| Roberto Mosquera is being held in a maximum-security prison in Eswatini. Moises Saman/Magnum, for The New York Times |
‘Do you think I’ll ever get out of here?’
By Nicholas Casey The New York Times
As he stepped out of the American military cargo plane, Roberto Mosquera had no idea where he was or why he had been taken there. He had never heard of a country called Eswatini.
The tiny, landlocked country in southern Africa, until recently called Swaziland, is one of at least 35 countries — including South Sudan, Ghana, Palau, Uzbekistan and Moldova — that have made deals with the U.S. to take deportees from other countries of origin.
Mosquera arrived in the U.S. on a fishing boat from Cuba in 1980, when he was 12. In his 20s, he took a plea deal and served time in prison after shooting a rival gangster in the leg. That would have been grounds to deport him, but Cuba wasn’t cooperating, so Mosquera was allowed to stay. He built a new life for himself, becoming a plumber and a born-again Christian; he married and had four daughters.
But all that changed last year when he went to renew his work permit. An immigration official told him that his time in America was up. After stints in U.S. detention centers, he was flown to Eswatini, where he’s being held in the country’s maximum-security prison with four other detainees from Jamaica, Laos, Yemen and Vietnam.
The Trump administration is building a growing detention archipelago overseas, often in unstable or autocratic countries. And in cases like Mosquera’s, it’s turning deportation into a form of indefinite imprisonment with no legal recourse.
“Can I ask you a question?” Mosquera asked me on a WhatsApp video call in June, using a phone he obtained after a hunger strike. “Do you think I’ll ever get out of here?”
| Click to watch. The New York Times |
‘Depraved monsters’
The first time the Trump administration paid a foreign government to take deportees was last year, in a deal with the autocratic president of El Salvador, Nayib Bukele.
Bukele accepted a $6 million payment to hold some 250 Venezuelan immigrants in a megaprison. The Venezuelans were later flown home, but many claimed that they were abused and tortured by their prison guards.
Since then, variations of this deal have multiplied. Many of the countries that have agreed to take deportees are unstable, or 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.
At home, the administration has justified its actions by casting those sent abroad as inhuman.
In a post on X, the Department of Homeland Security had called Mosquera and the four other men who were sent to Eswatini with him “depraved monsters” who were “so uniquely barbaric their home countries refuse to take them back.”
‘No way out’
The deportations — whether they involve immigrants with criminal histories or not — often happen before deportees can argue their cases before a judge.
And because they are foreign nationals, with no legal status in the countries to which they have been sent, they generally remain under indefinite detention abroad, without charges and with little or no recourse in any court of law.
As a result, for some detainees, there is no clear path to get out. They remain in the third countries to which they are sent, stuck in a legal purgatory. They are a new class of prisoner created by America’s widening crackdown on immigration.
More than a year after his arrival, Mosquera still sits in that same maximum-security prison. No charges have been brought against him. He has no way to appeal his predicament. And there is no sign that he will ever be released from prison. “It’s like you wake up, and you’re in this place, and there’s no way out,” his lawyer said.
In 2024, when Trump again set his sights on the White House, Mosquera saw himself as one of the working-class Americans whom Trump said he would defend. Mosquera’s sister told me she remembered Mosquera practically stumping for Trump. “He would sit on the patio and say, ‘Trump is going to change everything, you’ll see,’” she said.
Three more groups of men have landed in Eswatini since Mosquera arrived. He has a job now: showing new arrivals how to get money wired from home, where to wash their clothes, what to do when the power goes out.
The guards have been clearing space for more detainees.