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.

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. (Jamaica Gleaner)