Trump administration sends deportees to tiny African nation Eswatini

USA Today

16-07-2025

The five men hail from Yemen, Laos, Vietnam, Cuba and Jamaica and have long criminal records.
The Trump administration said it has deported a group of immigrant men from different countries to the tiny African nation of Eswatini.
The five men have long criminal records involving rape, homicide, drugs and assault according to Department of Homeland Security Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin.
"This flight took individuals so uniquely barbaric that their home countries refused to take them back," she said in a post on the social media site X on July 16.
The men are originally from Yemen, Vietnam, Laos, Jamaica and Cuba. McLaughlin didn't say whether the men had completed their sentences in the United States before their removal.
Eswatini, formerly Swaziland, is a landlocked country bordering Mozambique and South Africa. The nation is smaller than Maryland, suffers from severe poverty, high unemployment and the world's highest rate of HIV and AIDS, according to the CIA World Factbook.
The United States has long sought to deport immigrants to third countries when their own home nation is recalcitrant or won't accept their own deportees. Countries including Vietnam, Cuba, Haiti, Venezuela and China have often refused to take their citizens back.
The Trump administration is attempting to scale up third-country deportations after the Supreme Court in June suspended a lower court ruling requiring the administration give deportees due process and an opportunity to claim fear of persecution before they're sent to a country that isn't their own.
In a July 8 memo following the SCOTUS decision, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Acting Director Todd Lyons said if the United States "has received diplomatic assurances" that deportees "will not be persecuted or tortured," they can be shipped there without further proceedings.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio has negotiated with countries around the world to accept foreign nationals, including with war-torn South Sudan and El Salvador, which has locked up hundreds of deportees in a notorious mega-prison. Early in the administration, ICE sent some 300 immigrants to Panama; many were from Asia and the Middle East and spoke no Spanish.
Immigrant advocates say deporting people to a country that isn't their own where they don't speak the language is a violation of human rights. The administration has argued that immigrants who commit seious crimes should be removed without recourse.
"These depraved monsters have been terrorizing American communities but thanks to @POTUS Trump (and) @Sec_Noem they are off of American soil," McLaughlin said in her post.