Lawyers for five men deported by the US to Eswatini, formerly Swaziland, said they are being denied proper access to their clients, who they said are being imprisoned illegally.
The men from Vietnam, Jamaica, Laos, Yemen and Cuba have criminal convictions, but had all served their sentences and been released in the US, their lawyers said. The US deported them to the small southern African country without warning in July, claiming they were “depraved monsters”.
The US has sent migrants to several third countries, as Donald Trump’s administration ramps up deportations. Eight men were sent to South Sudan in July, Rwanda accepted seven migrants last week and Uganda has agreed to take in asylum seekers. The US also deported 252 Venezuelans, first sending them to a notorious prison in El Salvador for four months.
The lawyers said they have been unable to have private conversations with their clients, who are allowed one short video call a week in the presence of prison staff. A local lawyer representing the five men has been prevented from visiting them in the maximum security Matsapha correctional centre.
The Emaswati lawyer filed a case demanding access to the men, but a hearing scheduled for Monday was postponed when the judge did not show up, said Alma David, who is representing the Yemeni and Cuban men.
When the men, who had all been in the US since they were children, were first deported, US assistant homeland security secretary Tricia McLaughlin claimed they were “so uniquely barbaric that their home countries refused to take them back.”
In response, Jamaica’s foreign minister, Kamina Smith, said: “The government has not refused the return of any of our nationals to Jamaica,” and would work to return any deportees to the country. She later said that diplomats visited Orville Etoria in prison in Eswatini on 21 August and found him “in good spirits”.
Etoria, 62, came to the US legally in 1976, aged 12, said his lawyer Mia Unger, of the Legal Aid Society. He was convicted of murder and sentenced to 25 years in prison in 1997. He obtained an undergraduate degree in prison, was released on parole in 2021 and was working in a men’s shelter and studying for a master’s degree in divinity when he was deported.
He had been reporting to Immigration and Customs Enforcement as required and obtained a Jamaican passport earlier this year at their request. His relatives told Unger he had first been put on a plane to Jamaica and then removed, she said, adding that his being sent to Eswatini “makes no sense”.
Relatives of the four other men did not want their identities disclosed, their lawyers said. The Yemeni man, who served 22 years in prison for murder and was released in 2020, had been living in Michigan and is 70, his lawyer David said. The Cuban man, also convicted of murder, is in his mid-50s and had been working for a plumbing company in Florida. He was released from prison in 2012, David said.
She spoke to both men while all five deportees were with guards and the prison chief, who said that only the US embassy in Eswatini could grant access to the men. “Since when does the US embassy have jurisdiction over Eswatini’s national prisons?” she said.
Tin Thanh Nguyen, representing the Vietnamese and Laotian deportees, said the men were aged 34 and 45 and released in 2015 and 2023 respectively. The Laotian man’s relatives reported he was starting to show signs of depression.
“The United States is outsourcing their detention … to purge the United States of immigrants and refugees and to make a spectacle of deportations,” Nguyen said.
Last month, a group of Eswatini NGOs challenged the country’s acceptance of the deportees on constitutional grounds, arguing that parliament had not been consulted and that the men’s human rights were being violated.
An Eswatini government spokesperson said they would not be responding while court cases were under way.
Ice and the Department of Homeland Security did not respond to a request for comment.
