Trump Deports Five Men to New "Third Country" of Eswatini

The United States expelled five men to the Southern African country of Eswatini on Tuesday as part of its ongoing efforts to exile immigrants to so-called “third countries.” The move closely followed the United States’ deportation of eight men — seven with no connection to the country — to violence-plagued South Sudan.

The Trump administration has been expanding its global gulag for expelled immigrants, exploring deals with more than a quarter of the world’s nations to accept deported persons who are not their citizens. Many of these countries are beset by violence, have been excoriated by the State Department for human rights abuses, or both.

Tricia McLaughlin, a spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security, celebrated the expulsion of the five men, who hail from Cuba, Jamaica, Laos, Vietnam, and Yemen. In the U.S., McLaughlin said, the men were convicted of serious crimes and had been sentenced to significant time in prison.

“This flight took individuals so uniquely barbaric that their home countries refused to take them back,” she wrote on X, calling the men “depraved monsters.”

Neither the Department of Homeland Security, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the State Department, nor the government of Eswatini responded to The Intercept’s requests for comment before publication.

The State Department’s most recent human rights report on Eswatini, a tiny absolute monarchy landlocked by South Africa and Mozambique, paints a damning portrait. It refers to credible reports of arbitrary or unlawful killings, including extrajudicial killings; torture and cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment by the government; serious problems with the independence of the judiciary; and the incarceration of political prisoners.

“Eswatini is an absolute monarchy in a severe economic crisis with a problematic human rights record. On what conditions has it agreed to take these people?”

Anwen Hughes, the senior director of legal strategy for refugee programs at Human Rights First and one of the lawyers representing the men exiled to South Sudan, told The Intercept the latest expulsion exposes the deportees to the same dangers and uncertainty faced by her clients.

“The fact that I genuinely don’t know what these people will face in Eswatini is part of the reason we’re arguing that people being removed to a third country need to be given meaningful notice — so they have some chance to figure out what this is going to mean for them,” Hughes said. “But even with notice, the opacity of the deals the United States is concluding with these third countries remains a problem.”

Last month, the Supreme Court ruled that the Trump administration could resume expelling immigrants to countries other than their own without any chance to object on the grounds that they might be tortured. The court’s recent decisions have been a boon to the administration, which has been employing strong-arm tactics with dozens of smaller, weaker, and economically dependent nations to expand its global gulag.

The Trump administration earlier this year expelled hundreds of African and Asian immigrants to Costa Rica and Panama, including people from Afghanistan, Cameroon, China, India, Iran, Nepal, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Turkey, Uzbekistan, and Vietnam. It began using the notorious Terrorism Confinement Center, or CECOT, in Tecoluca, El Salvador, as a foreign prison to disappear Venezuelan immigrants in March.

Uzbekistan received more than 100 deportees from the United States, including not only Uzbeks but citizens of Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, according to a statement the Department of Homeland Security released in April. Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum said the same month that her government had already accepted roughly 6,000 non-Mexicans from the U.S. for “humanitarian reasons.” Last month, the U.S. struck a deal with Kosovo, Europe’s youngest country, to accept 50 deportees from other nations.

The Intercept previously identified Eswatini, formerly known as Swaziland, as a country with which the Trump administration explored an agreement to accept third-country nationals.

“Eswatini is an absolute monarchy in a severe economic crisis and with a problematic human rights record,” said Hughes. “On what conditions has it agreed to take these people? What if anything has it told the United States will happen to them once there? We don’t know.”

The Trump administration’s third-country deportation deals are being conducted in secret, and neither the State Department nor Immigration and Customs Enforcement will discuss them. With the green light from the Supreme Court, thousands of immigrants are in danger of being disappeared into this network of deportee dumping grounds.

Last week, ICE officials released guidance allowing for rapid deportations if the State Department receives guarantees that the immigrants will not be persecuted in the third country. Even without such assurances, officials can still expel deportees with just 24 hours’ notice or in as little as six hours in “exigent” circumstances.

After being detained for weeks on a U.S. military base in Djibouti, the men deported to South Sudan on July 5 have been held incommunicado. An investigation by The Intercept found that before the men boarded a plane bound for Africa in May, U.S. officials told them that they were being sent on a short trip from Texas to another ICE facility in Louisiana. Many hours later, the plane landed in Djibouti. Members of Congress have since expressed outrage at the deception, and one called on DHS Secretary Kristi Noem to resign.

In a blistering dissent last month, Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor took aim at the court’s complicity in third-country deportations.

“Apparently, the Court finds the idea that thousands will suffer violence in far-flung locales more palatable than the remote possibility that a District Court exceeded its remedial powers when it ordered the Government to provide notice and process to which the plaintiffs are constitutionally and statutorily entitled,” she wrote.