U.S. sends 5 men to Eswatini in third-country deportation, DHS says

The Department of Homeland Security announced Tuesday that it has sent five men to Eswatini in what it called a “third-country” deportation, meaning the individuals are not from the small southern African nation.

DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin said on social media that the flight to Eswatini had landed, marking the latest third-country deportation announced by the Trump administration, which has also sent migrants to El Salvador, South Sudan and elsewhere. In a series of posts, McLaughlin said the deportees – who are from Vietnam, Jamaica, Laos, Cuba and Yemen – have serious criminal convictions including child rape and murder and that their home countries would not receive them.

The approach is part of President Donald Trump’s wider anti-immigration push, which has also involved immigration raids in cities, as his administration tries to fulfill his campaign promise of conducting mass deportations. The United States has rarely sent immigrants to third countries in the past, though it has used detention facilities outside its borders such as the camp at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

Last month, the Supreme Court ruled that the administration could deport people to places where they are not citizens, while litigation on the issue continues in lower courts. The court’s ruling overturned an order issued by a federal judge in Massachusetts that migrants must have a “meaningful opportunity” to contest their removal.

Todd M. Lyon, the acting director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, wrote in a memo to the ICE workforce last Wednesday that the Supreme Court had cleared the way for officers to “immediately” start sending immigrants to “alternative” countries, the Washington Post reported.

The memo also said that if officials have given assurances that deportees will be safe from persecution or torture, federal immigration officers may deport them to third nations with no advance notice. In “exigent” circumstances, immigrants can be deported to third countries without such assurances, with just six hours’ notice, it said.

In May, the U.S. attempted to send eight men to South Sudan, seven of whom are not citizens of the country, but they were held in Djibouti for weeks until the Supreme Court decision and arrived in South Sudan earlier this month. It has also sent dozens of Venezuelan migrants to a megaprison in El Salvador and deported hundreds of people from various nations to Costa Rica and Panama.

Renamed from Swaziland in 2018, Eswatini is a lower-middle-income nation of roughly 1.1 million people. It is slightly smaller than New Jersey in land area and borders South Africa and Mozambique. It was not immediately clear when or on what grounds the United States made an agreement with Eswatini to send migrants there.

In a statement posted to X, Eswatini’s government said the arrival of the deportees from the U.S. “poses no security threat to the Nation” and that the “five prisoners are in the country and are housed in Correctional facilities within isolated units, “where similar offenders are kept.”

Acting government spokesperson Thabile Mdluli said in a statement that the deportees would eventually be repatriated to their respective countries.

Mdluli wrote that Eswatini’s receipt of the deportees is “the result of months of robust high-level engagements between the U.S. Government & Eswatini,” adding that the two governments will collaborate with the International Organization for Migration to facilitate moving the men to their countries of origin.

“The Kingdom of Eswatini and the United States of America have enjoyed fruitful bilateral relations spanning over five decades,” Mdluli said.

The Department of Homeland Security, the Eswatini Foreign Ministry and the Eswatini Embassy in Washington did not immediately respond to requests for comment Tuesday night.

Trump’s third-country deportations have sparked alarm among human rights experts and advocates, who say such a practice does not give migrants a chance to plead their cases and may violate international law.

In a statement about the Supreme Court ruling, a group of U.N. human rights experts said international law “is clear that no one shall be sent anywhere where there are substantial grounds for believing that the person would be in danger of being subjected to serious human rights violations.”

The experts expressed “deep worry” about the fate of migrants sent to South Sudan, which is under a State Department-issued “do not travel” advisory because of crime, kidnapping and armed conflict.

Eswatini is not under as severe of an advisory, though there have been reports of detainees subjected to torture and other human rights concerns there, according to Amnesty International.

The U.S. is one of a handful of nations that have sent migrants to third countries. Australia has had agreements with third countries for more than a decade to process asylum seekers who arrive by boat. Israel sent thousands of Eritrean and Sudanese asylum seekers to Rwanda between 2013 and 2018, when the Israeli Supreme Court suspended the practice, the BBC reported.