Roberto Mosquera's family had no trace of him for a month after he was arrested by US immigration agents, until a government social media post revealed he had been deported to Africa's last absolute monarchy.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents had picked up the 58-year-old Cuban at a routine check-in with immigration officials on June 13 in Miramar, Florida, said Ada, a close family friend, who spoke to AFP under a pseudonym for fear of US government retaliation.

They told his family they had sent him back to Cuba, she said, a country he had left more than four decades earlier as a 13-year-old.

But on July 16, Ada recognised her lifelong friend in a photograph posted on X by US Assistant Homeland Security Secretary Tricia McLaughlin, who announced that Mosquera and four other detainees had been flown to tiny Eswatini.

It was a country Ada had never heard of, and 13,000 kilometres (8,000 miles) away, wedged between South Africa and Mozambique.

The Cuban and the nationals of Jamaica, Laos, Vietnam and Yemen were sent to the kingdom under a deal seen by AFP in which Eswatini agreed to accept up to 160 deportees in exchange for $5.1 million to "build its border and migration management capacity".

The Jamaican, 62-year-old Orville Etoria, was repatriated to Jamaica in September but 10 more deportees arrived on October 9, according to the Eswatini government.

Washington said the five men sent to Eswatini were "criminals" convicted of charges from child rape to murder, but lawyers and relatives told AFP that all of them had long served their sentences and had been living freely in the United States for years.

In tightly controlled Eswatini, where King Mswati III's government is accused of political repression, the deportees have been jailed in a maximum-security prison without any charge.

They have no access to legal counsel and are only allowed to talk to their families in........

© International Business Times