Eswatini, the landlocked nation formerly known as Swaziland, is Africa’s last remaining absolute monarchy. It is the kind of place where King Mswati III—who took the throne as an 18-year-old four decades ago—can warn in a speech in 2023 that nobody should “complain if mercenaries kill” political activists. When one of the country’s leading human rights lawyers is murdered[2] only hours later, the king’s representatives will suggest[3] there is no connection. No one will be punished[4].
In other words, Eswatini is just the kind of country—small, untroubled by democracy, and presumably eager to avoid a superpower’s wrath—with which the Trump administration has been eager to do business.
In May, officials from the US and Eswatini signed a deal that allows the Trump administration to deport people from all over the world to the African nation. A copy of the arrangement I reviewed shows that the United States has agreed to pay Eswatini $5.1 million to take in up to 160 so-called “third country nationals”—immigrants who came to the US with no ties to the country to which they are being deported.
A practice that would have been unthinkable under past administrations is becoming normalized: Sending ICE detainees, without due process, to far-flung prisons.
In July, the first five of those men arrived[5] in Eswatini, where they were sent to a maximum security prison and detained in the country without any clear legal basis. Last weekend, the Trump administration sent ten more people to the Eswatini prison. None of the fifteen men sent to the nation are from Eswatini. But they are now under the authority of its king.
The situation is a “legal black hole,” according to Tin Thanh Nguyen, a North Carolina-based attorney who is representing five men from Vietnam and Laos now imprisoned in the African country. As he explained in a statement on Monday, “I cannot call [my clients]. I cannot email them. I cannot communicate through local counsel because the Eswatini government blocks all attorney access.”
The arrangement with Eswatini, which has a population of 1.1 million, is similar to the deal that allowed the United States to send[6] more than 200 Venezuelans to an infamous Salvadoran prison earlier this year. The Venezuelans sent to the Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT)—most of whom had no criminal history[7]—were released[8] in July as part of a prisoner swap following sustained international outrage. (As we reported[9], ICE targeted many Venezuelans because of tattoos that the agency falsely claimed were evidence of gang membership.)
The CECOT disappearances led to international outrage. But the Trump administration’s efforts to offload people to a prison in Eswatini, along with similar arrangements with South Sudan and other African nations, have attracted much less attention.
A practice that would have been unthinkable under past administrations is becoming normalized: Sending ICE detainees, without due process, to far-flung prisons in countries with notorious human rights records.
The Department of Homeland Security did not respond to a request for comment. DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin warned in a statement last month: “If you come to our country illegally, you could end up in CECOT or a country you didn’t even know existed.” Eswatini’s US embassy also did not respond to a request for comment.
The legal pathway for third-country deportations became far easier this summer.
In May, the Trump administration tried to summarily remove a small group of third-country nationals to South Sudan, despite a preliminary injunction from a federal judge in Massachusetts that clearly blocked the move. At an emergency hearing in May, Judge Brian Murphy found that DHS’s conduct was “unquestionably violative” of his preliminary injunction. He ordered[10] the men not to be handed over to South Sudan.
In late June, the Supreme Court removed the protections Murphy put in place—effectively rewarding the Trump administration for flagrantly disobeying court orders. Justice Sonia Sotomayor excoriated the move in a dissent[11] joined by Justices Ketanji Brown Jackson and Elena Kagan.
“Apparently,” Sotomayor wrote, “the Court finds the idea that thousands will suffer violence in farflung locales more palatable than the remote possibility that a District Court exceeded its remedial powers.” (At another point, Sotomayor compared the administration’s legal nitpicking in the case to an “arsonist who calls 911 to report firefighters for violating a local noise ordinance.”)
DHS quickly took advantage of the power granted it by the Supreme Court’s conservative majority.
In July, the department followed through on the South Sudan removals and announced the first five deportations to Eswatini. In a series of social media posts, DHS claimed[12] the men were so “uniquely barbaric that their home countries refused to take them back.” The posts said that the men sent to Eswatini—who were from Cuba, Jamaica, Laos, Vietnam, and Yemen—had been convicted in the United States of serious criminal offenses, including murder and rape.
