Jamaican among deportees held in Eswatini prison without charge

CAPE TOWN, South Africa (AP) — Three men, among them Jamaican national Orville Etoria, have been locked away in a maximum-security prison in Eswatini for seven weeks without charge or access to lawyers, despite already completing their criminal sentences in the United States, their attorneys revealed Tuesday.

The New York-based Legal Aid Society said it was representing Etoria and that he had been “inexplicably” sent to Eswatini when his home country was willing to accept him back.

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.

The deportations are part of the Trump administration’s largely secretive third-country program to crack down on immigration.

The 62-year-old Etoria was convicted of a serious crime in the US in 1997 and was released from prison on parole in 2021, the Legal Aid Society said in a statement. The US Department of Homeland Security said in a post on X that Etoria had been convicted of murder.

The Legal Aid Society said the US government had falsely claimed that Jamaica refused to accept him back.

Homeland Security, when announcing the deportation of a total of five men to Eswatini in mid-July, claimed they were “so uniquely barbaric that their home countries refused to take them back.”

Homeland Security said at the time the men were dangerous criminals from Jamaica, Cuba, Laos, Vietnam and Yemen but didn’t identify them by name.

A lawyer representing the two other men, from Laos and Vietnam, said Tuesday his clients also served their criminal sentences in the US and had “been released into the community.”

“Then, without warning and explanation from either the US or Eswatini governments, they were arbitrarily arrested and sent to a country to which they have never ever been,” the lawyer, Tin Thanh Nguyen, said in a statement.

He said the US government was “orchestrating secretive third-country transfers with no meaningful legal process, resulting in indefinite detention.”

Homeland security said those two men had been convicted of charges including child rape and second-degree murder.

A third lawyer, Alma David, said she represented two men from Yemen and Cuba who are also held in Eswatini and were denied access to lawyers.

She said she had been told by the head of the Eswatini prison that only the US Embassy could grant access to the men.

“Since when does the US Embassy have jurisdiction over Eswatini’s national prisons?” she said in a statement, adding the men weren’t told a reason for their detention, and no lawyer has been permitted to visit them.”

David said all five were being held in Eswatini’s main maximum-security prison indefinitely at US taxpayers’ expense.

Since July, the Trump administration has expanded its third-country deportation program and sent migrants to at least three African nations: South Sudan, Eswatini and Rwanda, and has a deal in principle with a fourth African country, Uganda.

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