The house looked nothing like the modern beauty salon that Vusala Yusifova once owned in Azerbaijan.
The smell of freshly brewed coffee, not hair spray, filled the air. Ms. Yusifova worked amid kitchen utensils and children’s books. Her 9-year-old daughter, Inji, stood by as her assistant. Her husband lifted the client over the bathroom sink to wash her hair.
And yet, despite the limitations, it was more than Ms. Yusifova could have imagined for herself a year ago, when the Trump administration deported her and her family to Costa Rica.
The Yusifovs were arrested while illegally crossing from Mexico into the United States after their asylum appointments were canceled. Border patrol agents caught them after Inji became tangled in a barbed wire fence.
They were among the first people to be expelled under a mass deportation program. Thousands of migrants who cannot legally, or safely, be returned to their home countries have instead been sent to places they have no ties to.
So far, the Trump administration has sent 15,000 people to unfamiliar nations, according to the Migration Policy Institute — including Panama, Cameroon, South Sudan and elsewhere.
Like the rest of the 200 people who arrived in Costa Rica last year, the Yusifovs endured several months in detention in a makeshift holding center. But today they are among a handful of families who have found an unexpected welcome in Monteverde, a mountaintop town in northwest Costa Rica.
There, an alliance of residents, expatriates and pacifist Quakers raised money to support the new arrivals, found them places to rent, helped their children go to school and, in some cases, offered them jobs.
“We’re in the process of seeing how to empower them step by step so they don’t have to depend on others all the time,” Danielle Hentschl, 39, said of the Yusifovs.
The Hentschls, a Christian couple from California living in Monteverde, had asked Ms. Yusifova to cut one of her young daughters’ hair.
“The family you see are my closest friends,” Ms. Yusifova, 43, said of her hosts. “I love them.”
It remains unclear how much longer the town will be able to support the deportees, or if it can welcome any more of them. Costa Rica signed an agreement in March to accept 25 or more new deportees every week. The latest group arrived last Saturday.
In Monteverde, where mist showers the forests and tourists zip line through the canopy, a few of those cast out by the United States have slowly built a fragile sense of home.
‘I’ve Been Robbed’
When they arrived in Costa Rica last year, the 200 deportees were taken to a repurposed pencil factory near the Panamanian border. Officials seized their passports and crowded them into barracks for months with little access to schooling or health care, according to several deportees and human rights groups that documented their confinement.
Conditions were so dire that at least six people escaped.
Authorities were forced to release the deportees, giving them the option to stay or leave following a scathing report by the country’s ombudsman and international lawsuits. A Constitutional Court also ruled that the detentions were illegal.
Most returned to their home countries. Others sought asylum in Costa Rica. Several received a special immigration status that allowed them to find jobs and move freely.
“If I take you to Russia without documents, without money — you don’t know the language, you don’t know this country, you know nothing — and I open the doors and tell you, ‘Do whatever you want,’” German Smirnov, a Russian deportee, said, “how would you react?”
Mr. Smirnov, 37, worked as a poll worker in Russia when he filmed what he said were anomalies in the 2024 presidential elections. Caught by soldiers, he was given a choice: Go to prison or go fight in the war in Ukraine. He fled instead, flying to the U.S. border with his wife and son. In January, their asylum appointment was canceled and they turned themselves in. They were deported to Costa Rica.
“I’ve been robbed,” Mr. Smirnov said. “I did everything right.”
Families like his, unable to return home or move on, were left in limbo.
Marcia Aguiluz Soto, a Costa Rican lawyer who advised several deportees, said she hosted a family in her home near San José, the capital, for a few days.
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“I could offer them a room and food,” she said. “I couldn’t offer them community.”
Through her work with the American Friends Service Committee — a Philadelphia-based organization founded by Quakers, a peaceful religious movement — Ms. Aguiluz Soto realized that community was what a group of Quakers had been building in the cloud forests of Costa Rica for over 70 years. So she turned to them.
A Sense of Freedom
In 1951, a group of about 40 American Quakers moved to Monteverde after four of their men were jailed for refusing to register for the peacetime draft. When a judge told them to find another country if they wouldn’t serve, they chose Costa Rica, which had just abolished its military.
They raised dairy cows and opened a cheese factory. They set aside thousands of acres of forest that attracts birders and hikers year-round. A large wooden building serves as a bilingual school, community center and place of worship.
Monteverde eventually grew into an enclave of retirees, biologists, artists and foreigners.
Last year, when word spread of entire families stuck in a detention center with no idea where to go, many Quakers felt obliged to offer sanctuary, as their founders once sought.
“This community was willing to step up and try to mitigate this suffering as best as possible,” said Jennifer Walker Gates, an American immigration lawyer living in Monteverde.
They raised enough money to cover housing and food for six families.
“We were not doing it as a political statement,” said Katy Van Dusen, 68, a member of the Monteverde Friends Meeting, the Quaker group. “We were doing it because these are people that need help.”
Darkness had fallen in Monteverde last July when, one by one, 25 exhausted and disoriented deportees got off the bus.
A crowd waited for them. One person brought homemade cookies. Another had a golf cart filled with donated sweaters.
Jennie Mollica, 55, another Quaker, said she sensed among the new arrivals a feeling of freedom. “An ability to maybe take a deep breath,” she said.
Of the six migrant families, one moved north to a farm and requested asylum, the Quakers said. Others crossed into the United States again. Only two remain in Monteverde.
A New Home
Earlier this year, Mr. Smirnov and his family visited Costa Rica’s towering Arenal volcano. The country where he and his loved ones had been deported to, the nation that had confined them, also had beauty to it.
“Before I arrived here, I never thought about this,” Mr. Smirnov said, adding that the trip inspired him to learn more Spanish and to travel beyond Monteverde.
Mr. Smirnov found work as a trainer at a local gym. His boss cut his hours because she could not pay him full time, but she let him bring his own clients — mostly Quakers and foreigners.
“He told my husband, ‘I’m going to make you look so sexy,’” said Ms. Walker Gates, the immigration lawyer.
Yet the gap between the newcomers’ old and new lives remains wide. At her salon in Azerbaijan, Ms. Yusifova specialized in complex hair coloring — vibrant reds and complex ombrés. In Monteverde, she has felt stifled. Her clients prefer a natural look. Some of them go gray.
“Sometimes it feels a bit boring,” she said. “I know I can do so much more.”
There are more pressing issues. A one-month government permit to receive free health care in public clinics expired in March, forcing Ms. Yusifova to skip ultrasounds needed to regularly monitor cysts in her breasts.
“I am genuinely afraid of getting sick here,” she said.
The family’s future feels uncertain. Ms. Yusifova’s husband, Azar, said they could not return to Azerbaijan because he had been arrested after creating campaign posters for an opposition party. He still longs for the United States.
“One day, America will accept us legally,” Mr. Yusifov, 41, said.
The money raised by the Quakers are expected to run out in a few months. Mr. Smirnov and his wife, Anastasiia, have stretched the financial aid until September by covering half their expenses.
“We will find a solution,” Mr. Smirnov said. “We would like to stay.”
So would his 7-year-old son, Timur.
One recent night, Timur shared drawings of the wildlife in Monteverde. He had also drawn a Costa Rican flag. How did he feel about this new, tropical country?
The boy smiled shyly. “It’s perfect,” he replied in English.
David Bolaños and Nailia Balayeva contributed reporting.
Emiliano Rodríguez Mega is a reporter and researcher for The Times based in Mexico City, covering Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean.
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