On July 16, the US Department of Homeland Security’s assistant secretary for public affairs, Tricia McLaughlin, announced that a third-country deportation flight had landed in Eswatini, a small kingdom in southern Africa.
The flight contained five men, allegedly from Vietnam, Jamaica, Laos, Cuba, and Yemen, who she labeled as “barbaric” and “depraved monsters.” McLaughlin posted their photos and an unverified list of convictions and sentences.
On the same day, Eswatini’s government spokesperson Thabile Mdluli reassured the public that the deportees were safely detained in isolated prison units while they awaited repatriation. A few days later, Prime Minister Russell Mmiso Dlamini added that the government was open to receiving more deportees.
Local media amplified anxieties about those “foreign criminals,” with no mention of the need to verify the details provided by the officials. McLaughlin’s ploy worked: the public debate focused on fear rather than rights.
According to prominent Swati magazine the Nation, Swati correctional services cynically appealed to prisoners’ privacy rights and refused to release names, further undermining efforts to shed light on what happened. One of them has been identified by the New York Times: Orville Etoria, sixty-two, a Jamaican national, had been out of prison since 2021, and was allowed to stay in the United States as long as he showed up for annual check-ins with immigration.
The deportees’ lawyer in Eswatini, Sibusiso Nhlabatsi, told me that as of September 3, he has still been denied access…
Auteur: Vito Laterza
