MBABANE – The man described in The New York Times on Wednesday had never heard of Eswatini before the United States sent him there. He does not speak Swazi or Zulu, the country’s two national languages. He has no relatives in this landlocked kingdom of 1.2 million people tucked between South Africa and Mozambique. He has no lawyer in a court system that was not built to process his situation. A Times journalist visited the prison where he is being held and interviewed him. He is one of a group of deportees the Trump administration has transferred to the country under an agreement with the Swazi government that the Department of Homeland Security has not publicly disclosed.
The arrangement is called a third-country deportation agreement. Under its logic, the United States is entitled to remove a person not to their home country but to any country willing to accept them, provided the home country refuses or is unavailable. The agreement addresses none of what follows: the legal situation, the practical reality, the human experience of arriving somewhere no one expected. The man in the Eswatini prison has been told nothing definitive about when he might leave. He does not know whether the United States, which deported him, can retrieve him. He does not know whether Eswatini, which agreed to hold him, has any process to release him. He has no country actively advocating for him. He exists in a space the administration has created deliberately and defined loosely: removed from American jurisdiction, and nowhere in particular else.
King Mswati III has governed Eswatini as an absolute monarchy since 1986. The country banned political parties in 1973, when it was still called Swaziland, and the ban has never been lifted. Opposition parties remain illegal. Press freedom is minimal. The national economy revolves around subsistence agriculture and sugar exports, with a GDP per capita of roughly $4,600 a year. Eswatini has one of the highest HIV prevalence rates in the world. It is not a country typically associated with American foreign policy, and its prison system was not designed to receive people who were deported there involuntarily and do not speak either of its languages.
What the United States offered Eswatini in exchange for the agreement has not been disclosed. The White House has not addressed the terms publicly. DHS, in response to the Times inquiry, did not explain how many individuals have been transferred, what their legal status is under Swazi law, or whether they retain any appeal rights under the arrangement. The government of Eswatini did not respond to questions. The existence of the program became publicly known only when the Times journalist entered the prison and spoke directly with the people inside it, reporting that the administration had not anticipated or authorized.
The third-country deportation model was first widely reported during Trump’s arrangement with El Salvador, under which the administration transferred migrants to the CECOT maximum-security prison in 2025. El Salvador’s government received economic and diplomatic support in exchange. CECOT became a symbol: a destination so severe that immigration attorneys used photographs of the facility as evidence of what their clients feared. Eswatini is not CECOT. But it is, in the relevant legal sense, its equivalent: a country to which the United States has exported a person it cannot deport conventionally, in circumstances those people had no realistic opportunity to contest before they arrived.
The broader enforcement picture provides context for what Eswatini represents at its outer edge. The State Department has revoked more than 175,000 visas since January 2025, a figure released without any breakdown by nationality or visa category. At airports, a TSA-ICE memorandum formalized in May 2025 has required screening agents to flag non-citizens with civil immigration violations to enforcement officers, a policy that has ensnared a Johns Hopkins researcher detained at Baltimore airport whose work authorization ran through 2029. Gabar Choli, a Kurdish filmmaker recognized as a UN refugee, was force-fed for eight months by ICE under a court order issued without allowing him to speak before being deported. These cases are not aberrations. They are the enforcement mechanism in operation.
The individual inside the Eswatini prison is what the system produces at the far end of that mechanism, when the home country refuses to accept a deportee and the administration needs somewhere to send them. Immigration attorneys who have reviewed third-country agreements say the common thread is the absence of any meaningful legal pathway for the person once they arrive. They cannot easily access legal aid. They cannot petition American courts from abroad. They cannot, in many cases, seek asylum in the receiving country, which has agreed to hold them but not to grant them any particular immigration status.
A congressional response emerged on Wednesday, with Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee calling for a classified briefing on the scope of the Eswatini program, the number of individuals transferred, and the legal basis the administration used to authorize the transfers. They noted that no legislation specifically authorizes the deportation of individuals to countries with which they have no prior connection. The administration has framed third-country agreements as an extension of existing executive deportation authority. Critics say that authority does not extend to removing someone to effective statelessness in a country that will not recognize their legal existence.
The Times’s reporting did not name the man in the Eswatini prison. His case is documented but not identified, which itself reflects the conditions of confinement: a person in a situation the administration would prefer to remain invisible, in a country with limited press freedom, whose story reached the public only because a journalist was willing to travel there and the prison allowed entry that day. Whether future access will be granted, whether the administration will respond to the attention by altering the program or accelerating it, and how many others are currently held in Eswatini or under similar arrangements elsewhere remain unanswered. The man is where he is. The country that sent him there has not said when, or whether, that changes.