The severity of the crimes obscures the legal stakes of the case. All of the men DHS sent to Eswatini had served their sentences and been ordered deported. The question was (and is) not whether they can be deported—it is whether the Trump administration has the authority to send people anywhere it wants, without due process, and imprison them in countries where the detainees have never broken any law.
Trina Realmuto, one of the lead lawyers in the case before Murphy, stressed that all of the class members she is representing have rights regardless of their criminal histories.
“But make no mistake,” Realmuto, the executive director of the National Immigration Litigation Alliance, said, “this is going to happen to people without criminal convictions.”
DHS did not name the people it sent to Eswatini, but it did share their photos. Through those photos, family members and friends in the United States learned that their relatives had been sent to a small kingdom on the other side of the world. It would be about two weeks before they were able to speak with them.
Nguyen, the North Carolina immigration lawyer, and two other American lawyers who took the cases of the men in Eswatini quickly, began working with Sibusiso Nhlabatsi, who is well known in Eswatini for his work as a human rights lawyer.
Nhlabatsi was also a colleague and close friend of Thulani Maseko, the activist and lawyer killed[13] in 2023 while watching television at home with his wife and two young children. No one has ever been held accountable for his friend’s murder, and Nhlabatsi said he fears for his own “safety every day” due to his work. “It’s a risk that you have to take,” he told me. “Unfortunately, sometimes you have to pay the highest price.”
“It’s a monarchy. Nobody wants to be the person who does the wrong thing or does the thing they’re not supposed to do. But nobody really knows what they’re supposed to be doing.”
So far, Nhlabatsi’s efforts to represent the people sent to Eswatini from the United States have been thwarted by the kingdom. For the first time in his career, Nhlabatsi said that prison officials have repeatedly denied him the chance to meet with his clients at the prison.
In response, Nhlabatsi filed suit to try to force the courts in Eswatini to allow him access to the men deported from the United States. But what has happened since has been Kafkaesque.
After taking the government to court, Nhlabatsi said a legal adviser for the country’s prison system told him that he would be able to meet his clients. But when he returned to the Matsapha Correctional Complex—which houses the maximum security prison where the men are being held—Nhlabatsi said he was “pushed from pillar to post” and made to wait hours. Finally, Nhlabatsi told me the head of the prison told him that he would not be able to meet with his clients after all. The reason was absurd: The prison director claimed the men were refusing to see him.
A close friend of Roberto Mosquera, the Cuban national sent to Eswatini in July, said Mosquera told her during a brief call that he never refused to meet with Nhlabatsi. She said that officials in Eswatini “just blatantly lie and say that Mr. Mosquera refuses counsel.”
Mia Unger, an immigration attorney at the Legal Aid Society in New York, represented a man sent to Eswatini named Orville Etoria. “He requested to speak with us numerous times, and he wasn’t allowed,” Unger said. “They didn’t allow him to call us.”
Etoria’s story is particularly galling because there appears to be no basis for DHS’s claim that Jamaica, his home country, refused to take him back. Unger said that Etoria, who was convicted[14] of murder nearly three decades ago and released from prison in 2021, was asked by Immigration and Customs Enforcement to obtain a Jamaican passport at a check-in earlier this year. He got the passport, went to another ICE check-in in June, and was taken into custody. Unger said “there was never any question of whether he was able to go to Jamaica.” As a result, it should have been illegal to send him to Eswatini. (US law makes it clear[15] that people can only be deported to third countries when it is “impracticable, inadvisable or impossible” to countries to which they have close ties.)
After Etoria arrived in Eswatini, Jamaica’s government immediately made clear that it had not refused to take him back. And in September, after being imprisoned for two months at Matsapha, Etoria returned[16] to the Caribbean island. (A Mexican national sent to South Sudan was also repatriated[17] after the Mexican government facilitated his return.)
