Syrian refugee in limbo after harrowing trek to U.S.

To reach the U.S. and claim asylum, all Maissoun Hanaa Halawi had to do was cross a continent by foot.

That would include crossing the remote, roadless, impenetrable Darien Gap, a 10,000-squaremile tropical forest and swampland along the border of Colombia and Panama that separates the two continents.

Halawi, her husband and a group of about 20 Indian, Middle Eastern and other asylum seekers faced a harsh reality. Not only do jaguars, scorpions, poisonous frogs and insects lie crouched in the shadows, but paramilitary groups, traffickers and guerrillas hide under the thick canopy’s shelter.

“In the jungle, the fear — you can’t imagine it,” Halawi, a Syrian, said in her accented but fluent English. “You don’t want anything except to get out. There’s no food. It’s a savage, wild jungle. We took our chances.”

She and her husband, a Syrian surgeon, knew the risks. But as refugees fleeing a war-torn country infiltrated by violent militant groups, the six-day journey wasn’t a choice. Halawi, her husband and the others paid the smuggler $500 a head. Before they set off into the Darien Gap, he gave them a final warning.

“Every time I’ve made this trip, I must lose one person,” Halawi remembered him saying.

Behind the barbed wire fence and through security checks at the entrance to the South Texas Detention Complex in Pearsall,