Students detained in Panama

Three international Penn students were held in a Panama airport while returning from an Alternative Spring Break trip to Costa Rica.

The students were held for three hours because they did not have appropriate Visas.

The group’s plane, which was scheduled to land in Colombia for a connecting flight back to New York Sunday evening, had a mechanical difficulty and instead landed in Panama.

Upon arrival, the three undergraduates who did not have American passports were first told to remain on the plane, and then they were guided to interrogation rooms in the Immigration Offices.

“The officers were quite inappropriate in terms of what they were saying to us,” a College sophomore, who asked to remain anonymous, said. The officers were making offensive jokes, and there was “a lot of tension,” she added.

Shama Jamal, one of the other students detained, said most of the problems were related to the language barrier.

“Not being able to speak in Spanish, it was hard to know what was going on,” she said. “The conversation got heated up because there was a language gap.”

When the students were released, a different immigration officer escorted each of them to a hotel.

The officers, who took control of the students’ passports, remained at the hotel all night and took the students back to the airport the following morning.

The entire group returned safely to New York Monday afternoon and will be back in class today.

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