U.S extends deportations to Eswatini as rights concerns grow

A U.S deportation flight carrying Southeast Asian migrants landed in Eswatini on the 6th of October, underscoring Washington’s widening use of third-country deals to transfer migrants far from American jurisdiction, reported by Africa News via the Associated Press.

The flight is part of a broader deportation programme that began under Donald Trump and has quietly persisted, reaching deep into Africa.

Lawyer Tin Thanh Nguyen, who represents two Vietnamese nationals on the flight, said at least nine Southeast Asian deportees were sent from Louisiana’s Alexandria Staging Facility on October 3rd. The plane stopped in Puerto Rico, Senegal, and Angola before arriving in Eswatini, a small, landlocked monarchy bordered by South Africa and Mozambique.

Eswatini’s government confirmed it would receive eleven deportees this month under a reported $5.1 million arrangement that could see up to 160 people resettled, or detained, there. Four men from Cuba, Laos, Vietnam, and Yemen, previously deported in July, remain held in a maximum-security prison without charge or access to counsel.

The deal mirrors earlier Trump-era deportations to El Salvador and Guatemala, where asylum seekers returned under “safe third-country” frameworks often faced persecution or destitution. Human-rights observers warn that the Eswatini transfers repeat the same pattern of “deportation by outsourcing,” shifting responsibility to countries with fragile legal systems.

A similar arrangement exists between the United States and Rwanda, where up to 250 migrants may soon be sent under a “controversial” scheme. In another instance of Trump’s deportations to Africa, a Jamaican man was deported to Eswatini earlier this year, detained for weeks, then quietly repatriated. Rwanda and Eswatini, both criticised for repressive governance, have become the new testing grounds for Washington’s experiment in extraterritorial migration control.

Libya has warned against accepting such transfers, with Tripoli threatening political retaliation if the U.S proceeds with its proposed deportation plan.

For Washington, these deals provide political distance and plausible deniability. For deportees, they create new geographies of limbo, where human rights fall between the cracks created by America’s outsourced justice system. The map of Trump’s deportation efforts now extends not only southward into Latin America but across the Atlantic into Africa.

In this shadow network of transfers and payments, both human rights and America’s responsibility are lost in the murky waters of secret deals and unaccountable legal structures. What began as a domestic border control strategy has become a global system of exile, where legality is blurred and accountability drifts further from view.

Africa News via AP, Maghrebi