Kidnapped and Captive in Eswatini
A grim picture emerges of the fate of the people this administration is sending to secret prisons in third countries
For months, we have been able to do no more than speculate as to the fate of the people the Trump administration has deported to South Sudan and Eswatini—two African countries that have inked deals with the U.S. government to accept third country nationals removed from the United States.
The fate of the people the U.S. sent to El Salvador was all too visible. The country’s authoritarian president live-streamed their humiliation and mistreatment upon their arrival—gleefully boasting about the abuse. Trump administration officials applauded him for it.
These 250 or more men then languished without charge or trial in the country’s CECOT prison for months—before most of them appeared to be released in a prisoner exchange deal with Venezuela—in which the U.S. government apparently agreed to trade its political hostages for some of Maduro’s.
To this day, however, not all of the men have been accounted for. Their attorneys fear some people deported from the U.S. may still be incarcerated in El Salvador’s black site prison—but they don’t know how many; or if they are even still alive.
The plan in El Salvador, then, was clear: the U.S. government bankrolled the Salvadoran officials to detain asylum-seekers indefinitely, as a means to terrorize them and other people seeking refuge in the United States. Then it deported them back into the hands of the very persecutor they originally fled (back when they still hoped they might find safety and dignity in the U.S.).
What was less clear was the administration’s plans for the people it is sending to third countries in Africa (so far, South Sudan and Eswatini have both received non-nationals from the U.S.—and Uganda has reportedly agreed to do the same; and now, the U.S. government is reportedly trying to send Kilmar Abrego Garcia to the latter).
Are the people Trump is sending to these countries at least to be set at liberty upon their arrival?
Will they be allowed to try to create some sort of life for themselves—hard as that will be—in a country to which they have no prior connection, and which is continents away from their families and homes? Will they at least be able to try to leave these countries, after their arrival, to take another shot at reaching safety elsewhere—even if it likely means going into debt to the sorts of loan sharks that prey on vulnerable people in these conditions?
The answer appears to be no. This is worse than I had feared.
We now have reporting from the New York Times—as of early yesterday—that the men the administration deported to Eswatini have been detained indefinitely upon their arrival in the country’s prisons. They include a Jamaican immigrant to the U.S.—Orville Etoria—as well as four nationals of Vietnam, Laos, Cuba, and Yemen.
According to a statement published this morning by the advocacy organization SEARAC, the attorney representing the two Southeast Asian refugees detained in Eswatini informs us that these men are being held without any access to counsel or basic due process.
Some of the men have criminal histories in the United States—including Orville Etoria. But all had served their time in U.S. prisons and been released back into the public.
Thus—by making deals to send them places where they will be held indefinitely—the Trump administration is layering on a second incarceration to which these men have never been sentenced in court.
They are using the sinister work-around of abducting people to third countries in order to inflict on them worse penalties than could be had from the (already highly punitive) U.S. legal system. They are doing it to evade the scrutiny and access to justice ostensibly vouchsafed by our courts.
In short, the Trump administration really has created the “legal abyss” that some observers feared when they first started deporting people to the CECOT prison in El Salvador—an alternative system of incarceration where the rules of due process and access to justice do not apply. Concentration camps, in short.
And the U.S. Supreme Court has let them get away with it. Though the justices intervened to prevent further process-free renditions to CECOT—they rather mysteriously did not apply the same reasoning to the administration’s renditions to South Sudan and Eswatini. (As with many of the Court’s recent actions, they issued these rulings on an emergency basis, and did not explain their reasoning, so we are still completely in the dark as to how they intend to square that circle.)
Who knows how many other people the administration will now try to deport to Eswatini, South Sudan, or other third countries? We know they are trying to send Kilmar Abrego Garcia to Uganda right now—but whether to be detained indefinitely there, or not, is so far unclear.
Perhaps some of the people they will try to abduct in this matter will have criminal records; but again—they have already paid their debt to society—and incarcerating them in a secret gulag in a third country is quite obviously an unconstitutional and unlawful secondary punishment—a violation of the principle of double jeopardy—not to mention the Eighth Amendment’s bar against cruel and unusual punishment.
Many of the other people subject to this policy may have no criminal histories at all. We know from public reporting that most if not all of the people the administration sent to the CECOT prison had never been convicted of any crime. Many had pending asylum petitions before the U.S. government—and thus a valid legal basis to stay—at the time they were loaded onto planes and abducted to face indefinite confinement.
Take the case of one Venezuelan national who came to the United States in order to escape the Maduro dictatorship in his home country. He wrote on his asylum application that he came here because he wanted to live in a country where “constitutional guarantees” would be “respected” for a change.
Then, the U.S. government kidnapped him without due process and put him on a plane to El Salvador, where he was held in a gulag without access to his family or attorneys for months.
