To celebrate 50 years of independence from Britain, the kingdom of Swaziland changed its name to Eswatini in 2018. I had to look up the tiny nation on a map to find it was landlocked between South Africa and Mozambique. This houses America’s newest version of Guantanamo Bay – but it’s a detention camp for deportees, not terrorists.

The has just published a chilling article about the fate of an inmate: “He was Deported to a Country He’d Never Heard Of. He May Never Go Free.” This tells the terrifying, Kafkaesque story of Roberto Mosquera, a Cuban who was forced onto a military cargo plane in Texas and deposited in a maximum security prison in Eswatini last year.

Mosquera arrived in the US aged 12 from Cuba. As a teenager, he joined a gang and served time for attempted murder after shooting a rival gangster in the leg. At this point, I can feel your sympathy waver. But on his release, he settled down, became a plumber, married, had four daughters – and led a normal life as long as he checked in with US immigration authorities every year. He is now 59.

In June 2025, Mosquera went to renew his visa, as usual, and was transported to Eswatini. Cuba will not take back US detainees and he has no idea how long he will be stuck in a harsh, friendless prison on the other side of the world. The US is paying undisclosed millions to Eswatini and other countries to keep immigrants like him in limbo. It’s a horror story.

“Do you think I’ll ever get out of here?” Mosquera asked the reporter, who managed to speak to him by phone. Nobody knows. The US department of homeland security celebrated his deportation (with four other detainees) last year with a cruel social media post about “depraved monsters” who were “so uniquely barbaric their home countries refused to take them back”.

This isn’t who Mosquera is. But is this what America has become? A place of secret flights, disappearances and rendition? This is the terrifying reality behind Donald Trump’s mass deportation policy. While the President slumbers in his golden Oval Office and finds new ways to drape himself in praise, people are being thrown into where they are left to rot.

The cruelty is the point. Does anybody care? The world took notice when Renee Good and Alex Pretti were killed by immigration agents at anti-ICE protests in Minneapolis last winter. “Operation Metro Surge” was halted. But the arrests, deportations and disappearances have continued.

These frequently occur when immigrants are just checking in, like Mosquera, and behaving responsibly. Often, they simply go missing until families, friends or employers start alerting the police and find they have been detained.

In July last year, an administration order blandly called “Interim Guidance Regarding Detention Authority” gave Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents the authority to detain people “regardless of length of residency and community ties to the US” and stipulated “continuous custody” until they are removed.

Although the courts are getting choked up with appeals, most people are helpless to defend themselves. The Department of Homeland Security insists, “The law is on our side”. It told this week: “ICE is not slowing down.” There are currently 65,000 ICE detainees held in 200 jails or temporary, makeshift sites in America. They are full to bursting. In June, 300,000 Haitians lost Temporary Protected Status allowing them to work in the US, so ICE has begun ordering them to check-in with the authorities to be issued with ankle monitors instead.

Remember the Haitians in Springfield, Ohio? Fired up by his running mate JD Vance, Trump wildly and falsely claimed during a presidential debate with Kamala Harris: “In Springfield they are eating the dogs… they are eating the cats.”

Springfield’s 16,000 Haitians have been the first in their state to receive letters ordering them to check in, according to local news reports this week. “When they do, their passports are collected,” said Carl Ruby, pastor of Springfield’s Central Christian Church. “They’re fitted with ankle [monitors]; I call them ankle shackles.”

They are not criminals and have done nothing wrong. In fact, the Republican governor of Ohio, Mike DeWine, said they had revitalised Springfield’s economy by taking on manufacturing and other blue-collar jobs. Now they’re being placed in shackles, like slaves, in a northern, midwest state that fought for the Union during the Civil War.

The American people had their say at the last election. But the result under Trump is a sprawling, secretive shadowland of suffering that is rarely heard about and mostly ignored.

Sarah Baxter is Director of the Marie Colvin Center for International Reporting