An immigrant deported by the US and held in an African prison for more than a year has been released

CAPE TOWN, South Africa — A Laotian citizen deported by the United States to Eswatini under the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown was released from a maximum security prison in the African nation on Sunday after being held there for more than a year, his lawyer said.

Phone Chomsavanh was among five immigrants deported to Eswatini — where he has no ties — in July 2025 in the early days of the Trump administration’s secretive and highly contentious third-country deportation program.

Chomsavanh’s U.S.-based lawyer, Tin Thanh Nguyen, said in a statement announcing his release that he had only been informed that he was being deported to Eswatini shortly before a military cargo plane carrying him and other deportees landed there more than 14 months ago.

Chomsavanh was now being deported to Laos, Nguyen said.

Chomsavanh and the four other immigrants he was deported to Eswatini with were convicted of serious crimes in the U.S., but had served their sentences by the time they were sent to the Matsapha Correctional Complex near Eswatini’s administrative capital, Mbabane.

“Years after he finished serving his sentence in the United States, the Trump administration flew him to the small southern African kingdom and handed him over to a maximum-security prison, where he was held for more than a year without ever being charged with a crime,” Nguyen said.

He said in separate messages to The Associated Press that Chomsavanh had left Eswatini and landed in Johannesburg en route to Laos.

An Eswatini government spokesperson didn’t immediately acknowledge Chomsavanh’s release.

Chomsavanh was born in a refugee camp in Thailand after his parents fled Laos, and his family moved to the United States when he was 7, his lawyer said.

Chomsavanh is one of around 500 immigrants who have been deported from the United States to African countries that aren’t their home nations since the third-country program began last year, according to rights group Human Rights First, which has been monitoring the deportations.

Around a dozen African countries have accepted third-country deportees from the U.S., some in exchange for millions of dollars in payments. Eswatini, which is Africa’s last absolute monarchy and is ruled by a king, was paid $5.1 million by the Trump administration to take deportees, according to the agreement between the countries. Eswatini has received around 30 deportees so far.

The program, which results in immigrants being held in countries they have no ties with and where they haven’t been charged with any crime, has been fiercely criticized by rights groups and lawyers. It has been the subject of legal challenges in the U.S. and in some of the countries where immigrants have been sent.

The Trump administration has defended the policy as a way to quickly remove immigrants who have final deportation orders from the U.S. when their home countries might not immediately take them back.

Last month, a U.S. appeals court upheld a judge’s ruling to halt the program, because it didn’t give immigrants facing removal from the U.S. time to challenge their deportation to a third country because they fear persecution or torture there.

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled last week to temporarily allow U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration to continue swiftly removing immigrants to third countries, though it will hear arguments in the case in December.

The program has largely been carried out in secrecy, with little transparency over how many immigrants have been deported to third countries, and where and in what conditions they are being held.

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AP Africa news: https://apnews.com/hub/africa