Alma David, an immigration attorney with Novo Legal, is representing Mosquera and Kassim Saleh Wasil, a Yemeni national in Eswatini. She told me the head of the Matsapha prison said via WhatsApp that the only way to have an unmonitored conversation with her clients would be for her or another attorney to come in person. She noted that Nhlabatsi had tried, and that he had been repeatedly turned away. In response, David said the prison chief told her that Nhlabatsi needed to go to the US embassy to get permission to meet with his clients.
It is unclear what the actual policies are. “It’s a monarchy,” David explained. “Nobody wants to be the person who does the wrong thing or does the thing they’re not supposed to do. But nobody really knows what they’re supposed to be doing.”
“All of these people had served their sentences,” she stressed about the men sent to Eswatini. “They were living in the community, and were not considered a danger to anybody until one day they were picked up and sent to Eswatini.”
When we first spoke late last month, Nhlabatsi said that he would soon be in court to secure an order allowing him to meet with the men sent from the United States. Last Friday, he said that the court ordered him to have access. But it came with a major caveat: the government immediately appealed the judgment.
It means that Nhlabatsi is likely months away from being able to meet with his clients—if he is able to do so at all. The goal appears to be to try to stonewall until the men are removed from Eswatini, at which point their claims would become moot.
Nhlabatsi said that the case has become big news in his country. Many residents have not been happy to learn that their government is holding people convicted of serious crimes in the United States. In contrast to the propaganda video El Salvador released after Venezuelans arrived at CECOT, Eswatini’s government seems to have tried to draw as little attention as possible to what it’s doing on behalf of the United States. (Nhlabatsi said he does not believe that the men are being physically abused while in custody, but added that being in prison is bad enough.)
ICE is now doubling down on these deportations. Nguyen, the North Carolina lawyer, said ICE told a group of men in detention in the United States last Saturday that they were about to be deported to Eswatini. Nguyen said that the new group of deportees includes people from Cambodia, Chad, Cuba, the Philippines, and Vietnam. Flight tracking records indicate[18] that the plane carrying them arrived in the nation around midnight on Monday. (Unlike the first five people sent to Eswatini, this group was able to make short calls after arriving in the country, according to Nguyen.)
Court records show that Mosquera, the Cuban national sent to Eswatini in July, was arrested in 1988 and later convicted for attempted first-degree murder. (ICE has incorrectly claimed that he was convicted of homicide.) He was later ordered deported, but the federal government was apparently unable to remove him to Cuba, which has often refused to accept deportees. Following additional arrests in 2008 and 2015, Mosquera was convicted of offenses including grand theft auto, assaulting a law enforcement official, and misdemeanor assault.
Mosquera’s close friend, who requested anonymity due to fear of potential retaliation by ICE, said Mosquera had “paid his dues to society” and had turned his life around by the time he was detained by ICE at a routine check-in this June. She said Mosquera, who came to the United States as a boy more than 40 years ago, should never have been sent to a prison in a country in which he has never committed any crime.
“I used to believe in the Constitution,” Mosquera’s friend said. “I used to believe that I lived in the greatest country in the world.” She explained that she was born in the United States after her parents left Cuba in the early 1960s. “But this is not the America that I grew up in,” she continued. “This is a whole different America.”
References
- ^ Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily. (www.motherjones.com)
- ^ murdered (www.fidh.org)
- ^ suggest (www.africa-newsroom.com)
- ^ punished (www.hrw.org)
- ^ arrived (www.reuters.com)
- ^ send (www.motherjones.com)
- ^ no criminal history (www.cbsnews.com)
- ^ released (www.motherjones.com)
- ^ reported (www.motherjones.com)
- ^ ordered (www.motherjones.com)
- ^ dissent (www.supremecourt.gov)
- ^ claimed (x.com)
- ^ killed (hrf.org)
- ^ convicted (www.nytimes.com)
- ^ clear (www.law.cornell.edu)
- ^ returned (www.cnn.com)
- ^ repatriated (www.cnn.com)
- ^ indicate (bsky.app)