Lawyers for men deported to African prison accuse Trump of denying them due process

CAPE TOWN, (AP):

Five men deported by the United States to Eswatini in July have been held in a maximum-security prison in the African nation for seven weeks without charge or explanation and with no access to legal counsel, their lawyers said on Tuesday.

They accused the Trump administration’s third-country deportation programme of denying their clients due process.

The New York-based Legal Aid Society said that it was representing one of the men, Jamaican national Orville Etoria, and that he had been “inexplicably and illegally” sent to Eswatini when his home country was willing to accept him back.

That contradicted the US Department of Homeland Security, which said when it deported the five men with criminal records, they were being sent to Eswatini because their home countries refused to take them. Jamaica’s foreign minister has also said that the Caribbean country didn’t refuse to take back deportees.

Etoria was the first of at least 20 deportees sent by the US to various African nations in the last two months to be identified publicly.

EXPANDING DEPORTATION PROGRAMME

The deportations are part of the Trump administration’s expanding third-country programme to send migrants to countries in Africa, which they have no ties with, to get them off US soil.

Since July, the US has deported migrants to South Sudan, Eswatini and Rwanda, while a fourth African nation, Uganda, says it has agreed to a deal in principle with the US to accept deportees.

Washington has said it wants to deport Kilmar Abrego Garcia, whose case has been a flashpoint over US President Donald Trump’s hard-line immigration policies, to Uganda after he was wrongly deported to his native El Salvador in March.

Etoria served a 25-year prison sentence and was granted parole in 2021, the Legal Aid Society said, but was now being held in Eswatini’s main maximum-security prison for an undetermined period of time despite completing that sentence.

The US Homeland Security Department said that he was convicted of murder. The agency posted on X, in reference to a New York Times report on Estoria, saying that it “will continue enforcing the law at full speed – without apology”.

It didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment from The Associated Press.

The Legal Aid Society said that an Eswatini lawyer, acting on behalf of all five men being held in prison there, has been repeatedly denied access to them by prison officials since they arrived in the tiny southern African nation bordering South Africa in mid-July.

The other four men are citizens of Cuba, Laos, Vietnam and Yemen.