MANZINI – Five immigrants deported by the United States to Eswatini in a secret deal last month had served their criminal sentences before they were sent to be held in a prison in the African country, a lawyer working on their cases said Friday.
The Eswatini lawyer also said the men from Cuba, Jamaica, Laos, Yemen and Vietnam sent to southern Africa under President Donald Trump’s third-country deportation program have been denied access to legal representation while being held in Eswatini’s main maximum-security prison.
The lawyer, Sibusiso Nhlabatsi, said he hasn’t been allowed to see the men and that he filed court papers Thursday against the head of Eswatini’s correctional services department and the country’s attorney general, demanding access to them.
He said he is representing them on behalf of lawyers in the U.S. and was prevented from seeing them by Eswatini prison officials on July 25. It’s unlawful for the men, who have been in Eswatini for around two weeks, to be denied access to a lawyer, he added.
The Eswatini government has said the men will be held in solitary confinement until they can be deported to their home countries, which could take up to a year.
“They have served their sentences,” Nhlabatsi told The Associated Press. “If a person has committed a crime and they have served a sentence, why are you then keeping them in a prison?”
Nhlabatsi said the men have not been able to communicate with their families or receive visitors since arriving in Eswatini, although prison officials said they were in the process of setting up devices to allow them to speak with their families.
He alleged their ongoing detention could have legal implications for Eswatini, a small country bordering South Africa and one of the world’s last absolute monarchies, ruled by a king accused of cracking down on dissent.
The Trump administration has come under scrutiny for its choice of African countries to strike deportation deals with. It deported eight immigrants described as violent criminals to South Sudan in early July in an operation that was halted by a legal challenge in the U.S. The eight were held for weeks in a converted shipping container at an American military base in nearby Djibouti while the case was decided. A Supreme Court ruling eventually cleared the way for them to be sent to South Sudan.
Both South Sudan, which is in danger of tipping into civil war, and Eswatini have poor rights records and governments accused of being repressive. Critics say the deportees, who the administration says were in the U.S. illegally, will likely be denied due process in those countries.
The five sent to Eswatini were also described by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security as serious criminals. Their convictions included murder and child rape, the department said in social media posts, calling them “uniquely barbaric.”
The department, which did not say if they had completed their sentences, did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Friday.
An Eswatini government spokesman also declined to comment on Nhlabatsi’s allegations, saying it was now a matter for the courts.
Nhlabatsi said the deportees are being held at the Matsapha Correctional Complex near the administrative capital, Mbabane, the same prison said to hold pro-democracy activists on trumped up charges. The government has declined to say where the five men are being held, citing security concerns.
Eswatini’s statement about the five men ultimately being deported to their home countries appears to contradict claims by the U.S. that their home countries refused to take the men back.
Activists in Eswatini have demanded that the details of the agreement with the U.S. be made public but the government has said they are “classified.” South Sudan has also declined to give details of its agreement to take deportees from the U.S.
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