and the irrevocable events between them.”

Translations by Elina Alter

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