Lao man sent by Trump to African country where he had no ties is finally released after more than a year

Want to bookmark your favourite articles and stories to read or reference later? Start your Independent Membership today.

A Laotian man deported by the US to the African kingdom of Eswatini has been released from prison, ending an ordeal lasting for more than a year in a country where he has no ties.

Phone Chomsavanh was deported in July 2025 along with four other people under president Donald Trump’s contentious third-country deportation programme.

Mr Chomsavanh, who had arrived in the US as a minor, had no connection with Eswatini.

His American lawyer, Tin Thanh Nguyen, said Mr Chomsavanh had only been informed that he was being deported to Eswatini shortly before a military cargo plane carrying him landed in the African nation.

Mr Chomsavanh was freed from the maximum-security Matsapha Correctional Complex near the administrative capital Mbabane after 14 months, pending his deportation to Laos, according to Mr Nguyen.

Mr Chomsavanh and the four fellow immigrants deported to Eswatini with him were convicted of serious crimes in the US, but had served their sentences by the time they put were on the military aircraft.

“He’d already served his time,” the lawyer said. “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.”

“He sat there for more than a year. No notice, no hearing, no chance to object. That is not due process by any definition.”

The US had described the deportees as “criminal illegal aliens”.

“This flight took individuals so uniquely barbaric that their home countries refused to take them back," Tricia McLaughlin, assistant secretary for homeland security, said at the time.

Mr Chomsavanh was born in a refugee camp in Thailand to parents who had fled Laos. His family had moved to the US when he was seven, his lawyer said.

Thousands of Laotian families affected by the relentless American bombing of their country during the Vietnam war were resettled in the US.

Mr Chomsavanh is one of around 500 immigrants who have been deported to African countries that aren’t their home nations since the third-country programme began last year, according to advocacy groups Human Rights First and Refugees International.

About a dozen African countries have accepted third-country immigrants from the US so far, some in exchange for millions of dollars in payments. Eswatini, Africa’s last absolute monarchy ruled by a king, has received $5.1m from the US to take some of the deportees, according to an agreement between the two countries.

In July this year, Amnesty International said at least 25 more people had been removed from the US to Eswatini under the same arrangement.

The third-country programme, which sees immigrants deported to places they have no ties to, has been fiercely criticised by rights groups and lawyers. It has been the subject of legal challenges in the US and in some of the countries where immigrants have been sent.

The Trump administration has defended the policy as a means to quickly remove immigrants who have received their final deportation orders but whose home countries might not immediately want to take them back.

Last month, a US appeals court upheld a judge’s ruling to halt the programme because it did not give immigrants facing removal from the US time to challenge their deportation to a third country if they feared persecution or torture there.