ICE deported 11 migrants to Eswatini on fourth third-country flight, including two with legal protections

Eleven migrants deported by the United States arrived in Eswatini on Wednesday, July 8, 2026, the fourth group of deportees the U.S. has sent to the southern African kingdom since a third-country removal arrangement began in July 2025. Two small planes departed Louisiana on Tuesday, refueled in Senegal, and landed in Eswatini on Wednesday afternoon, according to flight-tracking data cited by wire reporting. Alma David, a U.S. immigration attorney familiar with some of the cases, said the group includes at least two people who hold legal protections — including withholding of removal or protection under the Convention Against Torture, in some cases granted for gender-based violence — that advocates say should have shielded them from deportation. David said ICE treats people with such protections as "low hanging fruit" for third-country removal, since the government argues it is legally barred only from sending them directly to their home countries, not to a third country.

Of the 19 people the U.S. had sent to Eswatini before this flight, two — a Jamaican and a Cambodian national — have since been repatriated, but the remaining 17 continue to be held without charge in a high-security prison. Eswatini has confirmed receiving roughly .1 million from Washington under an agreement to accept up to 160 deportees in exchange for funding to strengthen its border and migration-management capacity; ICE did not respond to a request for comment on this flight. No prior entry exists in the archive for the three earlier Eswatini flights (July 2025, October 2025, and roughly March 2026), despite the same pattern of legally protected deportees being sent to indefinite, uncharged detention; this entry covers only the July 8, 2026 flight, with the earlier flights flagged separately for backfill.