The United States is paying African nations to imprison people it deported who have no connection to those countries, and almost nobody is watching.

"What was done to me was pure evil. What I have lost, I still have not got it back."

— Orville Isaac Etoria, 63-year-old Jamaican man sent to Eswatini by ICE

A military plane carrying five immigrants took off from Djibouti in July 2025 and flew south to Eswatini, a small country on the border between South Africa and Mozambique. The men did not know where they were going until the aircraft was nearly landed. When it touched down, the government of Eswatini put them in maximum security prison at Matsapha Correctional Complex.

They have no ties to Eswatini. They will never see their families again without permission from a foreign prison system. And most of them remain there today, with no way to challenge their detention.

The Trump administration paid $5.1 million for the deal. It was supposed to accept up to 160 people. As of March 2026, nineteen have arrived in three flights. Only two have been repatriated to their home countries. The rest are still locked up.

Eswatini is an absolute monarchy that ranks among the worst human rights abusers on the African continent. It banned political parties for decades. Its police routinely use torture and extrajudicial killings. In 2021, it cracked down on pro-democracy protests with live ammunition.

None of this seemed to matter when the deal was struck. What mattered was that Eswatini wanted money and the United States wanted somewhere to put people it did not want anymore.

The arrangement is part of a broader program that a Senate Foreign Relations Committee investigation called "questionable deals by making direct payments primarily to corrupt and unstable foreign governments with track records of public corruption, human rights abuses and human trafficking." The Democrats who authored the report found the Trump administration paid more than $32 million to five countries to accept approximately 300 deportees.

Translation: the United States is outsourcing its detention problem to the world's least accountable governments.

The conditions at Matsapha Correctional Complex are documented in a complaint filed with the African Commission on Human and People's Rights. After the first five men arrived, they were held in isolation for two weeks without any contact with the outside world. They could not leave their cells except to receive food, which consisted of bland porridge.

Orville Isaac Etoria was among them. A Jamaican national, he had been convicted of a crime years earlier, served his sentence, and rebuilt his life in the United States. ICE had allowed him to check in on an order of supervision since 2021 instead of deporting him. Then Trump returned to office, ICE detained him, and after about a month in custody, he was flown halfway around the world to a country he had never heard of.

"The isolation made every day feel heavier than the last," Etoria wrote in his statement for the legal complaint. "This feeling of distance from my loved ones, halfway across the world, is one I will never forget. I felt lonely and utterly lost."

He was eventually deported to Jamaica in September 2025 and reunited with his family. Other men are still inside.

Beatrice Njeri, a regional litigator for Africa at the Global Strategic Litigation Council, represents several of the detainees. She told Capital & Main that the men have reported losing weight from inadequate food. Meals now consist of rice and thin soup, sometimes with a vegetable. One man, Roberto Mosquera de Peral, went on a hunger strike for thirty days before showing signs of organ failure.

The prison is full of mosquitoes and provides no bed nets. When temperatures drop, detainees do not have enough clothing to stay warm. Medical care is virtually nonexistent. Njeri reported that one man has not received treatment for skin lesions or glaucoma. Another had an infected tooth, and the dentist pulled the wrong one. Neither was given access to medical records.

When a lawyer tried to visit the men, prison officials told her the detainees had refused to see him. The complaint says this was false.

"For me the most important thing for people to know is the flagrant human rights violations that the state is complicit of and is not willing to address," Njeri said. "They are aware that there are human rights violations. The state of Eswatini will not address it, and no one else is intervening in that situation so the human rights violations are continuing unabated."

The legal case with the African Commission is moving forward, though it is unclear how quickly. Even if the commission rules against Eswatini, it has no enforcement power. The same limitation applies to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, whose 2010 finding that U.S. border officials tortured and killed a Mexican immigrant in San Diego was ignored by the Trump administration without consequence.

Njeri noted that the documentation still matters. A formal ruling against these deportation agreements could deter other African countries from entering similar deals with the United States. Some nations are sensitive about their human rights reputations, even if they have few scruples about actually improving conditions.

But there is a deeper problem: no one in power seems interested in holding the United States accountable for what it is doing. The Department of Homeland Security issued a boilerplate response when asked about Eswatini: "The Trump Administration is utilizing all lawful options to carry out the largest deportation operation in history, just as President Trump promised. Anyone who has been deported received full due process."

The phrase "full due process" does not describe people being flown to an African kingdom they have never heard of and locked in solitary confinement without access to a lawyer. It is political theater dressed up as legal justification.

Eswatini is just one piece of a sprawling operation. Journalist Gillian Brockell, who tracks ICE deportation flights, documented agreements with at least eight African countries that have received deportees with no ties to the receiving nation. The United States has also made arrangements in Asia, Europe, and the Western Hemisphere. Last year, Venezuelan men were sent to El Salvador's notorious prison system under similar circumstances.

The scale of the program is still unclear. The Senate investigation found $32 million paid to five countries for approximately 300 deportees as of January 2026, but those numbers almost certainly undercount the total. Many of these deals were struck in secret and their terms remain undisclosed.

Njeri thinks two things have kept the Eswatini story from gaining traction: stigma about reporting on conditions in African countries, and the relatively small number of people involved compared to mass deportations within the United States.

The silence is itself a form of complicity. The Trump administration built this program precisely because it knew most Americans would never think to ask what happens to someone after ICE puts them on a plane.

Orville Etoria eventually made it home. He said the experience changed him in ways he is still trying to understand. The men who remain in Eswatini do not have that luxury. They are being held indefinitely in a maximum security prison halfway across the world, with no timeline for release and no recourse to challenge their detention.

The United States paid $5.1 million for this arrangement. The people inside did not consent to it. And the families waiting for news from them are told there is nothing anyone can do.

The question is not whether this is a human rights violation. The question is why so few people seem to care that it is happening.