The Trump administration sent five migrants from Vietnam, Jamaica, Laos, Yemen and Cuba to a small African nation on Tuesday, resuming the practice of so-called third-country deportations after the Supreme Court cleared the practice earlier this month, Department of Homeland Security officials said Tuesday.
The deportations were announced on social media by the agency on Tuesday evening.
“NEW: a safe third country deportation flight to Eswatini in Southern Africa has landed — This flight took individuals so uniquely barbaric that their home countries refused to take them back,” wrote Tricia McLaughlin, a D.H.S. spokeswoman. She added that the men had been convicted of crimes including murder, assault and robbery.
Eswatini, formerly known as Swaziland, is a nation of about 6,700 square miles surrounded on three sides by South Africa. The New York Times previously reported negotiations with Eswatini in an investigation detailing how the Trump administration had been looking to get more than 50 countries to take migrants from other places.
Since the early days of the Trump administration, homeland security officials have sent migrants to countries they are not from, including sending hundreds of migrants from countries including China, Iran and Pakistan to Panama and Costa Rica in February.
Later, the administration sent Venezuelan immigrants to El Salvador, and earlier this month, after weeks of legal delays, it sent eight migrants from several countries to South Sudan.
The migrants had spent six weeks in Djibouti, after a federal judge ruled that the administration needed to allow more time for migrants to express fear of torture in a third country and to appeal any potential denial of their claims. That ruling was put on pause by the Supreme Court.
Last week, Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials released internal guidance allowing for such deportations to occur quickly if the State Department received assurances that the migrants would not be persecuted in the third country. Even without such assurances, officials could still deport migrants in as little as six hours in certain circumstances.
The Trump administration has been increasingly encouraging immigrants to self-deport, emphasizing the potential consequences for those who remain in the United States without authorization, including detention at a center in Florida known as “Alligator Alcatraz.”
Justice Sonia Sotomayor pushed back against the practice of third-country deportations in her dissent from the Supreme Court ruling.
“What the government wants to do, concretely, is send the eight noncitizens it illegally removed from the United States from Djibouti to South Sudan, where they will be turned over to the local authorities without regard for the likelihood that they will face torture or death,” she wrote.
Hamed Aleaziz covers the Department of Homeland Security and immigration policy for The Times.
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