\n<\/p>\n
The United States<\/span> expelled five men to the Southern African country of Eswatini on Tuesday as part of its ongoing efforts to exile immigrants to so-called \u201cthird countries.\u201d The move closely followed the United States\u2019\u00a0deportation of eight men<\/a> \u2014 seven with no connection to the country \u2014 to violence-plagued South Sudan.<\/p>\n The Trump administration has been expanding its\u00a0global gulag for expelled immigrants<\/a>, exploring deals with more than a quarter of the world\u2019s nations to accept deported persons who are not their citizens. Many of these countries are beset by violence, have been excoriated by the State Department for human rights abuses, or both.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n Tricia McLaughlin, a spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security, celebrated the expulsion of the five men, who hail from Cuba, Jamaica, Laos, Vietnam, and Yemen. In the U.S., McLaughlin said, the men were convicted of serious crimes and had been sentenced to\u00a0significant time in prison.<\/p>\n \u201cThis flight took individuals so uniquely barbaric that their home countries refused to take them back,\u201d she\u00a0wrote on X<\/a>, calling the men \u201cdepraved monsters.\u201d<\/p>\n Neither the Department of Homeland Security, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the State Department, nor the government of Eswatini responded to The Intercept\u2019s requests for comment before publication.\u00a0<\/p>\n The State Department\u2019s most recent\u00a0human rights report<\/a>\u00a0on Eswatini, a tiny absolute monarchy landlocked by South Africa and Mozambique, paints a damning portrait. It refers to credible reports of arbitrary or unlawful killings, including extrajudicial killings; torture and cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment by the government; serious problems with the independence of the judiciary; and the incarceration of political prisoners.<\/p>\n \u201cEswatini is an absolute monarchy in a severe economic crisis with a problematic human rights record. On what conditions has it agreed to take these people?\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/figure>\n Anwen Hughes, the senior director of legal strategy for refugee programs at Human Rights First and one of the lawyers representing the men exiled to South Sudan, told The Intercept the latest expulsion exposes the deportees to the same dangers and uncertainty faced by\u00a0her clients.<\/p>\n \u201cThe fact that I genuinely don\u2019t know what these people will face in Eswatini is part of the reason we\u2019re arguing that people being removed to a third country need to be given meaningful notice \u2014 so they have some chance to figure out what this is going to mean for them,\u201d Hughes said. \u201cBut even with notice, the opacity of the deals the United States is concluding with these third countries remains a problem.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n Last month, the Supreme Court\u00a0ruled that the Trump administration could resume\u00a0expelling immigrants<\/a>\u00a0to countries other than their own without any chance to object on the grounds that they might be tortured. The court\u2019s recent decisions have been a boon to the administration, which has been\u00a0employing strong-arm tactics with dozens of smaller, weaker, and economically dependent nations to expand its\u00a0global gulag<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n The Trump administration earlier this year\u00a0expelled<\/a>\u00a0hundreds of African and Asian immigrants to\u00a0Costa Rica<\/a>\u00a0and Panama,\u00a0including people<\/a>\u00a0from Afghanistan, Cameroon, China, India, Iran, Nepal, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Turkey, Uzbekistan, and Vietnam. It began using the notorious\u00a0Terrorism Confinement Center<\/a>, or CECOT,\u00a0in Tecoluca,\u00a0El Salvador<\/a>, as a foreign prison to disappear Venezuelan immigrants in March.\u00a0<\/p>\n Uzbekistan received more than 100 deportees from the United States, including not only Uzbeks but citizens of Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, according to a\u00a0statement<\/a> the Department of Homeland Security released in April. Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum\u00a0said the same month that her government had already accepted\u00a0roughly 6,000 non-Mexicans<\/a>\u00a0from the U.S. for \u201chumanitarian reasons.\u201d Last month, the U.S. struck a deal with\u00a0Kosovo<\/a>, Europe\u2019s youngest country, to accept 50 deportees from other nations.\u00a0<\/p>\n The Intercept\u00a0previously identified<\/a>\u00a0Eswatini, formerly known as Swaziland, as a country with which the Trump administration\u00a0explored an agreement<\/a>\u00a0to accept third-country nationals.<\/p>\n \u201cEswatini is an absolute monarchy in a severe economic crisis and with a problematic human rights record,\u201d said Hughes. \u201cOn what conditions has it agreed to take these people?\u00a0What if anything has it told the United States will happen to them once there? We don\u2019t know.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/p>\n\n