A Cambodian man deported by the United States to the African kingdom of Eswatini under the Trump administration’s third-country programme was released to be repatriated after spending five months at a maximum-security prison with other deportees, his lawyer said.
Pheap Rom was deported to the southern African nation in October and held at the Matsapha Correctional Center.
He was due yesterday to take a commercial flight to Johannesburg, South Africa, to start his journey to Cambodia, his US-based lawyer, Tin Thanh Nguyen, said.
The US has sent 19 migrants from other countries to Eswatini in three batches since July. Rom is the second to be repatriated after a Jamaican man was flown home in September.
US President Donald Trump has taken a hard-line stance on immigration and the United States has deported around 300 migrants to countries they have no ties with under the third-country programme, which lawyers have criticised as unlawful.
The United States has so far struck deals with at least seven African nations to take some of those migrants.
The United States paid Eswatini US$5.1mil (RM20.1mil) to take up to 160 deportees, according to details of the deal released by the US State Department.
While Eswatini’s government has previously said the migrants are in “transit” there on their way home, the deal allows them to be held in Eswatini for up to a year.
Rom served a 15-year prison sentence in the United States for attempted murder and was released in late 2024, Nguyen said, adding in a statement that Rom was illegally held at the prison in Eswatini for five months because he faced no criminal charges in the African country.
“Rom’s release proves what we have argued from the beginning. These third-country deportations are unnecessary and unlawful,” Nguyen said.
The US State Department and the Department of Homeland Security have defended third-country deportations as a means to quickly remove people who are in the United States illegally.
Many of the deportees sent to Eswatini were convicted of serious crimes and had completed their sentences in the United States.
But lawyers say sending migrants to countries they have no ties with is a tactic by the administration to bypass US immigration laws and denies the deportees their rights.
Last year, the US Supreme Court allowed the Trump administration to go ahead with third-country deportations.
Last month, a US federal judge ruled that the policy was unlawful because it didn’t give migrants notice of where they were being sent or an opportunity to challenge their deportations. An appeals court lifted that order this month. — AP
