The US has struck agreements with five nations under third-country deportation programme
A plane carrying a group of Southeast Asian migrants deported from the United States landed in the African nation of Eswatini early Monday, a lawyer for two of the deportees said.
It is the latest deportation flight to Africa, where the US has struck largely secretive agreements with at least five nations to take migrants under the Trump administration’s third-country deportation programme.
Eswatini is already holding four men from Cuba, Laos, Vietnam and Yemen in a maximum-security prison after they were deported by the US in mid-July.
Lawyers for those men say they’ve been detained without charge and denied access to legal counsel for nearly three months. The US said they are convicted criminals who all had deportation orders. A Jamaican man deported to Eswatini in that group was repatriated last month. Tin Thanh Nguyen, a US-based lawyer, said he represents two Vietnamese nationals who were on the latest deportation flight.
He said they had been detained at the Alexandria Staging Facility immigration detention centre in Louisiana before being put on a flight to Eswatini on Friday night.
He said there were at least nine Southeast Asian nationals on board the flight, but there could be up to 11 deportees in total on board. Nguyen tracked the deportation flight with the help of a rights group and said it stopped in Puerto Rico, Senegal and Angola before arriving in the southern African kingdom of Eswatini. Nguyen also represents two of the men who were previously deported to Eswatini and are still being held there.
The Eswatini Government said in a statement Sunday that it had agreed to receive 11 more deportees from the US “during the month of October” but didn’t say exactly when they would arrive. An Eswatini Government spokesperson and a spokesperson for Eswatini’s immigration department said Monday that they could not immediately confirm the plane had arrived. Eswatini has said it has a deal with the US to take up to 160 deportees.
