US to deport 11 more people to Eswatini in deal criticised by lawyers and NGOs

Eswatini will receive 11 people deported by the US later this month, the government has said, the second group of third-country deportees to be sent to the southern African kingdom by the Trump administration in what lawyers and NGOs have described as violations of the migrants’ human rights.

A statement by the Eswatini government posted on social media said: “The individuals will be kept in a secured area separate from the public, while arrangements are made for their return to their countries of origin.”

It added that it would work with the International Organization for Migration on the returns. The statement did not specify where the deportees were originally from, when they would arrive in Eswatini and the reasons given by the US for deporting them. Eswatini’s acting government spokesperson, Thabile Mdluli, said she would respond later to a list of questions.

Donald Trump’s administration is attempting to ramp up deportations from the US. This has included striking deals with third countries including El Salvador, Rwanda, Uganda and South Sudan to remove dozens of migrants who have no connections to where they are being sent and are not given any opportunity to challenge their removals.

At least eight west African men were deported to their home countries via Ghana in September, despite fearing they would be subject to “torture, persecution or inhumane treatment”.

Five men from Cambodia, Cuba, Jamaica, Vietnam and Yemen were deported in July by the US to Eswatini, a country of 1.2 million people landlocked by South Africa and Mozambique, where they were put in a maximum security prison.

Orville Etoria, who served 24 years for murder in the US before being released there in 2021, was returned to Jamaica on 21 September. The US had claimed that the five men were so “uniquely barbaric” that their home countries wouldn’t take them back, something that Jamaica’s government denied in the case of Etoria.

Eswatini’s government, which is appointed by Africa’s last absolute monarch, King Mswati III, said two of the other five men “are expected to be repatriated soon”.

Meanwhile, a group of Eswatini NGOs has challenged the deportation deal. However, the case has been delayed twice – once when the attorney general didn’t come to court and then again when the judge didn’t show up. The hearing is now due on Tuesday 7 October.

US lawyers for the men have said they have been denied the opportunity to have private calls with their clients. On 3 October, Eswatini’s high court granted a local lawyer access to the men. The judgment was stayed, as the government immediately appealed to the supreme court, arguing that, “the respondent failed to establish a legally recognised connection with the foreign nationals”.

“The US government is basically paying ‘third countries’ to be the henchmen in their deliberate cruelty toward immigrants,” Alma David, the US attorney for Roberto Mosquera del Peral from Cuba and Kassim Wasil from Yemen, both of whom are still imprisoned in Eswatini, said in a statement responding to Etoria’s release in September.