The Trump administration has deported migrants from several Asian nations, including Pakistan, to Panama, a Latin American country, The New York Times reported on Thursday, citing Panamanian and US officials.

The report said the move could signal “much faster removals of immigrants” who have remained in the United States because their countries have made it difficult to return them.

It said that the flight carrying the migrants on a military plane took off from California. It came on the heels of US Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s visit last week to Panama, which has been under pressure from President Donald Trump over how it runs the Panama Canal.

The more than 100 migrants on the flight, including families, had entered the United States illegally from countries such as Afghanistan, China, Pakistan and Uzbekistan, with the Times saying, “It is often difficult for the United States to return migrants to those nations”.

Panama’s President Jose Raul Mulino, speaking at a news conference on Thursday morning, said 119 people of “the most diverse nationalities in the world” had arrived Wednesday night on a US Air Force flight at an airport outside Panama City, according to the report.

Mulino said two more US Air Force flights were expected to bring a total of about 360 deported migrants to Panama. The Panamanian president said that he expected they would “quickly be flown” to their countries of origin from Darien in an effort that would be paid for entirely by the US. Mulino did not give a timeline for when the other flights were scheduled to arrive.

Migration at the southern US border has shifted in recent years to include not just people coming from Mexico and Central America but also those from a wider range of countries, including ones that either do not accept deportation flights or take them sparingly, it was pointed out.

The Panamanian president had also indicated a willingness to receive deportees from other countries.

“We are completely certain that reverse immigrants will come at some point — that is, they will be sent back either along the same route or because the United States will bring them back to deport them from here,” Mulino said.

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The government in Panama has been under “greater pressure” than other Latin American countries to show it is on board with Trump’s priorities for the region.

Mulino, who has sought to align himself with Trump on migration. He also emphasised a 94 per cent reduction over the past year in migration at the Darien Gap, where hundreds of thousands of migrants had been entering the country from Colombia on their way north to the US border.