Phone Chomsavanh left an Eswatini maximum-security prison on Sunday after spending more than a year in custody, following a U.S. deportation to a country where he had no ties. His lawyer, Tin Thanh Nguyen, said Chomsavanh had left Eswatini and landed in Johannesburg, en route to Laos. An Eswatini government spokesperson didn’t immediately acknowledge his release.
“He had already served his time. Instead they put him on a plane without telling him where it was headed and left him in a prison in a country he had never heard of, where nobody ever accused him of anything,” Nguyen said. “He sat there for more than a year. No notice, no hearing, no chance to object. That is not due process by any definition.”
A deportation without a destination
Chomsavanh was one of five immigrants sent to Eswatini in July 2025, in the early days of the Trump administration’s third-country deportation program. Nguyen said officials told Chomsavanh shortly before a military cargo plane carrying him and other deportees landed that Eswatini was his destination.
Chomsavanh and the four other immigrants had been convicted of serious crimes in the United States. They had served their sentences before authorities sent them to Matsapha Correctional Complex, near Eswatini’s administrative capital, Mbabane. The program sent them to a country with no connection to their lives, where they hadn’t been charged with any crime.
Chomsavanh was born in a refugee camp in Thailand after his parents fled Laos, Nguyen said. His family moved to the United States when he was 7. Now released, he’s being deported to Laos, Nguyen said; his messages reported that Chomsavanh had landed in Johannesburg on the way there.
A paid arrangement, carried out in secrecy
Eswatini, Africa’s last absolute monarchy, is ruled by a king. It received $5.1 million from the Trump administration under its agreement with the United States. The country has received around 30 deportees. Around a dozen African countries have accepted deportees from the United States, some in exchange for millions of dollars in payments.
Advocacy groups Human Rights First and Refugees International monitor the deportations. They say around 500 immigrants have been sent from the United States to African countries that aren’t their home nations since the program began last year. The program has largely unfolded in secret. The public has little transparency about how many people authorities have deported, where they’re held or the conditions of their detention.
The Trump administration says the policy lets officials quickly remove immigrants with final deportation orders when their home countries might not immediately take them back. But that rationale sits beside the reported absence of notice and any chance to object in Chomsavanh’s case, according to his lawyer.
Courts leave the fight unresolved
Rights groups and lawyers have sharply criticized the program, and legal challenges have been brought in the United States and some recipient countries. Last month, a U.S. appeals court upheld a judge’s ruling halting the program because it didn’t give immigrants facing removal time to challenge deportation to a third country if they feared persecution or torture there.
Last week, the U.S. Supreme Court temporarily allowed President Donald Trump’s administration to keep swiftly removing immigrants to third countries. The court is scheduled to hear arguments in the case in December. The legal battle continues. The program’s secrecy leaves basic questions about deportations and detention conditions unanswered.