Plane carrying deportees from the US arrives in Eswatini

A plane carrying a group of Southeast Asian migrants deported from the United States landed in the African nation of Eswatini early Monday, a lawyer for two of the deportees told The Associated Press.

It is the latest deportation flight to Africa, where the U.S. has struck largely secretive agreements with at least five nations to take migrants under the Trump administration’s third-country deportation program.

Eswatini is already holding four men from Cuba, Laos, Vietnam and Yemen in a maximum-security prison after they were deported by the U.S. in mid-July. Lawyers for those men say they’ve been detained without charge and denied access to legal counsel for nearly three months.

The U.S. said they are convicted criminals who all had deportation orders. A Jamaican man deported to Eswatini in that group was repatriated last month.

Tin Thanh Nguyen, a U.S.-based lawyer, said he represents two Vietnamese nationals who were on the latest deportation flight. He said they had been detained at the Alexandria Staging Facility immigration detention center in Louisiana before being put on a flight to Eswatini on Friday night. He said there were at least nine Southeast Asian nationals on board the flight, but there could be up to 11 deportees in total on board.

Nguyen tracked the deportation flight with the help of a rights group and said it stopped in Puerto Rico, Senegal and Angola before arriving in the southern African kingdom of Eswatini. Nguyen also represents two of the men who were previously deported to Eswatini and are still being held there.

The Eswatini government said in a statement Sunday that it had agreed to receive 11 more deportees from the U.S. “during the month of October” but didn’t say exactly when they would arrive. An Eswatini government spokesperson and a spokesperson for Eswatini’s immigration department said Monday that they could not immediately confirm the plane had arrived.

Eswatini has said it has a deal with the U.S. to take up to 160 deportees. International rights group Human Rights Watch has said it has seen documents that show the U.S. will pay Eswatini $5.1 million as part of the agreement. The U.S. has said it wants to deport Kilmar Abrego Garcia to Eswatini, a small kingdom bordering South Africa where the king holds absolute power and has been accused of clamping down on pro-democracy movements.

The U.S. has previously sent more than 30 deportees to African countries since July, including eight to South Sudan, seven to Rwanda and a group of 14 West African migrants to Ghana. Rights groups have criticized the program for sending deportees to countries where they will likely be denied due process.

Six deportees are still being detained in an unspecified facility in South Sudan, while Rwanda hasn’t said where it is holding its deportees. Eleven of the deportees sent to Ghana are suing the government there for holding them in what they described as terrible conditions at a military camp on the outskirts of the capital, Accra.