Nicholas Casey reports:

As he stepped out of the American military cargo plane, Roberto Mosquera still couldn’t tell where he was or why he had been taken there. When federal immigration agents forced him onto a secret flight 30 hours earlier, it was a hot July afternoon in Texas. Now, after traveling thousands of miles, he felt a cold winter’s morning in the air.

He was in the kingdom of Eswatini, a tiny, landlocked country in southern Africa that until recently was called Swaziland. Mosquera had never heard of it. He hadn’t set foot outside the United States since he was 12, when he arrived on a fishing boat as part of the 1980 Mariel boatlift from Cuba with his mother, a sister and her infant daughter. As a teenager, he joined a Miami gang, and in his 20s, he took a plea deal after being charged with attempted murder for shooting a rival gangster in the leg. That would have been grounds to deport him had he been from almost any other country. But Cuba wasn’t cooperating with the United States on deportations, so Mosquera was allowed to stay, provided he checked in with the authorities each year. He built a new life for himself, becoming a specialty plumber and a born-again Christian; he married and had four daughters.

Then one day in June of last year, Mosquera, who is 59, went to renew his work permit at an immigration office. The appointment was usually short; Mosquera had borrowed the company truck so that he could head to a job when he was done. But it didn’t turn out that way. An immigration official told him that his time in America was up. With President Trump now back in office, Mosquera knew these were not empty words. But if the United States couldn’t send him to Cuba, where would he go?

He was taken to the Krome Detention Center, a notorious holding facility for deportees in Miami, then to another in El Paso, Texas, where he was confined without being able to contact lawyers for nearly two weeks. Soon agents told him to get ready to move again. Mosquera was surprised when he was loaded onto a small luxury jet — it seemed to him more like something the singer Marc Anthony would rent, he told me. Along with him were four other detainees, from, as he would later learn, Jamaica, Laos, Yemen and Vietnam. They were transferred to a military cargo plane at a U.S. air base in the East African nation Djibouti, and more than a day later, the five men landed in Eswatini.

Before they could make sense of the situation, they were forced inside a metal cage that was fitted onto a transport truck and driven to the Matsapha Correctional Complex, Eswatini’s maximum-security prison. In a post on X, the Department of Homeland Security had called Mosquera and the four other men “depraved monsters” who were “so uniquely barbaric their home countries refuse to take them back.” Now they were met by dozens of guards wielding large sticks.

That was more than a year ago. Mosquera still sits in that same maximum-security prison with nowhere to go. No charges against him. No way to appeal his predicament. No sign that he will ever be freed. Cuba has not signaled any willingness to take him, and Mosquera says he has no desire to go there. Eswatini will not release him from prison, even though he served his time in the United States and committed no crime in Africa.

I first heard about his case through Alma David, an immigration lawyer at Novo Legal Group in the United States, who represents him. When I reached Mosquera on a WhatsApp video call in early June, he had already spent 11 months behind bars. The Eswatini government refused to let me visit him or any of the others detained with him, so WhatsApp video calls were our main means of communication. As we spoke, Mosquera squinted at me; in detention, he had developed glaucoma, and a doctor told Mosquera he had lost half his vision in one eye and 80 percent in the other. He has struggled to receive treatment for the condition.

“Can I ask you a question?” Mosquera asked me. Behind him I could see the green bars of his cell where he spends his nights and the silhouettes of some of the other prisoners.

“Do you think I’ll ever get out of here?”

Mosquera is one of a growing number of people whom the Trump administration has put into a global administrative limbo. For more than a year, it has been offering millions of dollars — often without disclosing the payments — to foreign governments to take immigrants the United States was having trouble deporting to their countries of origin. This includes not only people with criminal pasts like Mosquera but also deportees who were under court protections not to be returned to their homelands because they faced threats there.

The practice of deporting someone to a so-called third country isn’t new, but it used to be rare. In the past, the United States might deport someone to a place deemed safe — Canada, for instance — or to a country where they had dual citizenship. But in 2019, the first Trump administration began sending thousands of foreign nationals, including people from the Caribbean and Central America, to Mexico. In Trump’s second term, the practice has vastly expanded: At least 35 countries have made deals to take deportees, a list that includes nations as far-flung as South Sudan, Ghana, Palau, Uzbekistan and Moldova, according to Third Country Deportation Watch, a monitoring group that tracks the agreements.

The deportations bring up serious legal questions that have been the subject of multiple federal lawsuits. The removals — whether they involve immigrants with criminal histories or not — often happen before deportees can argue their cases before a judge. Some of the countries selected by the Trump administration don’t offer the basic legal protections to which the deportees would be entitled in the United States, such as access to a lawyer. And because they are foreign nationals, with no legal status in the countries to which they have been sent, the deportees generally remain under indefinite detention abroad, without charges and with little or no recourse in American courts. In a written statement to The Times, the Department of Homeland Security maintained that anyone who was deported received due process: “These third-country agreements, which ensure due process under the U.S. Constitution, are essential to the safety of our homeland and the American people.”

A number of the countries that have made the deals are unstable or autocratic and usually desperate for American cash. The Central African Republic is in the middle of a civil war. The Democratic Republic of Congo took 15 deportees shortly before the recent Ebola outbreak. Eswatini, which received $5.1 million in its arrangement with the Trump administration, is one of the world’s last absolute monarchies. [Continue reading…]