Out of the iron house of bandage, a man, guilty of no crime but love of liberty, fled to the people of Massachusetts. He came to us a wanderer, and Boston took him to an unlawful jail; hungry, and she fed him with a felon’s meat; […] naked, and she clothed him with chains; sick and in prison, he cried for a helper, and Boston sent him a marshal and a commissioner; she set him between kidnappers, among the most infamous of men—
—as Theodore Parker wrote in a discourse first published in 1852, commemorating the one-year anniversary of—as the title of the pamphlet puts it—“The Rendition of Thomas Simms.”
Simms was a man who had escaped slavery in the South. But he arrived in Massachusetts—once ostensibly a “free state”—after the passage of the notorious “Fugitive Slave Act”—which commandeered Massachusetts state officers to forcibly kidnap and rendition people back into the hands of their would-be enslavers.
I don’t make this comparison lightly. And I’m not saying the Trump administration’s third country deportation program is the exact moral equivalent of the nineteenth century Fugitive Slave Act.
But it is not entirely unlike it either.
Both involve sending people who sought freedom back into the hands of bondage. Both involve kidnapping people off the streets where they have made their homes and returning them to the clutches of their persecutors.
If history here does not perfectly echo—nonetheless, it rhymes.
Men like Orville Etoria—the descendant of enslaved people in the Caribbean—brought to Jamaica to sweat and die under the lash in plantations to enrich the merchants of Boston, to whom Theodore Parker addressed his stern discourse—are being sent back across the Atlantic to face indefinite confinement without charge or trial in secret prisons.
Shades of the “middle passage” crowd into my brain.
And since men like Orville Etoria are being sent to these hidden dungeons without the benefit of trial or counsel or sentence—it could happen to anyone (or anyone, that is, who has not the unspoken universal passport of a white skin): “With such ‘ruling’ as we have known on the Slave Act bench, such swearing of ‘witnesses’ […] any man’s freedom is at the mercy of the kidnapper,” as Parker wrote.
And who is signing up to do the evil deed of kidnapping Etoria and others? They come voluntarily, gleefully, boastfully.
The "Proud Boys” founder posts Ponzi schemes online—offering crypto tokens in exchange for ratting on one’s neighbors and putting them into the paws of the kidnappers.
Our revamped, Stephen Miller–ified Department of Homeland Security sends out flyers to recruit people using white nationalist imagery; and young white men wearing jeans, with bandannas covering their faces, show up at court houses to arrest families and separate parents from children—the heirs in our time of all lynchers and rowdies and “slave-catchers” and terrorist “Redeeemer” vigilantes past.
The worst of the kidnappers were natives of the spot [writes Parker.] It was done by volunteers, not impressed to the work, but choosing their profession,—loving the wages of sin,—and conscious of the loathing and the scorn they all are sure to get, and bequeath to their issue. They did it deliberately; it was a cold-blooded atrocity: they did it aggressively, not in self-defense, but in self-degradation. They did it for their pay: let them have it; verily, they shall have their reward.
“Or who, with accent bolder, / Dare praise the freedom-loving mountaineer?” as Emerson once asked—”I found by thee, O rushing Contoocook! […] The jackals of the negro-holder[!]”
But why is this administration so in love with the spectacle of their own evil? Why do they boast of it; crow about it? Why do they not at least have the decency to try to obscure or disguise what they are doing—to “walk backward, with averted gaze / And hide the shame!” as Whittier wrote?
There was in Boston a large number of crafty, rich, designing, and ‘respectable men,’ [writes Parker,] who wanted a man kidnapped […] they wanted that for the basest of purposes, —for the sake of money; they wanted the name of it, the reputation of kidnapping a man. They protected the kidnappers—foreign and domestic; egged them on, feasted them.
I’m looking at you, Marco Rubio! Kristi Noem! Pam Bondi! J.D. Vance! When Bukele took two hundred and fifty men who had been abducted from their homes, and shaved their heads and forced them to bend double for his own amusement and the sport of their humiliation—you egged him on. You boasted about it. You crowed about it. And you call yourselves Christians!
When they made Abrego Garcia kneel in discomfort in a roomful of other men, and guards in black masks walked row by row—beating anyone who let their balance slip—for no reason other than their pain and to gratify their captor’s sadism—it was as if you were doing the beating yourselves, Noem, Vance, Bondi, Trump, Miller, Rubio, and all your kind. You “wanted the name of it.” And you shall have your reward.
It was said that he was tortured every day with a certain number of stripes on his naked back. That his master once offered to remit part of the cruelty, if he would ask pardon for running away. The man refused, and took the added blows. [….] Those blows were laid on by the speakers of the Union meeting; it was only ‘to save the Union’[!]”
What difference does it make that one kidnapping—one abduction—one “rendition” of a man to indefinite confinement or “eternal bondage,” as Parker puts it—one beating, one session of torture and brutality—happened more than a hundred years ago, and to a different man?
The names of the kidnappers change—the masks are exchanged—but the essence remains the same.
“It is piracy to steal a man in Guinea; what is it to do this in Boston?” Parker asked. Or anywhere else, for that matter—in this land of the free?